SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap SpaceX has responded to Blue Origin's announcement of a heftier version of its New Glenn rocket in the only way it knows how – by accidentally destroying a Starship booster. Last night, Elon Musk's rocket company announced that the first of the Super Heavy V3 boosters, Booster 18, was beginning prelaunch testing, starting with …
Well, now they have more data. Kinda what it's all about. They churn these things out at an insane rate. Agree or not with the development cycle ethos, it does what it is meant to. As an aside, the constant putting Musk so prominently in SpaceX news is a bit silly. Fuck him, who cares? Hats off to all the talented engineers.
SpaceX has launched so many satellites it's ruined my favourite night-sky view. They're already serving the ISS, and carrying passengers- both government and private.
Blue Orbit's biggest bit of visibility was launching William Shatner up so high he could almost see the coast. On a 'spaceship' so slow and low that fixed-wing aircraft have been higher and faster. They only reached orbit for the first time this year.
What I'm saying is SpaceX have far, far more history in putting things in orbit and beyond than Blue Origin. Even if Musk is a prat, he's put together one hell of a team.
"573 successful orbital launches (full mission) to 1"
It's not valid to compare Falcon 9 to Starship nor New Glenn. F9 is a classic design that isn't punching in the same weight class. It's a big indicator that a prominent engineer, Tom Mueller, left SpaceX as Elon was winding up Starship. Tom has stated he wanted nothing to do with it. Hmmmm, I wonder why.
Jeff and the Blue crew have opted for the slow and steady track to kick off with a much better record of successful flights. The first New Glenn went very well. Landing on the barge was on the test card, but they knew they had questions unasked and there could be problems. They nailed it (literally) on the second go.
Starship flights 10 and 11 were far less successful than fans are giving credit for. The major goal is to have a fully reusable craft, but images show that there's still a long way to go with the heat shield. SpaceX is also not getting the hardware back to be able to analyze what they are getting. Starship hits the Indian Ocean and falls over, blows up and sinks into the swamp ocean. The booster isn't blowing up anymore in use, but it's also not looking right and tight as it comes back. Having flames coming from broken lines is scary to bring back for a tower catch and doesn't advertise a gas-n-go turn around.
"Instead of collecting data Blue Origin is putting stuff into orbit and beyond with their big booster"
They've done that once. Whether you like Musk or not, SpaceX has accomplished a hell of a lot more. New Shepard is little more than a solid fuel piece of fireworks that will get a capsule into a 10 minute suborbital hop, and New Glenn is definitely "inspired" by previous SpaceX engineering.
Meanwhile SpaceX has been "collecting data" and putting that into a whole range of increasingly advanced designs (in part because they're not afraid of RUDs as a source of engineering data) and has clocked up a lot of successful commercial launches.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Musk fanboi by any stretch of the imagination.. But Bezos isn't all that much better. He's less prone to shooting off his mouth, but as far as the creepiness factor goes, he's right up there with the Muskrat.
Icon as a means to illustrate one way of obtaining engineering data,
"New Shepard is little more than a solid fuel piece of fireworks that will get a capsule into a 10 minute suborbital hop, and New Glenn is definitely "inspired" by previous SpaceX engineering."
Oh plulleeeze. The Falcon 9 is straight out of Gary Sutton's "Rocket Propulsion Elements". SpaceX has even stated that the rocket was built on existing proven technologies. Blue Origin is also not riding on breakthrough engineering to propel them forward. There's no riding on SpaceX's coattails for Blue (maybe examples of what not to do).
Early in my going into aerospace, I was blown away by a rocket that only went up a couple of meters. It was a test bed by Armadillo Aerospace. The video showed it taking off, hovering and landing again behind some industrial buildings. The company I wound up with managed the same thing some years later and I have first hand knowledge of how hard that is and how little altitude is as much as a factor as control. New Shepard isn't going to orbit, but it is going to space and returning both the booster and capsule for a controlled landing to be reused. The launches are nearly always picture perfect. Honda seems to be taking that route right now as they learn via a small rocket that isn't gong to orbit, but is still a serious bit of kit. Even before SpaceX started their "Grasshopper" program to develop landing technology, many others were already there (with much less funding).
