twitter.com
https://xcancel.com/nasaspaceflight/status/20601649284728548...
https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696...
https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696...
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/blue-origins-new-glenn...
I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm.
The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.
If they are unlucky, the cause will be a mystery, and it will take them months to nail down the root cause.
Early in Falcon 9's history, the Amos 6 satellite was stacked on the rocket during a routine static fire and the whole thing blew up. It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". For a brief moment SpaceX suspected sabotage by rival ULA. They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket.
It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner in the carbon composite pressure vessels. Friction ignited it, and the entire second stage blew up, destroying the rocket.
Something like:
telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.
In software development this is your average weekday.
Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.
Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.
[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.
I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong.
Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.
This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.
For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?
I don’t know the numbers but that spacex has more money moving around does not seem surprising. Launching 100s of rockets per year is not free?
Also did you do an accumulation over their existence? Blue had two orbital launches so far.
I have been following the Space industry for 1-2 decades and I would love to know what you base this number on.
In terms of what we know, is that we know that at times in the 2010s BlueOrigin had almost the same amount of people while launching much less often, having many many fewer projects (like no human capsule, no Starlink). It is well known that Bezos spend more then 1 billion a year on BlueOrigin, people estimate 2-3 billion $. And that was in a period where their overwhelming spend was on New Glenn.
The idea that SpaceX spent 20x that even on Starship is insane and not credible.
In fact, every piece of evidence shows the exact opposite. SpaceX developed Falcon 9 at a incredibly small budget, like literally vanishingly small compared to what New Glenn in spending. And then SpaceX iterated on the design while generating revenue.
New Glenn cost many, many billions before revenue and has a budget that is not that different from Starship will being more comparable to Falcon Heavy.
We also have other evidence. Lunar lander document from NASA suggested as much. NASA estimate that SpaceX would assume 50% of the cost, Blue bid was much higher and they were less willing to self finance (at least initially). Those numbers suggested that SpaceX and BlueOrigin lander cost were not that different, except of course the SpaceX lander had much higher capability.
And pretty much everything we know about Blue is that they spend a huge amount of money and are nowhere near as thrifty as SpaceX, specially compared to the same stage of development. SpaceX had to do that because they simply didn't have the finances. They couldn't just use the 1-3 billion $ of free money flowing into the company.
I open to being proven wrong here with some actual numbers. But I have been following this space in detail and try to look at the best numbers we know publicly and follow some companies that estimate these things. For example, for early SpaceX NASA did a study on cost and how SpaceX could do it at these costs. So we have some good knowledge on that period. We can also look at when SpaceX raised money and do some estimates of their budget and so on. If there are reliable numbers out-there that exist I don't know about, I would love know what you are talking about.
Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.
If your Blue Origin, the cost comes from each launch complex being essentially bespoke and built on-site.
If you’re SpaceX, you plan ahead to use lego construction, mass produce the pieces, the tanks, etc in a factory setting, and assemble the pieces on-site for much less and much faster.
As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into something nearby than to explode at the pad.
I was pondering this very thing. Was there a way to learn the same info as this static fire that didn't risk all the pad infrastructure? I get that the tower, fueling systems, deluge, etc all have to work together in a real launch but given the immense schedule and dollar cost of losing the pad, how much less valid would bifurcated tests be? Like each sub-system is tested in-place on the pad without firing the rocket and then static firing itself is done on a more expendable test pad? Maybe even a test pad that's only designed to only survive long enough to get the necessary data before melting and losing the rocket.
Or alternatively, as you mentioned, when it's time to test full fuel load, skip the "static" part and do everything possible to get the rocket up and away ASAP.
What if a static fire reduces your chance of losing a customer payload from 20% to 0.2%, but increases your chance of losing the pad from 1% to 2%?
And note: If they had skipped a static fire and gone straight for a launch, they would have lost the pad anyway, since the explosion happened at ignition.
This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach.
Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful sense. Top-down design (working backward from the customer) allows for you to perform what is effectively one big global search. Bottom-up design (TDD) requires many local searches that all have to fit together perfectly at the very end. With units & composition, the consequences of component A's interactions with component B may not be considered until nearly the end of the project. If you are testing an integrated vertical, you will discover these interactions much earlier.
The problem became apparent with several failed launches of moon lander, when rockets blew up or failed to deploy payload. So engineers spent month of assembling a lander that just got burnt. And when it reached its destination, it failed to perform, because they didn't test it separately extensively.
Then they realized it is faster to spend a lot of time testing each part on the ground instead of launching it all together when any bug would prevent even testing the rest.
Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting.
If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories.
BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.
After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)
The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.
> Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.
If that was his strategy he would have been much better of in actually investing his money in, actual space stations. There is a clear aspect of dick measuring with Musk. Like Blue literally threw out a lot of their plans because SpaceX was moving ahead of them so fast.
