I watched Jeff bezos’s tour of blue origin facility with everyday astronaut.
He gave the reasoning for why New Glen has more than three legs (I think 6)
He said that the more legs you have, the smaller each leg has to reach out to give the same probability of tipping over. So there’s a formula to pick the best number of legs given their weight etc.
Interestingly he said they picked their number not just for that but also because it went well with the engine distribution.
"Old money" is one way to put it. It seems to be dominated by pension funds and people's savings. Please don't put your savings into Vanguard's famous index fund — Vanguard currently has 7.47% of the shares and you don't want to ruin that by forcing Vanguard to increase its stake to 7.48%.
This is the second recent glitch in a SpaceX mission. The other, more serious, was the failure of a Starlink Falcon 9 to quite reach a viable orbit because of an oxygen leak on an engine.
These minor blips only stand out in the context of SpaceX’s unprecedented consistency, which surpasses anyone else. But, if they have another snafu soon, maybe it could hint at a slight decline in their normal technical excellence?
Edit : OTOH, this was launch 23 of that booster, as mentioned by @gregoriol, so I for one might see that as a successful test discovery of the reuse limits of the structure. And also, the F9 that didn’t reach orbit probably wouldn’t have threatened the lives of a human crew, although it would have scrubbed their mission.
It followed the promised flight path all the way to the drone ship and then tipped over.
I would understand the consternation if it left the keep out zone and landed in an entirely different area of the sea. But it sounds like that was not the case.
> even if it is inconsequential to the rest of the mission, well...
Could you finish your sentence please? The job of the FAA is to keep everyone safe. There is no indication that something unsafe happened here. What happened here is the reason why the recovery people are standing-by outside a declared safe zone and not chilling on the drone ship. (In other words this is the reason why the droneship is a drone ship.)
The FAA needs to know that if the same failure would have happened at a different point in the sequence, that all human lives would be safe.
So if Scott Manley was right and it was a landing leg strut failure, SpaceX could quickly report that and close the investigation. A landing leg strut failure would never threaten human lives so that's all the FCC cares about.
OTOH, if it was an engine failure leading to the rocket coming in hot (like others have speculated), it's possible that the same problem at a different point in the flight path could threaten lives. But SpaceX has redundancy in basically all systems for the "going up" portion of the flight so it could just say "yup, if that had happened at a different time the redundant systems would have had to take over".
During landing the center engine is a single point of failure. Going up they have 8 other engines and can get to space on just 8.
I just don't understand the repeated takes that this is unfair. There was a failure, it should be investigated and a fix found. Once SpaceX has done that, they can continue launching rockets. I'm not sure where the problem is. This is what we expect from every plane crash too, or did I imagine the existence and purpose of the NTSB?
There are failures which only cost the company money and there are failures which risks lives.
By all indications this is the first kind. It would be entirely different situation if the rocket thumbled out of control and hit the sea in the wrong spot. Then a grounding would be warranted. Here by all accounts they flown to the right spot but did not stick the landing.
> This is what we expect from every plane crash too, or did I imagine the existence and purpose of the NTSB?
We would not ground the whole fleet of an aircraft model if something adverse but expected happened to one of them.
It is simply not true that “all other companies” are investigated if their rockets fail to make a successful landing on a ship at sea. This is because no other company in the world has ever successfully landed a rocket on a ship at sea.
So you’re telling me every rocket launch from the US prior to 2015 led to an investigation, as well as every rocket launch not performed by SpaceX since then?
"Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data show that 50 commercial space launches from 2000 through mid-January 2023 resulted in “mishaps”—the industry term for incidents such as catastrophic explosions and other failures. This represents about 12 percent of 433 launches during the period and caused no fatalities, serious injuries, or significant property damage to the public."
and
"When mishaps occur, FAA can conduct an investigation itself or instead authorize launch operators to lead investigations of their own mishaps under FAA oversight, according to FAA. In practice, however, FAA has authorized operator-led investigations for all mishaps where it had lead investigative authority, GAO found."
Here, I’ll make it simple for you. On July 30, ULA launched USSF-51, an Atlas V mission in which the first stage did not successfully land on a drone ship, but rather was unceremoniously dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. Can you find me the investigation for that launch?
I am not understanding. Dumping in the Atlantic Ocean was part of their plan. The recent SpaceX landing failed. Landing was part of their overall flight plan.
