RisingFury
OBSP developer
"... but the good news is that we didn't blow up ANY OTHER pads!"
Updates Blue Origin announces the New Glenn Orbital Launch Vehicle
- Thread starter Kyle
- Start date
"... but the good news is that we didn't blow up ANY OTHER pads!"
steph
Well-known member
Makes me wonder how lucky we are that all the Starship-related ground RUDs were relatively mild, but there still is time.
RisingFury
OBSP developer
It's clear to me now that NASA should have been heading the development of of these large rockets, not simply acting as a customer.
dennis.krenz
Well-known member
I don't think that making companies build rockets is a problem. Its how they build them. If they would develop their software like they build rockets, their customers would run away and never come back for the next ten years.
Also, part of the idiocy is a NASA program depending on third-party rockets and spacecraft that doesn't exist yet. I really think that NASA should have built any such thing in house, regardless of the risk and cost, and replace this baseline with existing better spacecraft from the market as they are produced in the next round. But that means doing more than flags and footprints, a continuous commitment to fly to the moon for the next decades, so that a market for such spacecraft can develop.
Like it is now, its just blackmailing the tax payer until the tax payer refuses to even negotiate with everyone involved.
Also, part of the idiocy is a NASA program depending on third-party rockets and spacecraft that doesn't exist yet. I really think that NASA should have built any such thing in house, regardless of the risk and cost, and replace this baseline with existing better spacecraft from the market as they are produced in the next round. But that means doing more than flags and footprints, a continuous commitment to fly to the moon for the next decades, so that a market for such spacecraft can develop.
Like it is now, its just blackmailing the tax payer until the tax payer refuses to even negotiate with everyone involved.
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GLS
Well-known member
GLS
Well-known member
RisingFury
OBSP developer
And if the SLS blew up people would be saying that NASA should give up having their own rockets.
RisingFury
OBSP developer
In the last 30 years, there was a great push to "make spaceflight private". We now have the results of that. The companies chasing profit have sacrificed reliability and safety in favor of moving quickly and breaking things.
NASA has had rockets blow up and it's lost crews. But there was never a profit motive behind it. It's easier to trust the safety process in such an organization than it is in a for-profit organization.
Maybe profit was never the reason, but the same schedule pressure was certainly there. Apollo 1, STS-51L and STS-107, they all had serious schedule pressure pushing them. Apollo 1 had the political pressure of beating the Soviets and landing on the Moon before the end of the decade. STS-51L was just plain commercial pressure (shuttle was used as a public delivery vehicle for 100% commercial payloads). And STS-107 was once again political pressure to meet an arbitrary deadline of February 2004 to get the ISS assembly to a certain milestone(US Core Complete, ISS10A, Node 2 installation).
Thunder Chicken
Resident Lua Script Rabble-Rouser
TLE and the launch deck are trashed. One lightning tower down. The launch tower has damaged strut members at its base. The doors on the far side of the horizontal integration facility are damaged, so the doors on the pad side and probably quite a lot of stuff in the HIF are damaged. Visible tank damage, lost of visible tent damage.
Yeah, it isn't going to be a matter of some light repairs and fresh paint. It practically needs to be rebuilt. They aren't flying anything from that pad for a couple of years. The second pad might be the most expedient path to return to flight.
GLS
Well-known member
Every time a SpaceX or Blue Origin rocket blows up they have to do the exact same procedures NASA would do as mandated by the FAA and other government agencies.
Also when was the last major failure of a Falcon 9?
Or Rocket Labs Electron?
It's not a simple as "Hurr-durr corpos cutting costs made the rocket go boom!" because the industry is as regulated as Airliner production if not even more so because of ITAR and other things.
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GLS
Well-known member
I guess the reason NG blew up was because they loaded it with too much confidence...
RisingFury
OBSP developer
That's just it. Those rockets use technology NASA developed a long time ago. And don't ignore Falcon 1. It was just as much a learning curve for SpaceX as Electron is for Rocket lab.
APDAF said:
Yea, sure. Airbus is especially notorious for exploding every A380 during testing - to the cheers of every Airbus engineer
No?
No-one before had even thought of trying to landing a rocket under it's own power before
Plenty of those ideas through out the 80's and 90's. Only real success was McDonnell Douglas's DC-X:
GLS
Well-known member
Some LC-36 updates. Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news. The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. The booster “Never Tell Me The Odds” and the three GS-2s that were onsite in the integration facility also look good.
I’ve seen some speculation that we might move directly to the 9x4 configuration, but we won’t do that. Rate manufacturing of 7x2 is going well, and we’re going to continue that at pace as planned and store the stages for use. In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop, and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.
We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter.
"We will fly again before the end of this year." =
I’ve seen some speculation that we might move directly to the 9x4 configuration, but we won’t do that. Rate manufacturing of 7x2 is going well, and we’re going to continue that at pace as planned and store the stages for use. In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop, and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.
We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter.
"We will fly again before the end of this year." =
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