Don't get mesmerized by Elon's press. It's not better to take lots of goes at building something with wreckage all over the landscape. It's not a good look in the eyes of future customers. If Blue Origin can have successful mission after successful mission, their long development time will start looking like the much better way to have gone. Elon said on an interview that each BUG is costing SpaceX $100mn. After 11 flights and a bunch of other big bangs, that's better than $1.2bn of direct hardware costs. That buys a lot of engineering time and simulation without really slipping into "analysis paralysis".
You seem to have ignored SpaceX's other 150ish successful cargo carrying, money making flights this year.
Why can't we be happy for BO without using it as an excuse to piss on SpaceX because you don't like majority shareholder?
Hurray for BO!
Hurray for SpaceX!
Hey, even Hurray for ULA, Arianespace, all the rest, even the Chinese!
Awesome on the Chinese for getting their astronauts home without a long delay and having a spare coming up soon - I'm never going to disparage an efficiently run agency.
Feel sorry for the Chinese astronauts in their cramped capsule, hopefully there's no delays in that new larger single unit design the Mengzhou, that's more like a Dragon or Orion capsule.
"Nice to see Von Musk's V3 is as reliable as his V2."
Consistency is key.
Many forget the USA was number 2 for a long time in the early days of rockets. The old Soviet Union was way ahead until they weren't. Kennedys speech and drive sent the US to the moon.
Good luck to all non-SpaceX vendors.
Last time I checked, you test stuff to see where it breaks. You do your best to make sure it’ll pass, but if you don’t push it, the unknown unknowns will bite you sooner or later. This one didn’t even trash the stand, and with the speed they’re turning out boosters now, it’s more of an annoying pothole than a real problem.
And let’s not pretend Falcon didn’t have plenty of bangs. Falcon 1 blew up three times before it made orbit. Falcon 9 lost CRS-7 halfway up, AMOS-6 blew itself to confetti during fueling, and a few Merlins have randomly let go mid-flight over the years. Early landings were basically fireballs with shrapnel. Every one of those screwups fed straight into the next revision, and that’s how Falcon ended up being the ridiculously reliable machine it is now.
Starship’s just doing the same thing, but scaled up. Break it, figure out what snapped, build the next one better. Same playbook, louder booms.
And the money situation couldn’t be more different. Back in the Falcon 1 days, each failure was basically 'one more of these and we’re dead.' After the third loss they were almost out of cash, and the fourth try was literally all-or-nothing. Now? They’ve got Starlink cashflow, NASA contracts, commercial launches queued up, and enough runway to eat a few prototypes without anyone panicking. What used to be existential is now just R&D overhead.
And yeah, credit where it’s due. The engineers and everyone on the ground doing the actual hard work deserve a nod. They’re the reason any of this stuff flies.
If you want a historical parallel, it’s closer to Henry Ford than the scrappy early-days Musk. Ford didn’t invent cars, he just figured out how to build the hell out of them. Musk is doing the rocket version of that, industrializing the whole thing. Falcon was the Model T moment; Starship is the assembly line moment. Ford had busted engines and broken prototypes everywhere too, he just didn’t have thousands of people watching on livestreams.
And let’s be honest: neither Henry Ford nor Elon Musk are exactly people you’d hold up as moral examples. Ford was openly antisemitic and ran his factories like a dictatorship. Musk… well, take your pick from the headlines. Both of them can be pretty awful as people, but they’re annoyingly good at building things and dragging industries forward whether anyone likes them or not. You don’t have to admire the man to acknowledge the engineering.
This is a remarkably blasé view of things that reminds me a bit of Boeing after the merger with McDonnell-Douglas.
I don't want to take anything away from the achievements of the engineers. Nor even from Musk's ability to find the money to keep things going. But as the threat of competition becomes real, some of those contracts may be up for review and the financing options are nothing like as good as they were 15 years ago.
