It's a destructive setback with potential ramifications for the company's customer United Launch Alliance as well as Blue Origin's own rocket New Glenn.
a ULA spokesperson said, “The BE-4 testing issue is not expected to impact our plans for the Vulcan Cert-1 mission.”
That seems impossible to say at this point unless they already know that this explosion is not an engine design or part reliability problem, but rather something like a test equipment or procedural error. If that was the case, why wouldn’t they announce that?
All this business, for the ultimate goal of launching more military satellites, is killing people by millions. Through pollution. One person out of 6 dies from pollution. And pollution is massively generated by clowns like Bezos. Does he have blood on his hands? Absolutely.
Our activity should not be to help Boeing and Lockheed Martin to launch more equipment in the air. It should be to teach new jobs to the people with a current activity that emits pollution and CO2.
This circus is a prime example of what not to do, and how laws are unable to accommodate the people.
SpaceX follow iterative development, there is no fixed baseline. They do extensive testing to work out if a change was good/bad and feed that into the next iteration.
The downsides of this approach is you have to have lots of hardware and expect stuff to go boom.
Blue Origin are traditional aerospace, they spent a great deal of money designing a final product. They perform "qualification testing", this checks the result works as per their design/models.
The design/model heavy approach means you should have worked everything out in advance and it should just work.
The problem with this approach is its a really long time before you test, if there is an issue it could because of a decision made early on and be a nightmare to resolve (might be quicker to start again).
Rocket Lab seem to sit somewhere between these extremes.
This means we should expect Raptor engines to melt alot early on and gradually improve in reliability as they move towards a viable product.
The BE-4 should work perfectly during qualification testing as its the final design, so explosions at this point are a cause for concern
Losing rockets is nothing new. Musk has lost tons. NASA has probably lost more than both of them put together, just developing the technology to make them reliable in the first place.
Challenger blew up with a whole crew aboard. There’s a reason “rocket science” used to be the synonym du jour for anything that was supposed to be hard.
I would say it's in between. It's always 100% better to lose an engine in a test where no lives are at risk.
But to compare the loss to how SpaceX loses rockets is not quite the same. SpaceX is built to iterate on it's rockets in a way it can much easier handle a test failure. Blue origin is much more traditional space development where it can actually be much more impactful when a failure happens. See what stevecrox is saying above.
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