Blue Origin's rocket reuse achievement marred by upper stage failure

Posted by rbanffy 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by WalterBright 1 day ago

Once Elon showed how to do it, and how cost-efficient it was, a rocket company that doesn't do it is not viable.

Comment by testing22321 1 day ago

Spacex first landed an orbital booster just over 10 years ago and have now landed 600 times.

The entire rest of the world combined has done it twice.

For a long time people would scoff when it was said they had a 10 year lead, and that others would catch up quickly. Proof meets pudding.

Comment by gamblor956 1 day ago

FTA: "SpaceX suffered upper stage failures on three test flights of the massive Starship rocket last year. "

SpaceX has also had numerous failures with the larger generation of second stages and currently doesn't have a lead there. Nobody does.

Comment by decimalenough 1 day ago

Nobody else has anything remotely like Starship. If they pull it off, and it's looking like they will, they will extend their dominance for another decade if not more.

Yes, Starship development has been slow and occasionally explodey, but they've successfully demonstrated all the fundamentals and it's "just" iteration from here. (They haven't gone into full orbit, but that's by choice, not lack of capability.)

Comment by ActorNightly 1 day ago

> If they pull it off, and it's looking like they will,

I really wonder about this psychological effect where non technical people champion people like Musk so hard without any basis for doing so. Is is some sort of wanting to belong to some ideology that makes you just make shit up in your head about how Starship is a success, despite many indicators of it clearly being a stupid idea born from Musks ketomine episodes?

For the record, Starships engines are the equivalent of taking a Toyota Corolla and making it run on nitrous continously on the verge of self destructing. You may be able to do technology demonstrations here and there, but making it work reliably for actual missions is much much harder.

Comment by inglor_cz 23 hours ago

"Starships engines", also known as Raptors, are among the most extensively tested rocket engines in the world.

More than 600 of them (across all variants) have been produced and tested on McGregor test stands and in flight, with relatively few explosions, and for some of that test stand explosions, we do not know if those were deliberate overload tests.

Raptor is about the least problematic of all the crucial Starship components. They had a lot more problems with ullage and the gorilla in the room is the heat shield. It must be very reliable and at the same time quick to check and fix. The time to fix the heat shield will be the critical component of the total turnaround time.

Personally, I don't believe in 1 hour turnaround. 1-2 days just might be plausible.

Comment by ActorNightly 20 hours ago

Is that why you see several engines not functioning during flight tests?

The issue is that the controllers have to maintain a crazy unstable balance of the mixture to keep these things running due to the dual preburn cycle and cryogenic storage, that any unforeseen circumstance can lead to failure.

In the days of Falcon, where Space X was attracting people willing to disrupt the industry, I would have been in the "its possible" camp. Nowdays, with everything going on, I would place a large chunk of money on the fact that they will never get it to be reliable enough. They haven't even gotten it to orbit yet, despite the massive experience they have.

Comment by WalterBright 20 hours ago

The rockets were designed to be tolerant of a couple of the engines not functioning.

This is actually good engineering, as perfect reliability is very expensive.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by peyton 1 day ago

Bringing together the money and people to make this stuff happen is the basis. That’s the most impressive part. Debatably the only truly impressive part.

There’s no ideology. You can watch a really big rocket take off every month or two and watch a smaller rocket take off every couple days. I’m sure there are better designs out there… on drawing boards.

Comment by ActorNightly 1 day ago

Its not a video game where you put enough resources into "science" and stuff just works.

There are fundamentals at play that Musk certainly doesn't understand, and its ridiculous to think that he would be smart enough to account for them.

Comment by WalterBright 1 day ago

> There are fundamentals at play that Musk certainly doesn't understand

Examples?

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Comment by boznz 1 day ago

It's a hard problem, and both SpaceX and Blue Origin will probably have failures in the future too, I am encouraged that they both see failure as a way to do better and looking forward to both of them eventually succeeding. It's a good time to be a space nerd.

Comment by WalterBright 1 day ago

There's a saying in the racing business. If you're not walking back to the pit now and then carrying the steering wheel, you're not trying hard enough. If you're walking back to the pit too often, you're incompetent.

Comment by WalterBright 1 day ago

There's another aspect. If you're launching men in rockets, you cannot tolerate failures, so the development cost is way, way higher. The cost effective method is to launch unmanned ones, tolerating a lot of failures, and when the bugs are worked out then launch men.

Comment by bombcar 1 day ago

If you always fail, you aren’t trying.

If you never fail, you aren’t trying.

Comment by mandeepj 1 day ago

If you always fail, you aren’t learning

Isn't that better?

Comment by bombcar 1 day ago

True, but then you have to differentiate trying and failing vs not doing anything and failing by default.

Comment by sourcegrift 1 day ago

It's the 4-minute mile except it's taking everyone else too long to copy it. Really shows how far ahead Musk is.

Comment by eagerpace 1 day ago

I know insurance for a launch is typical, but seems really tough to do that for this still “rather experimental” launch. I got to imagine it has costs something like 50% on a project like this.

Comment by staplung 1 day ago

The failure of the upper stage is a bummer. If it triggers a months-long review, that will almost certainly bump back the schedule for the prototype Blue Moon lander launch.

Comment by dwd 1 day ago

What I was not aware of is how many satellites Amazon already has in LEO for it's own Internet service.

They've been flying under the radar there it would seen.

Comment by cmiles8 1 day ago

I will be good to have competition for space Internet. It’s unclear though if the market will really support two players. Satellite radio and data quickly ended up consolidating down to one.

Amazon is trying to become more vertically integrated but they seem at a structural disadvantage here competing against SpaceX.

Comment by jethro_tell 1 day ago

You might be counting out the value of government and military contracts that might not want to do business with a wild card.

SpaceX is killing it because the US government gives them a bunch of contracts, but if stability is slightly more important than cost or speed, amazon has a contender.

Comment by sanex 1 day ago

They "only" have about 250 but they're authorized for 3000. They just bought a satellite company this week though that might boost the numbers a bit.

Comment by dwd 1 day ago

As late as 2010 there were "only" around 1000 satellites in orbit.

Comment by sanex 1 day ago

Apparently they lose authorization if they don't get to 1500 hence the ""

Comment by sota_pop 1 day ago

It came to my attention recently how many TOTAL objects currently exist in LEO. And that a study said that due to light deflection of these objects, that the earth’s night sky is an average of 10% brighter than it was in 1980s… although I generally am excited by technological advancement, that fact (if true) made me feel somewhat melancholy.

Comment by imoonkey 1 day ago

I wonder how a company would be able to catch up with SpaceX, and make this no longer a monopoly.

Comment by SilverElfin 1 day ago

I think we will see many soon. India and China alone have something like ten promising space launch startups.

Comment by cryptoz 1 day ago

Video of the booster landing: https://xcancel.com/JeffBezos/status/2045874068763632017

Comment by Mistletoe 1 day ago

Stupid question I know, but are there people on that boat?

Comment by hgoel 1 day ago

IIRC people standby on a boat at a safe distance, then come onboard to secure the booster when it's safe enough