Blue and ARJ both bid to supply the engines for stage 1 of Vulcan. ARJ came second. Afterwards Jeff hired the management team from ARJ and put them in charge of the successful team of engineers at Blue. The result was devastating. Blue stagnated and the best and brightest left (notably Andy Lapsa founded who founded Stoke). Eventually Jeff worked out he had done the equivalent of Boeing buying McDonnell-Douglas. Jeff replaced the CEO. David Limp was faced with a near impossible task: completely changing the culture of a large organisation. The results are impressive. "Where are my engines Jeff?" has turned into "Blue has delivered 30 engines to ULA".
Blue now is showing early signs or approaching step 3 of a rocket company (1: Getting Money. 2: Getting to orbit. 3: Increasing cadence while maintaining quality. 4: Profit.) Step 3 is actually tougher than 2 and particularly hard for New Glenn. The booster was designed without prioritising manufacturing cost or time because re-use ensured they would only build a few. Re-use requires stage 2 has plenty of performance (so stage 1 does not have to work hard to turn around and go home). NG stage 2 uses the same (slow+pricey) manufacturing as stage 1. Limp's success changing the culture gives me confidence he will complete step 3, given time. Jeff's patience throwing money at Amazon until it became sufficiently dominant to dictate terms and rake in money means I am confident Blue will have the time to get to stage 4.
The contracts have already been reviewed. Old space wanted a cost plus contract for HLS from a government with no money. Even congressmen could work out old space would draw to project out until 2040 and lobby to replace their cancelled HLS with the same thing under a new name. Despite Limp's successful perestroika (hardware rich, rapid iteration, and other phrases we have heard from SpaceX for years) glasnost has not extended to his plan to get people to the Moon with a crew variant of the Mark 1 Blue Moon cargo lander.
Reading between the lines, Mark 2 requires re-filling with propellant in LEO to get people to the Moon. Re-filling requires a hefty chunk of the 24 launches/year New Glenn was designed for. Either Kuiper gets delayed or a stretched New Glenn with more powerful engines is required. Blue can only offer a flags and footprints secret plan in the time frame they expect SpaceX to complete a successful HLS demo.
The threat of competition will be felt most strongly by ULA for Kuiper and DoD contracts. By the time New Glenn is flying every month Stoke and RocketLab will be demonstrating medium lift rockets at lower prices than heavy lift New Glenn. Unlike NG, Nova and Neutron are designed to be cheaper than Falcon. On the down side, they do not have a captive mega constellation customer or the economies of scale of a heavy lift vehicle filling an orbital plane with satellites in a single launch.
The rocket industry is slowly walking towards real competition. In my dreams the AI(LLM) bubble bursts taking out Musk and putting someone less vile in charge of SpaceX. Real world experience has shown Musk can find fools willing to offer him $1T to keep trashing Tesla. Pitty. It was a nice dream.
"The booster was designed without prioritising manufacturing cost or time because re-use ensured they would only build a few. "
There's also that building number 2 is far cheaper than number one with additional substantial savings on number 3 as the build costs settle down to a fairly constant place. I'm sure they are already looking at reducing complexity and mass as they inspect sn2 and committing to better tooling for things that appear to be solid to get price down and quantity up without sacrificing quality.
I know a lot of the production machinery I built when I had a manufacturing company was overly complex and a bastard to build. The second iteration would have been much better, but most of the time there wasn't a need to refine the equipment. Over time I might have revisited a few things, but I closed down before then. Better is the enemy of good enough and there was always someplace else I could improve something for more of a return. In very mature industries, you will find production so optimized that there will never be any new competition for that thing unless it's a whole new widget such as going from florescent lamps to LED.
"Blue can only offer a flags and footprints secret plan in the time frame they expect SpaceX to complete a successful HLS demo."
SpaceX was supposed to land an uncrewed HLS Starship on the moon in January of 2024. Blue is fixin' to send a lander much much sooner.