But instead of using SpaceX capability, they fight against it, sue SpaceX and do everything to compete with SpaceX.
For example, its well known how much Bezos wants to beat Musk and SpaceX in a major NASA competition. This has been reported on. They regularly change plans and reorient themselves and go 'all in' on some major project. This has been reported on quite a bit. Even when it is not profitable for them.
They have also de-empathized their Space station, partly because NASA is less interested. But if Bezos has 2-3 billion $ per year to burn, that would be his actual focus.
So this whole 'its all about getting to O'Neil vision' faster is really only part of the situation and do not really explain much of BlueOrigin strategy as company.
Maybe in the early days when Blue was basically a think-tank, this was true, but its not any longer.
Is SpaceX also a vanity project? No, Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere.
Just because they're billionaires doesn't mean they're full of shit. In fact, in both of their cases, it means they're extremely driven by... real ambitions.
So obvious.
Does he want to expand human civilization for the benefit of human civilization or does he want to be the man who made that expansion possible?
I can absolutely see real ambitions behind them, I just think these ambitions are driven by vanity (and other "vices")
> It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner
I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon
"Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor
why
Musk is a competent manager, amazing bser, but he is not a genius.
edit: Competent manager is not a slight. There are very few competent managers these days.
I doubt Musk originated these idea but he was the one who ultimately made the decision on them. There were a lot of other people who had the same choice and either didn't come down that way or took a lot longer to come to the same place.
Like I said, genius? I personally wouldn't use that word. He's not an idiot though. He might be the minimum viable product for technical knowledge combined with a large amount of money but that's still pretty remarkable.
The whole reason for this was because of SS's supposed strength under the heat of reentry. Yet they now need to cover the whole thing in thermal insulating tiles. So I wonder if a composite Starship would not have been a better decision?
hubris
Finally contacted the manufacturer's rep, expecting to be called an idiot, only to find out that "yeah, we know about that bug. It's going to be fixed in the next revision."
for those who wondered like me!
The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...
> The “sniper” theory
> The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.
- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anything from a suicidal pyromaniac with a hammer to a hacker messing with engine control software and prediction markets, to a nation-state actor.
This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.
Sounds like me during a troubleshooting call trying to think of the wildest crap possible based on current available information, even if I sound crazy, sometimes my crazy question hits the nail. Never shun someone for trying to think of any crazy thing, sometimes they hit the nail on the head.
You want to start with a high level of discernment, focusing on the most plausible theories first, then broadening only if necessary.
If someone started out with crazy low-discernment ideas, I’d probably ask them to leave to stop distracting everyone else.
Only after that first exploration should you narrow it down according to likelihood. Then, if those likely scenarios appear to be dead ends, you can circle back to the earlier less likely scenarios. But trying to come up with less likely scenarios after your brain has already explored a different scenario in-depth takes a lot more effort.
> If someone started out with crazy low-discernment ideas, I’d probably ask them to leave to stop distracting everyone else.
Then you'd be doing it wrong. Valuing an idea (i.e. rating it in terms of relevance, likelihood, discernment, whatever you want to call it) is not part of the brainstorm, it's part of the post-brainstorm evaluation. Creativity and logic exercise the brain differently, trying to do both at the same time does not give the best results.
Creativity is much easier than reasoning and discernment.
Rarely do I need people to be more creative when problem solving, what I need is better judgement.
SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)
"Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events – there were just 93 milliseconds from the first sign of anomalous data to the loss of the second stage, followed by loss of the vehicle."
I haven't seen anything about latency--are you sure that's a problem in the telemetry stack?
> SpaceX’s new implementation (for Falcon 9 “Full Thrust” flights) of non- deterministic network packets in their flight telemetry increases latency, directly resulting in substantial portions of the anomaly data being lost due to network buffering in the Stage 2 flight computer.
However it looks that finding might've actually been corrected in the months before Amos-6, so moot point!
The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.
For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s
> I'm hearing that it is possible that Blue Origin decides to go directly to the larger 9x4 variant of New Glenn after this failure. Obviously no decisions like that will be made without more data review.
https://xcancel.com/SciGuySpace/status/2060190522539401631#m
To me it sounds like "alright, it's silly to waste time and energy on duplicate effort. Let's focus on getting this one right instead."
At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from.
Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship. What used to be year(s) long pauses, now only take a few months.
The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.
The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous.
On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about.
On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly.
So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible.
We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
Here's a long list of photos of Earth, a few were taken by humans, most were taken by robotic probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Ea...
One of those strides has been in characterising just how magnificent the human eye, mind and hand are at picking weird shit out of a background.
That said, I see a lot of synergy opportunities for humanoid robots on the surface controlled remotely by humans wearing VR gear.
Why are landing strips the big unlock? Blast effects? Tiny landing legs?
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.
Rough estimates? Mass drivers make sense. I haven’t seen the numbers for just compressing and leveling regolith.