For the past several years, SpaceX has attempted to recover their rockets in the ocean, with the well-understood risk that such a landing might fail, with the consequence of dumping the rocket into the ocean. SpaceX is currently the only orbital launch provider in the world with this capability. So on the rare occasion that this capability fails, SpaceX and SpaceX alone faces additional scrutiny over the otherwise completely acceptable consequence of the rocket getting dumped into the ocean.
It would be one thing if every launch provider faced scrutiny for not recovering their rockets, but they don't. As a matter of public policy, it's obviously acceptable to dump rockets into the ocean. Every other launch provider gets away with it. The US government gets away with it. SpaceX is the only launch provider that doesn't get away with it; they are, in effect, being penalized for having a capability that other launch providers don't have and plainly serves the public interest. This may indeed be an unintended consequence of FAA regulations being inflexible about "plans", but it is a consequence nonetheless.
SpaceX would face an FAA investigation if a mishap occurs during a landing attempt (whether on land or at sea) because the FAA is responsible for ensuring the safety and compliance of all commercial space launches and reentries in the United States.
Even though landing at sea is a unique SpaceX capability, the location or method of landing doesn’t change the FAA's oversight role.
If SpaceX landings start to fail, what is to say that the next one goes more awry and lands on a home in Cape Canaveral? They do land landings sometimes and we don’t want that to happen.
Like you sort of imply, it seems they are being held accountable for being better but still if they provide any capability it has to be done safely.
I agree an investigation would be warranted if SpaceX missed the landing zone entirely, but in this case they not only landed inside the landing zone, they even managed to land on the ship itself before the booster fell over into the sea. And the landing zone is, much like the dump site for an expendable rocket, cleared of marine traffic ahead of time.
ummm... someone is trying really hard to be a smartass and making himself looking like an ass.
> unceremoniously dumped in the Atlantic Ocean.
It wasnt ' unceremoniously dumped in the Atlantic Ocean' it was crashed into a designated area. Ensuring no, dmg to any property boat or people. They dont crash anything randomly somewhere in the ocean.
“Crashed” and “dumped” are broadly synonymous when one is crashing or dumping a solid object into the sea, and while the spent rockets may be precisely or even painstakingly dumped into a particular designated area of the sea, that does not necessarily imply that such dumping and/or crashing is what either of us would call “ceremonious”.
And I’m sure you would agree that however precise or painstaking those dumpings/crashings may be, they are certainly no more precise or painstaking than SpaceX’s recovery attempts, which are likewise designed to endanger only the SpaceX unmanned drone ship itself. So this is hardly sufficient to explain why a failed landing attempt is somehow more worthy of governmental scrutiny than not even making the attempt in the first place.
funny how you still double down, and trying to use grammar to not admit being wrong, and absolutely not addressing the point i made.
Only to prove you my point.
Its really simple, spaceX wanted to land but crashed, hmm this could have been dangerous.
Any other rocket, we will crash land in this part of ocean at this time. And crash at the designated area at the designated time - all according to plan no people should be there.
christ on a stick. Its like talking to a wind up toy.
Their plan was not to land anywhere in the world, duh.
Their plan was to land in designated area, but the landing failed. This could have endangered lives. Investigation is to ensure no one was at risk and contingency was in place.
The Falcon 9 booster fell into the ocean well inside of a designated area clear of marine traffic, other than the unmanned drone ship it attempted to land on. No lives were endangered. The only thing that went wrong is that it didn’t stick the landing on the drone ship, but that’s not a safety issue since the booster still came down inside the designated area.
Yeah, what raverbashing said. Let's say it is systemic. Let's say that boosters that have flown more than 10 times have a high rate of collapse and explosion when they land on the barge. OK, so? Why does the FAA care? It's not like the explosion endangers aircraft - the airspace should be cleared because of the booster's descent anyway.
FAA is doing their job. If the investigation turns up nothing then that’s fine. If they find something like SpaceX didn’t follow their quality processes then that’s time to pause before someone gets hurt.
He gave the reasoning for why New Glen has more than three legs (I think 6)
He said that the more legs you have, the smaller each leg has to reach out to give the same probability of tipping over. So there’s a formula to pick the best number of legs given their weight etc.
Interestingly he said they picked their number not just for that but also because it went well with the engine distribution.