Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

ceejayoz

Yikes. That's a big bang.

SilverElfin

Shame. I would love to see a competitor rein in SpaceX.

d_silin

Very unfortunate, but strategically this changes nothing for US spaceflight. If anything, SpaceX will continue to increase its dominance.

RattlesnakeJake

NSF is also reporting that it took out one of the lightning rod towers. It'll be interesting to see how much damage the pad and ground equipment sustained.

ChrisArchitect

NSF live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8wRjD3xVA

boredatoms

Thats a very impressive bang

jleyank

This shows the importance of choosing the correct jargon and terminology, and then employing clear and unambiguous communication. They asked engineers for a static fire test. Got one hell of a fire, so that’s good, but it wasn’t very static…

ebiederm

Hooray! A static test fire caught a problem. Crap! There was a serious latent problem for the test fire to find.

7e

IPO must be in the works!

generuso

It is not clear what "full duration static fire" means, but if the stage was fully fueled, the fuel tank would have contained 1000 tons of methane. The heat of combustion of methane is 55 MJ/kg. TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg. In terms of heat output (not blast or other effects) this would have been equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. The first atomic bomb had yield of 20 kt TNT, of which about half was in heat, and the rest in the blast and radiation. Depending on how full the rocket tank actually was, the fireball from the rocket explosion was in the same ballpark, or possibly even larger in the size and duration of afterglow compared to that from the Trinity nuclear test.

kortilla

Does anyone know what the fuel level was for the static test fire vs the upcoming mission profile? I want to know how big the explosion for new Glenn would be fully loaded.

mattas

Would be really curious to learn more about how rocket scientists are using (or not using) LLMs.

arjie

Tragic. But spaceflight isn't easy. Easy to have your expectations shifted as a watching fan after so many successful launches in recent times.

busymom0

Looks even crazier in this angle: https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696/video...

decimalenough

On the upside (or maybe that's tightly bolted down side), at least the rocket stayed static, unlike this one in China: https://youtu.be/IlQkeKa4IKg?si=nu-0D73-7hNg6jW3

dgrin91

I would guess this puts a big dent in NASA's moon plans. I think Blue origin was _just_ selected to be the first moon lander mission. Now they are going to be grounded _again_. They just got off grounded status last week! And this is not even going to mention the significant ground equipment damage they have to deal with. Very unfortunate all around. I hope BO finds a way to keep the timelines.

hgoel

Ouch, losing the rocket is unfortunate, but the damage to the launch infrastructure is going to easily mean over a year of repairs. I hope they're going to take this as an opportunity to update the infrastructure from lessons learned from the flights so far, and to be able to support some of their future ambitions (e.g. Jarvis).

JumpCrisscross

Did they blow up a pad? Or just a test stand? EDIT: Oh crap, they took out a launch complex.

brcmthrowaway

There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?

lorenzohess

https://xcancel.com/nasaspaceflight/status/20601649284728548...