alt Hacker NewsThis is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.
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.
Replies
> 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
I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon
Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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 not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog".
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.
"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security."
for those who wondered like me!
How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?
I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored.
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...