It "only" takes about 8 million metric tons of aluminium to put a conductive aluminium loop of 1Ω resistance around the moon's equator*, solving all the energy problems that the poles are usually supposed to solve.
While this is way more than we can do any time soon**, that's the kind of mass you'd need to get up there to build the infrastructure for a colony of just high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of people, which is well short of "mega city".
* https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28circumference+of+...
** Last I looked, SpaceX's website was listing 100 million USD per ton to the moon; your guess is as good as mine if or when they'll deliver anything close to the price Musk suggests for serious colonisation efforts
The Chinese will build a moon base, as a sign from the Chinese government to the Chinese people that China is capable of cutting-edge engineering and science (notably a demonstration to their own citizens - when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?).
America seems a bit shaky in their determination to actually build a moon base, though having Jared Isaacman as administrator gives hope. But regardless of whether America is currently on track, a successful Chinese moon base won't stay without answer
Last year, when negative news of delayed astronaut return was all over American news, e.g. [1][2]. Apparently makes American astronauts onboard Boeing ship being stuck in space less embarrassing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/space/china-space...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/05/china/china-shenzhou-20-a...
Boeing is pretty much out of the race at this point. Just too busy navel gazing and lobbying. There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the best things to happen to the rocket industry in decades. So, yes Blue Origin had a RUD with New Glenn. They should, learn and adapt and launch the next one. It would be good for SpaceX to have credible competition. And New Glenn seems like it could become that.
But if they only get their lessons every few years, they'll be competing against a fully reusable Starship rather than Falcon 9 & Falcon heavy by the time this thing becomes a serious launch vehicle. The goal posts are moving.
This was routine pre-launch testing, not a launch attempt.
In terms of application its the same amount of energy going into the rocket in either case.
Static fires put more stress on the rocket than an actual launch because the rocket is stuck on the ground, receiving all the shockwaves. They also cause more damage to the launch infrastructure.
There was no fatal launch failure for Apollo & pad explosion would be a problem with just 2 pads available.
There were a couple Saturn V stage explosions during testing but again - those damaged test stands, not the pad.
> There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China.
China seems to be focused more on pragmatic things and less on super expensive vanity projects.
The successful manned moon landings so far:
1. United States of America
2. United States of America
3. United States of America
4. United States of America
5. United States of America
6. United States of America
Now we're watching a riveting race for 7th place.
The Moon landing race was a new race.
Now the Back to the Moon race is a different one altogether.
I guess I am just not that bothered, because I don't assume American intentions are inherently better.
I have only armchair amateur half a world away knowledge of this, but I want to believe all they need is an exhaust diffuser thingy and refueling capabilities; the former can probably be built cheap enough anywhere, the latter can be made portable.
(of course then you also have the challenge of assembling and loading a rocket, lmao. But a hub-and-spokes setup with VAB(s) and launch sites spread out around it like an airport could work. Bonus evil villain points if the launch sites are underground to contain explosions in case of failure.
(this post is just imagination / castles in the sky)
But it is cadence that drives SpaceX to have multiple launchpads plus specialized capabilities and orbital dynamics for F9.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cvgz0pdg32mo
edit: the failure appears to start at the bottom, this seems to have damaged the structure enough to cause the sliding to start, then the huge fireball seems to begin with a small flash closer to the top of the rocket
Then the spacecraft structure starts falling and tilting.
Then the explosion ripples up through the core and pops out the top.
Then the massive explosion occurs due to the complete loss of fuel integrity.
It looks like the bottom fell out, and then caused the pressure to ripple up through the structure causing complete structural failure. Wild.
Very unfortunate all around. I hope BO finds a way to keep the timelines.
Just a rover [1].
Blue Moon is one of the two lander contractors. But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust.
Does Blue Origin not have another pad? (Did they blow up a pad or a test stand?)
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-blue-origin-t...
That isn't my impression of NASA/government opinion. Starship HLS is seen as the eventual option, as is obvious from the testing campaign. It'll get there eventually and offer unprecedented capability, but it's very clearly several years out.
Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having a less risky critical path. The rocket was already orbital, fewer refueling flights were needed, the engines weren't pushing the limits of materials technology, no reusable heat shield to worry about.
Though, ultimately it's worth keeping in mind that the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell.
Source? (Not doubting, and it sounds vaguely familiar.)
> the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell
The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction. (Hell, even without HLS you can ship nuclear power stations and solar panels and rovers.)
It seems to point to rising costs on SpaceX's end, and in my reading, is very critical of them compared to BO.
>The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction
I believe that suits are still important because you can't really do much with a crew there without them. There aren't even new EVA suits available. And, of course politically, it's going to be seen very poorly if they can't do a "One small step for a man..." moment.
The US simply hasn't been able to bring new spacesuits into use for a long time, every single time, the costs and timelines have spiraled. Probably because a lot of the knowledge has been lost to old age, and the new guys need some time to relearn those lessons and improve on them.
