Bezos Rocket Crashes After Liftoff, Only Experiments Aboard (apnews.com) 81
A rocket crashed back to Earth shortly after liftoff Monday in the first launch accident for Jeff Bezos' space travel company, but the capsule carrying experiments managed to parachute to safety. From a report: No one was aboard the Blue Origin flight, which used the same kind of rocket as the one that sends paying customers to the edge of space. The rockets are now grounded pending the outcome of an investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The New Shepard rocket was barely a minute into its flight from West Texas when bright yellow flames shot out from around the single engine at the bottom. The capsule's emergency launch abort system immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top. Several minutes later, the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor. The rocket came crashing down, with no injuries or damage reported, said the FAA, which is in charge of public safety during commercial space launches and landings. Blue Origin's launch commentary went silent when the capsule catapulted off the rocket Monday morning, eventually announcing: "It appears we've experienced an anomaly with today's flight. This wasn't planned."
The New Shepard rocket was barely a minute into its flight from West Texas when bright yellow flames shot out from around the single engine at the bottom. The capsule's emergency launch abort system immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top. Several minutes later, the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor. The rocket came crashing down, with no injuries or damage reported, said the FAA, which is in charge of public safety during commercial space launches and landings. Blue Origin's launch commentary went silent when the capsule catapulted off the rocket Monday morning, eventually announcing: "It appears we've experienced an anomaly with today's flight. This wasn't planned."
I Warned Him! (Score:3, Funny)
I told him the blood of factory workers couldn't be used as rocket fuel, but did he believe me?
Noooooo!
Well, I bet he does now.
Salpeter From Warehouse Urine (Score:2)
Blood ? Nope.
Actually he uses urine from overworked Warehouse employees.
They are not allowed to take much time to drink, and not much time to go to the toilet, so their urine is very concentrated, and from that you can manufacture salpeter giving you 10% more delta-V.
Oops! (Score:1)
Ya test everything that you think you should.
Then something happens to identify something you didn't test.
Now you test for that as well.
Re:Oops! (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon does not own Blue Origin. If Bezos were to try to steal money from Amazon to help out Blue Origin, he'd be in jail.
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Amazon does not own Blue Origin. If Bezos were to try to steal money from Amazon to help out Blue Origin, he'd be in jail.
Amazon did sign a contract with Blue Origin to use its non functional New Glenn rocket to launch Kuiper satellites and also with ULA to use Vulcan (which uses Blue Origins BE-4 engine that isn't ready yet) so it does LOOK like Bezos is funneling money from Amazon to Blue Origin.
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Interesting but then again, it's a classical way to transfer money from one company to another. This is often done for tax purposes.
Have a company located in a high tax rate area sign a contract or service agreement where they will lose money with a company or subdivision located where you barely pay any taxes. e.g. google and others in Ireland.
https://www.marketplace.org/20... [marketplace.org].
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Ya test everything that you think you should. Then something happens to identify something you didn't test. Now you test for that as well.
Sure. Logical.
Yep. Fail, and learn from the failure: that's the path to success.
As long as that "test" wasn't one of those checks established decades ago by a 60-year old space community that Blue Origin failed to review and acknowledge.
Here's a rule of engineering: every failure looks like a dumb mistake in hindsight.
An oversight like that can turn an Oops! into a Ya-Done-Fucked-Up real quick-like.
Learning not to make dumb mistakes... is another thing you have to learn.
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Sounds like the plot to the TV Series "Chernobyl".
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Ever notice every post about Bezos ends up with a discussion of dicks?
Maybe Slashdot needs to update their icon for Bezos related stories. The solar system and the flag don't quite do him justice.
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Re:Jeff Bezos' rocket penis (Score:5, Funny)
So the headline is Bezos' rocket suffers premature...Nah, too easy.
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So the headline is Bezos' rocket suffers premature...Nah, too easy.
Came here for this joke...
[ducks]
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Well, the company is named Blue Origin, after all.
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So the headline is Bezos' rocket suffers premature...Nah, too easy.
Ejection!
Who was flying (Score:5, Funny)
RUD (Score:2)
it's exactly that.
Doing RUDs instead of simulations and reviews is the best way to succeed faster.
I'm happy to see BO starting real stuff at last.
That means real progress, even if the first 5 rockets mostly explode.
it's exactly getting science advanced (at least for you)
No damage (Score:3, Interesting)
If the rocket wasn't damaged, shoot it off again!
