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.
Rockets exploding during testing seems par for the course. Is there a reason this explosion more impactful than your average test rocket explosion?
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
Thanks for the explanation!
Apparently this particular engine had components which failed early testing, they thought they fixed the issue and clearly hadn’t.
To be honest that reason just makes me think how they are approaching testing is wrong.
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?