The plans for Artemis are public, and they don't include any robotic construction before a manned landing.
Neveemind that the idea of a moon base is fanciful, I think it's very unlikely to happen in anything resembling current world climate.
They also change every time a Congressional staffer sneezes. If the space suits don’t work, a pivot would be easier than having the space suits with no rocket to put them on.
I really don't think there's anything particularly derisked about NG + Blue Moon 2 compared to Starship HLS.
Right now it seems like it's Axiom or bust, with their suits. The suits have missed a lot of milestones, and there's not much point in going to the Moon without suits. Latest NASA OIG report put them somewhere in the 2030s at best...
Also the ISS suits themselves are being replaced, by Axiom, because they are failing in near-fatal ways periodically.
And if you're wondering why they might use water for this well... water will be abundant and basically every habitat will have a municipal water hookup. A moon base might quickly find itself with several hectares of water and no where to put it. Might even end up injecting it into the ground where the water will be able to maintain it's liquid state (moon crust quickly reaches room temperature only a few dozens of meters underground).
The explosion happened at their only completed pad.
They reportedly have a second pad under construction (for the larger "9x4" variant of New Glenn) but I've not seen a lot of detail about how far along it is.
Would not be surprised to see them accelerating construction of the new pad.
SpaceX's architecture requires a second cislunar starship for the return trip. That will mean at most four moon landings per year and even that is optimistic. The large size of Starship makes return trips and lunar refueling really unattractive. If SpaceX wants to compete they will need to build a dedicated cislunar vehicle.
There is some VHS footage on YouTube surreptitiously shot by Americans on-site supporting the payload which became a guerrilla documentary.
The village was annihilated but the official number from the CCP was 6 dead.
6.
The Chinese government say very few were killed. But personally, my position is that the guys who routinely publish their embarrassing-seeming failures are quite believable (the US publishes that their planes fall off their carriers) and those who say they're perfect are probably lying. So I don't believe their numbers.
The village is pretty much gone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTFgZ9zl74
The exploded one was about 15-story building.
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.
It's still a big boom, but not anywhere close to what world occur with optional mixing.
Everyone can be glad though that no hypergolics are involved at least!
The energy of the detonation wave in rocket explosions is typically 1-2% of the energy in the fuel, at least that is the ballpark of what people use for estimating the effects of mishaps.
We also do not know if the tanks were fully filled -- it the past, rocket companies have called 10 second static fire tests a "full duration static fire test." We will probably find out later what it actually was meant to be.
The question was whether during this test the stage was loaded with the same amount of fuel as for an actual flight, or only a small fraction of that.
Well, only a little bit - they do use hypergolic ignition.
It isn't this simple for liquid oxygen and methane mixtures, and there's a great deal of disagreement between industry and regulators over what the right percentage of TNT equivalence is. Naturally, industry thinks the percentage is low, and regulators are skeptical, so there's a government-run test campaign going on as we speak to collect data for proper modeling.
This serves as a basis of comparison for this deflagration. If we are considering specifically the appearance of the late fireball, the heat output is the relevant figure of merit.
Assuming about 10-15% of the total bomb energy remained in the heat of the late fireball (with the rest spent on the blast wave, peak thermal radiation and neutron/gamma radiation), the fireball of this rocket deflagration could have exceeded the late fireball from the bomb. But this assumes the tanks were fully filled, which we do not know yet.
You fire the rocket as if it’s going to space, but you keep it on the pad. (From the engine’s perspective, it did a full launch.)
Some reports say that this means "running all seven BE-4 engines at full thrust for up to 38 seconds".
In flight the engines fire for 190 seconds.
So what the full duration means, and whether they fill the tanks with just enough fuel for the firing, or with a larger amount to help the clamps to hold the stage down, all this we will probably only find out from the investigation, if the results are ever published.
If clamped down, it’s a full-duration static fire. If clamps release, it goes to space. Basically, if the engine can’t tell (apart from atmosphere, which is a big apart) it isn’t going to space, it’s a FDSF. It’s a whole-engine show. If you’re running parts through a full duty cycle, that can be done in a lab (or on a stand).
(on that note it's also amazing that these exploding bolts are so reliable, I can imagine even a single one not releasing would cause... Issues)
The heat from combustion of this amount would be about 3.4 kt, which is roughly the same as the heat in the late fireball of the Trinity test.
The mushroom cloud from the New Glenn explosion was also substantial: https://photos.app.goo.gl/a7uPVjsB5n453SJA7
EDIT: Everyone is fine [1]. Go ahead and make jokes.
[1] https://x.com/blueorigin/status/2060172114796204539?s=20
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg
Have you seen how many issues race cars have? Same shit. It goes on and on.
Which is often fine, but sometimes isn't.