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Damage to the *payload*. This was obviously not a good result, but the launch escape system worked impressively well.
Re: No damage (Score:3)
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The statement was from the FAA. The FAA is concerned with everyone who is NOT involved in the flight. From the FAA point of view, there was no damage. The condition of the rocket doesn't matter to the FAA.
That's what I thought too (Score:1)
From the FAA point of view, there was no damage
That's how I took it as well, no damage to other structures or aircraft.
From the look of the very hard landing, I would be surprised if no experiments were damaged. But at least the capsule was intact so there's a chance they escaped harm, you have to think everything would have been pretty well padded just for the normal rocket G-force.
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From what I saw the landing looked pretty standard for a New Shepherd capsule so I doubt anything was damaged but they also probably didn't achieve any desired scientific goals as the amount of time they spent in zero-g was likely negligible. The reason why it looks rough is because they use retro thrusters just before touchdown to cushion the landing, and those tend to kick up a lot of dust.
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The reason why it looks rough is because they use retro thrusters just before touchdown to cushion the landing, and those tend to kick up a lot of dust.
I thought I read elsewhere those landing retro thrusters failed, that's part of why I thought the landing might have been pretty hard.
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Damage to the *payload*. This was obviously not a good result, but the launch escape system worked impressively well.
Indeed, I could bet the Challenger astronauts would have liked to have it available to them.
That's a pretty decent "failure" (Score:5, Insightful)
Rockets are hard. This failure demonstrated to potential customers that, "Even if something catastrophic happens, we're being very careful with your stuff."
Re:That's a pretty decent "failure" (Score:4, Informative)
On the plus side, the emergency recovery seemed to have gone well. Although the capsule looks like it landed with a bit of a thump.
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Blue Origin has apparently had the first successful emergency launch system engagement after a rocket failure. That is HUGE news,
"The first usage with a crewed mission occurred during the attempt to launch Soyuz T-10-1 on September 26, 1983."
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Here's some actual footage of Soyuz T-10-1 followed by a Youtube recreation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That wasn't during flight but on the launchpad, though, IIRC.
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Rockets are hard.
There's a Bezos Space Dick joke here somewhere.
Re:Message from Elon (Score:5, Informative)
von Braun and Oberth called: They blew lots of shit up too before Getting It Right.
Elon texted: Same. Still blowing shit up. And setting shit on fire.
This is the nature of rocketry, at any scale, from Estes to Saturn and beyond.
Blue Origin will get it right eventually, or run out of funds -- whichever comes first.
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"Launch fast and break things!"
Re:Message from Elon (Score:4, Insightful)
"Neener neener neener!"
SpaceX has blown up their share of rockets on launch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The trick is to learn from it
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Posts three videos of "launch"; two of them are not even a launch. :D
BTW I didn't even notice it, but the Falcon rocket family recently set a record for consecutive successful launches. Apparently they're now at 150 or so, which is way higher than anyone else has ever achieved. And judging from the current state of the launch industry, there's a very high chance that nobody will take that crown away from them for many decades. The previous record of 110-ish was set in the early 1990s -- and that is assuming
Learn from failure [Re:Message from Elon] (Score:2)
Posts three videos of "launch"; two of them are not even a launch. :D
Blowing up on the launch pad counts as a launch explosion in my view whether or not they pressed the button. There were other launch failures, I just picked these because they had good video.
SpaceX is proud of their failures. They think of these as badges of honor, showing that they're not afraid to take risks. (and, hurray for them for doing so).
BTW I didn't even notice it, but the Falcon rocket family recently set a record for consecutive successful launches.
Yep.The way to get reliability down the road is to learn from your initial failures.
Blue Origin is not as far down the learning curve as SpaceX. SpaceX, remembe
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Blowing up on the launch pad counts as a launch explosion in my view
You have strange views then, but whatever.
There were other launch failures, I just picked these because they had good video.
You could have listed those, then. Not sure why "good video" matters more than facts, unless you cater to sensationalists.
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You could have listed those, then. Not sure why "good video" matters more than facts, unless you cater to sensationalists.