It's interesting (to me, anyway) to compare Space X with Blue Origin. Journalists tend to downplay the latter's progress, but consider:
New Shepard has had two failures: one on it's first flight in 2015, and one failure in 2022. The interesting thing about the later one is that it proved something important: the launch escape system worked perfectly and landed the capsule safely (from about 26,000ft).
But my favorite thing about Blue Origin's efforts is summarized by noting that Jeff Bezos has personally flown on New Shepard...
And competition is a good thing. I think Blue Origin successfully landing the other day was a huge milestone. While it is a shame both companies are lead by twats who need a good slapping, the overall health of mankind's pace to exploring space are far better today than 15 years go, by an order of magnitude. This is history book stuff.
I wouldn't compare them that much. Not yet, anyway. Blue Origin had a different approach from the start and was forced to do things more carefully and, therefore, more slowly. A good thing in my view. Now that Bezos is taking a more active role, he's also said that he wants things to speed up so we might yet see similar things with Blue Origin. Or, he'll have to did into his petty cash a few times.
All these companies are doing great things, though I remain opposed to filling LEO up with glorified WiFi-repeaters.
"we want to be hardware rich"
"Building prototypes is easy but building a machine to make the machines in volume at rate is much harder."
"The key is to be hardware rich, so even if some of these missions have anomalies, we can recover quickly."
Blue's progress comes from looking at how SpaceX succeeded and copying the best strategies, particularly move fast and break things (not people). The other complaint against Blue was they were so focused on their own dreams that they paid no attention to what the market needed.
Blue Origin: "This [operating two sizes of New Glenn concurrently] will give customers more launch options for their missions, including mega-constellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome."
Blue spent decades earning a reputation for moving slower than a hibernating tortoise. In the last two years Limp has turned that around and reporting on Blue has changed to match. On the other hand, Musk has become much more blatant with his revolting politics. Journalists and customers have responded.
"Now that Bezos is taking a more active role, he's also said that he wants things to speed up so we might yet see similar things with Blue Origin. "
Jeff has stated that he stepped down from being CEO of Amazon to be more hands on with Blue. Speed and quality of decision making was a big component. When I worked for other people, it was always good to be able to get a reasoned yes or no quickly (as opposed to a knee-jerk answer) rather than waiting weeks for queries to go up and down a chain. I seem to recall Jeff making this sort of statement.
"New Shepard has had two failures"
That's because it's a solid fuel design that's so simple you could literally fit it with a fuse and light it with a match. Its performance is commensurate (which is to say, very unimpressive).
I have a hammer that I inherited from my great-grandfather. It works every time and has never failed once in over a hundred years. Great, but that doesn't mean it's a better piece of engineering than my laptop.
New Shepard is hydrolox. That explains the long development time, slow ramp up in cadence, lack of thrust required for the first stage of an orbital booster and propellant wasting gentle landings. Despite my snobbish dismissal of a sub-orbital tourist ride it is still impressive rocket tech.
Yes ot was a test but this was not a test article undergoing a destructive test. This is the booster that was being prepared for IFT-12. This wasn't supposed to happen.
Make no mistake, this is major setback that could cost months of delay if a design change is needed. Normally i would say no biggie but right now they are under the microscope because of HLS and this couldn't have come at a worse time with BO having a successful production flight and announcing block 2.
"This wasn't supposed to happen."
It was a new design under test. Failure is not the purpose of the test. The purpose of a test is to find out what works and what doesn't. This RUD served that purpose.
Yes, there are tests that start with deliberately blowing things up. But those are not the norm. Not even in rocketry.
The purpose of a test is to find limits. Rapid scheduled disassembly is part of the plan. Success is measured by the amount of data collected that can guide the next design or selection of manufacturing process.
Verification is to confirm your design and manufacturing is good enough to proceed to activities with a higher consequence of failure. For safety, there should be a plan for rapid unscheduled disassembly. Success is evidence that it is safe to proceed to the next level: filling with real propellant, loading a customer's cargo or launching.
This was a verification failure. As failures go it was not that bad: no-one died, they did not obliterate the test facility and they likely collected data that will prevent a repeat. The failure will have consequences. Certainly money and probably some schedule slip but not the end of the project or company.