AI is the fentanyl to JavaScript bootcamp heroin.
There isn't an actual diverse ecosystem of most consumer software, just a monoculture of largely undifferentiated clones.
What you refer to as the rocket, meaning the tube itself isn't failing. It's just that a big explosion will treat it apart
> The percent propellant has huge implications on the ease of fabrication and robustness in achieving the engineering design (and cost). If a vehicle is less than 10% propellant, it is typically made from billets of steel. Changes to its structure are readily done without engineering analysis; you simple weld on another hunk of steel to reinforce the frame according to what your intuition might say. I can easily overload my ¾ ton pickup by a factor of two. It might be moving slowly but it is hauling the load.
> Once the vehicles become airborne, the engineering becomes more serious. Light weight structures made of aluminum, magnesium, titanium, epoxy-graphite composites are the norm. To alter the structure takes significant engineering; one does not simply weld on another chunk to your airframe if you want to live (or drill a hole through some convenient section). These vehicles cannot operate far from their designed limits; overloading an airplane by a factor of two results in disaster. Even though these vehicles are 30 to 40% propellant (60 to 70% structure and payload), there is room for engineering to comfortably operate thus there is a robust, safe, and cost effective aviation industry.
> Rockets at 85% propellant and 15% structure and payload are on the extreme edge of our engineering ability to even fabricate (and to pay for!). They require constant engineering to keep flying. The seemingly smallest modifications require monumental analysis and testing of prototypes in vacuum chambers, shaker tables, and sometimes test launches in desert regions. Typical margins in structural design are 40%. Often, testing and analysis are only taken to 10% above the designed limit. For a Space Shuttle launch, 3 g’s are the designed limit of acceleration. The stack has been certified (meaning tested to the point that we know it will keep working) to 3.3 g’s. This operation has a 10% envelope for error. Imagine driving your car at 60 mph and then drifting to 66 mph, only to have your car self-destruct. This is life riding rockets, compliments of the rocket equation.
Thanks for the link.
Might that make an air-launched system more reliable? Even if it's less efficient, the TCO would be lower using a winged system for the initial phases of launch.
But that's how a lot of the X projects were / are done.
There's no future in this idea outside of small sat, and probably not even there.
And even then you need to have all the infrastructure flying and integrated rather as nice static pad.
You are also putting human in bigger danger unless you want to have another autonomous highly complex vehicle.
The benefits are simply better addressed by having 2-3 launch pads.
- Hanging under-wing is a totally different set of forces than standing vertically, especially for a big rocket with thin walls. You're more like a bridge than a tower, or rather like a bridge one moment and then a tower the next. You need reinforcement for that, which makes the vehicle heavier.
- Modern reusable rockets do quick "load and go" filling to keep their propellant as cold and dense as possible. You can't do that if you need to fuel on the ground and then hang off an airplane for ~an hour while it climbs.
Roughly put, the rocket equation is: change in speed = (engine efficiency) * log(mass of the rocket with fuel / mass of the rocket without fuel). So there's limited parameters to play with:
- The speed you need to reach is fixed.
- You can change the weight of the payload. Payload (eg, satellite) designers try to make things as light as possible, rocket designers try to give as much capacity as possible, and everyone prays they can meet in the middle.
- You want as little propellant as possible for cost and practicality, but mostly the other parameters fix how much you need. If the other parameters aren't good enough, you can easily get results like needing a rocket the size of Central Park. [1]
- You can make the engine more efficient. This means running it hotter with higher pressure, pushing the limits of material science. [2]
- You can make the non-payload static parts of the rocket lighter. This means removing structural integrity. It also means making the lightest parts to complete hard tasks like being a valve for cryogenically cooled, literally the smallest element, hydrogen.
Both the engine and non-payload static mass are essentially asking the question "How far can I push this without it breaking". Get your answer to that question even slightly wrong on any of the thousands parts in a rocket, and suddenly all of the fuel that you're using to go in one direction fast decide that you should instead go in every direction fast.
[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/24/
[2] Or not using chemical propulsion. However things like ion engines don't have enough thrust to get through the atmosphere and into orbit, and things like nuclear propulsion spew fallout everywhere.
It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
I will let John Young explain it his way;
> ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’
He test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4
(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)
It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.
I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.
We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages.
The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment
We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago [1]
> reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason)
Static fire tests are routine since the 60s, nothing new here either [2].
> We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs
This is about manufacturing optimization and it has very little to do with rocket safety.
> hey are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity
They are not. It is at best marketing speech. The access to space is at best cheaper but will never be commodity.
The parent post is right on point: Rockets todays are still fundamentally the same giant bomb filled at 85% with explosive that we were making in the 60s. And this is unlikely to change and unlikely to ever be safe.
There is very valid reasons to that: we still did not find anything better than chemical propulsion to go in the last 80 years. It is the only 'working' solution in term of the energy density required to bring us there:
- Ion thrusters have amazing Isp but nowhere the Thrust/Weight ratio required to launch from Earth.
