Posted by enraged_camel 18 hours ago
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...
As an aside, that acronym is something you would expect out of Musk and yet Blue Origin sort of accidentally got it themselves.
https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696/video...
(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.
Crap! There was a serious latent problem for the test fire to find.
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 :)
> 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.
EDIT: Oh crap, they took out a launch complex.
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...