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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.
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.
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).
Cthulhu_
I think that if companies want to scale up rocket launches (and let's disregard the cost / environmental impact / etc for now), they also need to scale up launch sites, at the moment they seem like single points of failure.

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)

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?
GolfPopper
Nukes.[1] Lasers. [2] (Doesn't work, yet.) Balloons.[3] (Floating megastructures in the upper atmosphere is hard.) Giant cannon. [4] (Downside - huge g-forces on payload.) Extra fun with angular momentum.[5] (Even higher g-forces.) Exotic materials[6], with novel failure modes.[7]

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...

heohk
Static fire more like dynamic fire