- Nuclear propulsion is good on paper but controversial in practice for pretty obvious reasons.
So we are still stuck. Stuck with burning 1'000t of highly inflammable Ergols in few minutes to just push any blob in orbit. With very thin engineering margins, way thiner than in airplane manufacturing or currently pretty any other domain.
And that make it unlikely to ever be really "safe" and accessible to the mass.
At least, not before we find a better solution to the problem.
Hire all those smart people who waste their lives being quants and steer them in the direction of something useful.
Unfortunately, this is not the way the world is going right now.
Physics research, and generally speaking fundamental research, is publicly funded.
Meaning, most of the time, under funded.
> We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago
One could argue the applicability of "reliable" given the project's track record, but it's not really relevant in any case since that program only got up a few kilometers and nowhere near orbital velocity.
Falcon has an accident rate of 2/640.
Airlines are about ~1.3 / 10^6
SpaceX first stage boosters are not orbital class.
They reach around Mach 6 (Up to my knowledge) at top course and around Mach 3 on descend before the landing burn.
Valid criticism however would be that the DC-X was intended for a return head first with a belly flip. Not tail first like SpaceX boosters.
As such, it is much more similar to Starship spacecraft.
The important distinction is that the DC-X prototype was, at best, supersonic given the low altitude and flight time record, while any efficient booster powering an orbital spaceflight is easily going hypersonic by the time it's returning to Earth.
We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.
We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two
Honestly we’re really good at not prematurely combining tens to hundreds of tons of high-energy fuel and oxidizer put right next to each other and then combining them at several tons per second in a highly controlled way using a very complex system of plumbing and turbopumps powered by the same reagents.
Given that it’s just barely possible, you can’t just make things twice as strong as you think you’d need to, just in case something unexpected happens. Anyhow when something moderately unexpected happens, that means you may get a giant fireball like we saw today.
Until very recently they were basically all custom with extreme tolerance requirements and absolute specifications. Nobody could have an "off day" on a single bolt, hose, nut, screw, wiring harness, etc.
Not really. Rocketry is hard.
You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while attempting to protect one or more fragile bags of meat and water as you travel into an environment that wants to kill them all.
Even when you think you've accounted for everything, something like a piece of foam insulation falling from an external tank is all it takes to produce a catastrophic failure later on during re-entry.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
Definitely unexpected from BO, knowing that everyone is okay, I feel for their engineers right now.
Which is tough with rockets.
The kinetic and potential energy of a 1 kg mass in orbit is around 33 MJ. The chemical energy of 1 kg of methane+oxygen propellant is only about 11 MJ.
Alternately, perfectly combusted methane-oxygen propellant has an exit velocity of around 3500 m/s. But you need about 7800 m/s to get into orbit.
Chemical energy is just very weak compared to the energy of things in orbit. It's really shocking that we can do it at all.
The result of this is that your vehicle is going to be almost entirely propellant. You simply can't just build a big, beefy rocket that's, say, only half propellant, with lots of extra safety margin for things that go wrong. Cars and bridges and things have immense margins. Airplanes, a bit less so, but still more than rockets. Rockets live right on the edge of what's possible, and as long as we use chemical thrust it'll always be that way.
Which isn't to say that rockets won't get more reliable. The Falcon 9 has had hundreds of flights since the last failure, and it isn't as optimized as it could be. But there will be a lot more failures before we get there.
Probably the mistake is to keep relying on rockets and propellants. Need to think more revolutionary. But hard for a startup to do that, usually needs gov backing.
Here's a 1hr video from the Everyday Astronaut explaining the process and everything that can go wrong.
Not really. The performance metrics on rocket engines are utterly insane.
The jet kinetic power of a Merlin 1D engine at sea level is 1.3 GW. The work output of a nuclear power plant in a device weighing half a ton and costing maybe $400K.
Kinetic energy of a rocket: 30 megajoules per kilogram at low earth orbit
It's the difference between one C sized alkaline battery, and slightly under one kilogram of gasoline perfectly mixed with oxygen and ignited in an explosion.
That order of magnitude difference in energy is the difficulty. Fundamentally, an airliner is a dramatically easier engineering task than an orbital capable rocket.
The universe's entire shtick is being very very unwelcoming to high energies, and has a strong tendency to take anything that is a high concentration of energy and turn it into a very spread out glob of much lower energy, or even into an entirely new form of something that "has" less energy but is way less useful to us.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-starship-upper-stage-exp...
*correction: Vac raptors can run at sea level in a test stand. Still doubtful that its safe/reliable and in either case it would still be far too slow.
[1] Note that the first G of acceleration is combating gravity, so Starship at e.g. 1.25Gs would accelerate away from the explosion at 1/20th the rate of Dragon v2.