"The purpose of a test is to find limits. "
One would assume that there's a known good starting point before expanding tests to search out ultimate limits. Tests are also used to verify that something meets spec.
Testing to destruction often leave a pile of debris that's hard to analyze. Even worse if it's at the bottom of an ocean. Maybe you can find issues, but perhaps not what led to what. Was there a COPV that was mis-handled and went off bang, or did something else go wrong that impacted that COPV causing it to go off bang.
A person I used to work for put together a high rise computer monitoring system that logged fire equipment times. Previously, there was only a indication of the sensors detecting things and pull boxes being activated, but not in what order or in time. The idea was to allow a fire department to see where a fire may have started and how it was moving through the building both while fighting the fire and rescuing people and to investigate it afterwards. Was it arson or did the fire start in an electrical service room? Having a detailed chain of events can help with cause and effect.
"This is the booster that was being prepared for IFT-12. This wasn't supposed to happen."
Another question is how many builds in progress are going to have to be scrapped. While it's not a bad thing to have lots of production capacity, it's a curse as well if there is a need for a major redesign. I'd hold back on building lots of something until I know I have something that works. There's no point in testing something with a known defect.
A number of lawsuits are showing up against tesla's design issues. Several for the door handles that fail in a crash and burn people alive and a suspension one and another autopilot one. It is bad when China is the one who may force tesla to redesign the door handles. And judges are catching on too. Florida of all places is getting very pissed at tesla's tactics at trial. They just got nailed with sanctions for providing 123,000 pages of useless docs 3 days before trial. https://electrek.co/2025/10/31/judge-sanctions-tesla-willful-deliberate-violations-fatal-crash-lawsuit/
If true, and I have no reason to doubt it, it would be awesome to see both the company and the lawyers themselves sanctioned for this behavior. Too many corporate lawyers forget their oath and in particular their ethical responsibilities.
"I do solemnly swear: I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State
of Florida; I will maintain the respect due to courts of justice and judicial officers; I will not counsel or
maintain any suit or proceedings which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I
believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land; I will employ, for the purpose of maintaining
the causes confided in me such means only as are consistent with truth and honor, and will never seek to
mislead the judge or jury by any artifice or false statement of fact or law; I will maintain the confidence
and preserve inviolate the secrets of my clients, and will accept no compensation in connection with
their business except from them or with their knowledge and approval; To opposing parties and their
counsel, I pledge fairness, integrity, and civility, not only in court, but also in all written and oral
communications; I will abstain from all offensive personality and advance no fact prejudicial to the
honor or reputation of a party or witness, unless required by the justice of the cause with which I am
charged; I will never reject, from any consideration personal to myself, the cause of the defenseless or
oppressed, or delay anyone’s cause for lucre or malice. So help me God. "
Minimal this time, I think the defendants were billed for court costs. The judge did say don't let it happen again... Many are noticing a pattern from tesla at trial, but there was another florida case earlier this year that found tesla liable for 243M. That lawyer broke thru the tesla glass and I expect others will follow. Basically it amounts to standing up to a bully with vast resources. This judge was clearly not happy and I expect if tesla does not cooperate with discovery, the next sanction will be per the judge,
“Finally, continued violations of Court orders… may cause the Court to impose critical and severe sanctions against the offending party, including… striking pleadings or defenses."
That's a very significant event and one that is bound to set them back for a LONG time. The way it's peeled open seems more indicative of a materials problem or a manufacturing quality problem than an engineering problem. It's not a "clean" pop along a defined seam or section, and it's in an area that should afaik not have anything strange going on in terms of structural loads (ie, easy to calculate and engineer for). If this is indeed the case, fixing those issues is going to take a lot of time because it likely means EVERYTHING they've built is now suspect and if they can't verify what EXACTLY went wrong and inspect existing boosters for that defect they have to actually start building a new booster from the very start and throw out everything they have
On the other hand, it did not split along the weld seams, so that at least shows the welds are stronger than the sheets that have been welded. That is as good as it gets for welds, isn't it?
