“The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines.” //

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
40,965
Companies don't just change their culture. One doesn't simply take a ponderous, deliberative engineering house and suddenly see them moving at warp speed. It takes time and experience to know when to push a risk and when not to.

Attempting to change the behavior of a company overnight is likely to lead to ill effects like blowing up your only launch facility during a static fire because you decided you wanted to test some new engine configuration before totally validating it on a test stand. //

Zacharot Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
13y
181
It may have been the valve that initiated the issue. But to be perfectly clear, the hazard they are working with is liquid oxygen. It takes so little to set it off, and it's self combusting. People have died from underestimating how volatile liquid oxygen is. Multiple rockets have been lost to valving or cracking liners, or anything that can generate heat around liquid oxygen. If they are still modifying valves at this stage, I worry that they lack the knowledge or experience necessary for rapid re-use. They certainly are not correctly characterizing the risk.

Edit: Downvote as you please, but New Glenn isn't operating under the same methodologies as Starship. It's a top down design. It worked out of the gate. It's Old Space manufacturing. They do not have the operational capacity to trial and error in the field. Sure, things go wrong and you fix them, there are always lessons to learn. But Blue Origin is not new. Those lessons should be years behind them at this point. If you seriously think "oh, they are of course fixing it, and learning, and understanding the risk", then you missed the point that the de-risk phase was before they built it. They are not hardware rich. They do not iterate to fix. As noted, they have to make modifications in-place. Maybe that works this time, but it's a huge red flag to everyone banking on New Glenn being reliable. It should not be an oxygen valve causing total vehicle and pad loss. For a company as mature as this, that's egg on face levels of execution.

lurknomore Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
3,581
mjuarez1977 said:
This bit stuck out to me.

Is it possible that after such a massive conflagration, literal ball-of-fire hundreds of feet into the air, they actually found the oxygen valve that failed, the actual hardware, somewhere in the debris, and somehow confirmed it had an anomaly prior to the explosion? I honestly can't see how that's possible.

Or is this more like "we have telemetry that showed the explosion started at an oxygen valve, and we confirmed with other oxygen valves we have that it needs to be redesigned"?

That threw the credibility off for me. Even after SpaceX showed how good companies can be at finding the needle in the pile of melted rubble, the wording made the rest sound, to me, like a "trust us dear customers, we/you can rush back to the pad" statement.