[2]https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/how-do-the-g-...
This has happened before on the Soyuz in 1983[1], hitting up to 17 Gs, and everyone was fine, modulo some bruising.
On the other hand a lot of the damage on the Falcon pad was IIRC due to burning kerosene getting everywhere on the pad & melting everything.
In this case I would expect all the liquid oxygen and methane to either be involved in the explosion or quickly vaporize, possibly resulting in a different damage pattern on the pad.
https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696/video...
Interesting that just 2 days ago NASA picked Blue Origin instead of SpaceX for this year Moon flights.
On a sidenote, one can wonder how much, giving coming SpaceX IPO, it costs for Bezos to hire a Starship engineer :)
Unless you're talking about moon landers specifically.
Anyway, competition is good and this is a bummer.
Sure we’re playing the same game, but the divide is enormous
> If anything, SpaceX will continue to increase its dominance.
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/spacexs-...
Vastly different destroying each of those.
The fact they did it with pinpoint accuracy even with engine issues and an in tact heat shield is a monumental success for a test flight.
For BO it’s much better to have this now when there is no payload or people on board so they can correct whatever the issue is.
It is amazing that this doesn't happen more often.
Rocket science is hard, and rocket physics are unforgiving. If the planet was just a little bit heavier, we would not be able to leave it with chemical rockets at all.
I know a WDR typically would, but I don't think they perform an ignition for those.
Off the top of my head, I recall in SpaceX's case it was a helium tank failure- a helium tank weld failed and the helium tank itself shot through the cryogenic oxygen, hit the far wall, and gave off a spark. But that sort of failure is only apparent when everything is pressurized correctly, which means tanks have to be full. The goal of the test is that you detect that sort of failure before it goes boom and then can fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ is a video of SpaceX's failure.
There's another comment that it wasn't the weld but even if it was the welders would build to spec and "better" (if it's known what better is) only if it's straightforward. There are certainly scenarios where a fabricator could design a better jig or use a more precise process but if the spec doesn't call for it then it's probably not going to happen because there are also the dimensions of time and money that matter as well.
Quoting from one of the press releases:
"The recovered COPVs showed buckles in their liners. Although buckles were not shown to burst a COPV on their own, investigators concluded that super chilled LOX can pool in these buckles under the overwrap. When pressurized, oxygen pooled in this buckle can become trapped; in turn, breaking fibers or friction can ignite the oxygen in the overwrap, causing the COPV to fail. In addition, investigators determined that the loading temperature of the helium was cold enough to create solid oxygen (SOX), which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen becoming trapped as well as the likelihood of friction ignition.
"The investigation team identified several credible causes for the COPV failure, all of which involve accumulation of super chilled LOX or SOX in buckles under the overwrap."
https://web.archive.org/web/20170216160231/http://www.spacex...
Edit: yes it was https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
>Externally, they sent the site director for their Florida operations, Ricky Lim, to inquire whether he might visit the roof of the United Launch Alliance building... ULA told SpaceX’s Ricky Lim to get lost when he wanted to see the roof of their building in Florida.
The FAA letter:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Space...
Man, the signs were always there, right? I think I only fully realized it in 2018 during the cave "incident".
You've got two large tanks making up the bulk of the stage's structure - one for oxidizer, one for fuel. They have large diameter pipes that feed propellant to the engines. You can't mix the ballast with either the oxidizer or fuel, and you can't feed the engines from anywhere but the propellant tanks...
Doing so risks having to write so much database logic — with all the potential for getting that code buggy as well — that it’s often better to avoid the mock and test the entire system, end-to-end.
This was an end-to-end rocket test.
Test fires with a near-empty rocket would put considerably more force on the pad's hold-downs and the corresponding parts of the rocket's structure.
Blue also had a fuelled 2nd stage on top of the booster for the static fire, which is not out of the ordinary.
SpaceX has a "cap" that is held down with cables that it uses when it needs to test-fire a first stage by itself at its McGregor test site; static fires at launch sites are usually done with the 2nd stage on top.
If you want to argue that it's impossible in practice, I'll point out that SpaceX's Starship first stage has a net thrust of 53 MN [3], and it does static fires (without the weight of the second stage on top) [4].
The space shuttle didn't do static fires because of the solid rocket boosters that would need to be teared down and reconstructed afterwards; not because it's physically impossible to hold it down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
[2] https://www.unionfab.com/blog/2024/03/yield-strength-of-stee...
> It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.
> But there's no sense crying over every mistake
> You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake
Move fast and blow things up early rather than slowly. The minimum number of explosions must be met!
That they make a big deal out of this is just embarrassing, they act like they are competing, but they really don't. They are hobby project for the richest man on the planet and they don't compete for investment $ with other companies like RocketLab.
No sane investor would put their money into Blue Origin and their 'slow and steady' approach.