The point I was making was the SpaceX had failures too; any one was sufficient to make the point, so the ones I picked were ones that were visual. I assumed you know how to use wikipedia and google, so, if you cared to know the full list, would find it trivially enough, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I was fully aware of the complete list of SpaceX's failures (since there's very few of them),
More than Blue Origin, though, so quit snarking about how Blue Origin has failures. Yes, that happens.
so I didn't have to "use Wikipedia and Google" to begin with.
Then what the fuck are you posting about?
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Then what the fuck are you posting about?
Just pointing out the stupidity of the videos.
so quit snarking about how Blue Origin has failures.
What the fuck YOU are on about? Where have I been "snarking about how Blue Origin has failures"? Show me! WHERE am I "snarking about Blue Origin"?
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What the fuck YOU are on about? Where have I been "snarking about how Blue Origin has failures"? Show me! WHERE am I "snarking about Blue Origin"?
You are replying in a thread starting
Message from Elon: "Neener neener neener!"
to which I replied "SpaceX has blown up their share of rockets on launch."
And for some unknown reason you decided to take issue with that.
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Delivery rating ... (Score:4, Funny)
[ ] Handled with Care
Hard landing (Score:3)
Is it just me or did that capsule land pretty darn hard?
I don't think humans would be happy after that touchdown, and I wonder if the payload actually survived.
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There were supposed to be retro rockets that fired just prior to landing, but they did not. This was NOT a textbook recovery.
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It's going to be a while before they can fly that thing with humans again. They will have to re-test the abort system.
Eh, it's only Bezos' phallic folly anyway. Sub orbital flights to the edge of space for people with too much money.
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There were supposed to be retro rockets that fired just prior to landing, but they did not. This was NOT a textbook recovery.
They absolutely did, the cloud of dust you see on impact is created by the retro rockets that fire just before touchdown. This was a good recovery. You can see the same happening on a perfectly executed Soyouz capsule: https://youtu.be/CYqW0rDEjnE?t... [youtu.be]
Escape system worked but would have been rough (Score:5, Informative)
Headline and summary leave a lot to be desired. Yes the booster failed and ultimately did crash. Looks like an engine failure (so-called engine rich exhaust problem!) at max Q and the computer shut it down and fired off the capsule escape system, which worked as designed. Had there been passengers onboard they would have been taken for a very wild ride and most likely injured, but they would have survived. The escape system worked well just as it had been tested in the past. However this booster engine failure will result in a halt to all Blue Origin passenger flights for a while until the problem is identified and rectified and the rocket is cleared for flight again. A set back to be sure.
The gee forces experienced in the capsule would have been pretty extreme. By the time the escape fired, the capsule was about 0 gee. The escape rocket would accelerate the capsule rapidly after which the capsule would then rapidly de-accelerate.
Scott Manley has a nice summary of what happened on his channel.
New Shepard crash (Score:3, Interesting)
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because Virgin Atlantic wasn't really a virgin.
Please be gentle (Score:2)
At least they outperform the SLS (Score:2)
and Bezos' entire capsule can be reused again.
With the SLS the capsule has to go through a strict inspection and probably only the door handle for the toilet will pass the test for re-usage.
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Not even comparable though. This is a sub-orbital rocket. It does not achieve orbit. Definitely does not go to the moon. Or spend any length of time in space.
Since when is the SLS an orbital rocket? (Score:2)
It hasn't lifted itself up from this earth even a foot.
It's still a 40 billion dollar steel pillar so far.
Well, maybe the crane lifted it a foot when they rolled it back to the hangar.
Bad title. Rocket did NOT crash (Score:2)
In other news (Score:1)
One of Elons rockets was re-used 14 times a few days ago.
That's gotta hurt (Score:2)
"The capsule's emergency launch abort system immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top."
So it circumcised itself? Ouch!
Welcome to NASA (Score:2)
Where broken seals can delay a launch for months, or cause a catastrophic explosion when they are missed in inspection.
It's no surprise Space X would face the same issues.
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Where broken seals can delay a launch for months, or cause a catastrophic explosion when they are missed in inspection.
It's no surprise Space X would face the same issues.
You do realize that this rocket isn't a SpaceX rocket but the only flying rocket of Blue Origin right?
The Art of Rocketry (Score:2)
Rocketry is the art of blowing something up very slowly.
Sabotage? (Score:1)
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That is an entirely specious accusation. Had ULA actually had employees capable of hitting a target, any target, they would have been promoted to program management year ago.
Bezos is just as brilliant as Elon Musk ;) (Score:1)