Was it a mishap causing overpressure in the rocket?
Was there a defect in the steel sheet itself?
Hopefully, as it was on test, there will be measurements and video that will help the investigation.
"Was there a defect in the steel sheet itself?"
I think Scott Manley pointed out that while the outer skin blew out, there were holes in the internal riser that were blow in which might indicate a pressure tank within the bigger tank let go. Whether that's what started the whole thing or a secondary effect, I haven't heard.
"Who does't come here for the sark ?"
I made a snarky comment previously about the ship being on fire as it was being transported to the test pad before this happened. Maybe that's still yet to come and I was just a bit premature.
It is the motto of Facebook, coined by Mark Zuckerberg.
Falcon 1 exploded three times before reaching orbit. Falcon 9 crashed and burned several times before landing became repeatable. Dragon parachutes were tested many times and the standard mathematical model for them was proved defective by breaking test articles. Dragon exploded once during ground testing, discovering a new way for valves to fail. Crew Dragon was built on the experience of Cargo Dragon. So far Crew dragon has not come close to killing people.
Compare with Starliner.
Orion has been in development so long that its problems get forgotten.
Space shuttle: Why do they drink coke at NASA? Because they can't get 7UP. What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts.
Musk supplies money, hires skilled rocket scientists and likes to take the credit for their ideas. By accepting the premise that he makes decisions at SpaceX you are just feeding his narsicism.
I did not intend to downvote your post, rather the reply disparaging NASA alluding to its early days. When I popped back to the main comment page, you had a new downvote, and I no longer even see the comment I intended to downvote. I've never seen this behavior before...
Sorry.
wub,
You can turn that frown upside down. If you've downvoted a post, you can simply upvote it - and your downvote will be cancelled automatically.
If you've accidentally clicked you have to now choose your poison, since you can't correct by un-voting. But you can at least choose whether to leave them upvoted and happy, or downvoted and sad. Or if they're a troll, presumably happy either way.
I'm sure jake will be along soon to tell us that votes don't matter. But they do. I'm always outraged when I get downvoted for a good* pun.
*Best bad pun ever, from Youtube: A man that would make a pun, would pick a pocket.
"Next SpaceX rocket will be assembled by Optimus robots and transported to site by CyberTrucks using Full Self Driving"
Next SpaceX rocket will be assembled by Optimus robots and transported to site by CyberTrucks using Full Self Driving while on fire.
FTFY
Perhaps Microsoft and others can take a look and see that tesitng is necessary, you can put something on the test bench and give it a go, before you get real customers using it and bad things happen.
Not a Musk fan, but at least they are making progress, even when things come apart in unexpected ways.
NASA getting sweaty palms because of another failure with spaceX, but they have at least filled the criteria set by NASA when the challenge was set to bring a cheaper, reusable efficient form of space travel to replace the shuttle. NASA have made some craft to take the place of the shuttle but no way of launching them in to orbit. why does no one ask why NASA gives the contract to launch these things to Boeing who do not fill the criteria set in the competition, launch system that can only be used once, that costs more and barely tested etc... why?? is it to keep the relationships between the military and NASA in place as creating new ones with a different company would be too problematic? After all the apparently the pentagon & CIA etc have no say or control in what NASA gets up too. staying with Boeing paying billions for things that don't work will not stand out with them, wont be different from the last 60 years, give it someone else and finding people to go along with a seat costing 15K a spanner costing 10K becomes an issue. no government/federal ties means no congressional oversight, hiding money etc becomes easier that way but when asked they will live up to their name
N never
A a
S straight
A answer
SpaceX said that B19 is getting stacked soon and losing B18 won't affect the timeline as the plan is to do IFT-12 in Q1 which I assume means end of March. I assume that ties in with the timeline for pad 2.
As to the cause, looks like COPV failure in one of the chimes. Its a material is bought in and then SpaceX make the the parts. The supplier is saying that all material is rigorously tested to 1.5x customer specification. If you look at the material stacked up at starbase its not hard to imagine it being knocked or something.
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