Humanity has not been idle when it comes to imagining alternate ways to get to orbit. But so far, the only one that works in practice is rockets.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP_Aerospace#Airship_to_Orbit_...
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinLaunch
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
7. https://www.gassend.net/publications/FateOfABrokenSpaceEleva...
Crap! There was a serious latent problem for the test fire to find.
Now they came up with maps where fireworks are allowed and apparently 90% of Prague is covered with beehives (you can't have firework within like 250m from beehive), it doesn't matter bees don't really care about them at all in freezing 1st January, but let's protect them and ruin fun for everyone!
imagine if they stopped financing it for one year and used all those finances to finance for instance cancer research
or maybe for starters they could just stop supporting genocidal regimes killing thousands of children, that would be pretty cheap
Personally I don't even own a car, so don't go on me with some carbon emissions and polluting enviroment, 95% of year I use public transport (most of the time electric trams), only 1-2 a year a ride a car when visiting mother/father.
2. while on vacation last year I saw huge column of snooker and crazy sound only to find out two electric cars were burning at charging station right in next street, I was much more annoyed by fireworks I watch from window at midnight, if you don't want just keep your window closed which shouldn't be that much of a deal in freezing night in December/January
And I mean, the EV thing just seems like a manufactured concern anyway. Walking around I'm very happy when I walk near an EV and don't breathe in exhaust. EV fires are remarkable because that's the only time their presence causes lung problems, while gas vehicles cause lung problems under normal operation.
gas vehicles with modern filters hardly produce any (lung) problems under normal operation
(Elon’s strategy of blowing up smaller versions of their rockets more or less deliberately doesn’t sound so insane in the light of this.)
There was no loss of life in this static fire failure.
- Test commences prematurely when people are still around
- Test is aborted partway through but then spontaneously resumes when people have started coming back
- Error in design or failure of hold-down structure turns static fire into dynamic fire, moving fire to where people are
These are unlikely, of course, but they are the things we have to seriously think about and try to design out of the system in order to create safe systems.
The train driver saw a man on the track ahead holding a cell phone to one ear and cupping his hand to the other ear to block the noise.
True. And yet it is not without precedent.
Scaled Composites had an explosion while performing a cold flow test of SpaceShipTwo’s engine which killed 3. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jul-27-me-explo...
https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/01/spacex-rocket-and-isra...
That was a full size rocket on a real mission with the $200M payload on board during the static fire, which is ostensibly worse. The payload was not integrated yet in Blue Origin’s case.
EDIT: Oh crap, they took out a launch complex.
As an aside, that acronym is something you would expect out of Musk and yet Blue Origin sort of accidentally got it themselves.
Was this an expected outcome? It doesn’t sound like it, but I’ve not really investigated it deeply.
I saw this at Google and it’s what will happen to SpaceX (already starting with Starlink pricing) if there isn’t someone to keep the competitive pressure on.
New Glenn is an incredibly large incredibly complex rocket with very, very complex and expensive engines. And both things are produced at rates much, much lower then Falcon Heavy.
Not to mention how optimized they are for reused and the fixed cost being split between launches.
We would be doing it
My first thought is why wasn't the t-e moved away before launch?
You can see them disconnect in the video I linked.
SpaceX does similar; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_erector / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_erector_launcher
> SpaceX uses the central spine of the transporter erector as a strongback, restraining the rocket, providing stability until the tanks are pressurized with fuels, and contain the fluid hoses along with power and telemetry cables. Consequently, it remains at the launch pad through the launch and is typically tilted away 1.5° from the rocket just a few minutes prior to launch and 45° away from the rocket at the moment of liftoff.
The Shuttle's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_launcher_platform played a similar dual role.
OP, one must show respect to the scattered remnants of rocket debris.
Sorry, hadn’t seen that confirmed yet.
For comparison, the N-1 rocket explosion was around 0.5 kilotons of TNT.
If you want to see an actual 1kT explosion, look at the 2020 Beirut disaster. That explosion was approximately 1.1kT and the damage / shockwave is clearly far greater than the New Glenn explosion.
The fact that the US has multiple extremely active commercial ventures plus a vibrant government programs with launches every few days just highlights har far ahead the US has become in this area of tech. Many people have never seen a rocket launch ever and yet for a big part of the US looking up in the sky and watching the amazing sight of a rocket going through staging is just a normal Tuesday evening.
That sort of expertise and base of scientists and engineers is not something other countries can just quickly replicate. For a while it looked like the US had put space on the back burner but now it’s back and bigger than ever before.
The occasional test going boom is just part of the fun in the end.
China maybe soon, but the EU is not close.
Ariane 6 is in no way comparable to either SLS or Starship or New Glenn. It does 10t to low-earth orbit, 4t to lunar-transfer orbit.
Amount of starups and new company formation in space, US dominates.
SpaceX alone dominates so completely that almost everything else is noise. And if you remove SpaceX, the US still ahead in most categories.