Blue Origin's reused first stage hit its targets, but New Glenn's upper stage did not.
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Errant upper stage spoils Blue Origin’s success in reusing New Glenn booster
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That seems a bit too pedantic. If I’m getting a contract for a launch service from someone, it will cover delivery to desired trajectory.
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I did find it interesting that “lasers” are apparently not covered by the insurance. I’m guessing this is talking about lasers as an anti-satellite weapon?
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Hmm. In the unlikely event that this failure was due to a negligent error on BO’s part, would the insurer be able to sue them for recompense of the insurance payout? Or do launch contract waivers prevent any such liability?
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It will not at least not at quoted prices. That is what insurance is for.
If a launch provider really wanted your business they would simply get a launch insurance policy add that to the cost of your launch plus some markup and just pass that cost on to you. You could get a much better deal with more flexibility just buying the launch insurance you want yourself.
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It isn't about the value of the lost satellite as much as it is about the downstream delays and questions that get raised. If they 1st stage crashed during landing and didn't land but the payload was delivered successfully Blue would be in much better shape.
The cold shower reality is DoD/Space Force is going to delay any $500 million satellite launches until NG figures out what when wrong and most likely fly another few 2 to 3 flights proving it has, today's problem fixed. If DoD needs to launch that satellite sooner we all know who they are going to call.
If Blue had launched over 100 NG's already I would say any problems would be well understood or trouble shooting any issues can happen much faster with a large database of successful launches to compare to. The reality is this is still all very new to Blue. The investigation is going to require plenty of new ground to get tilled, to dig into the what the problem could have been. I am guessing it will ground NG for at least 4 to 6 months at a minimum if they can zero in on the problem quickly.
Remember back in 2022 New Shepard was grounded with a problem with the BE-3 engines that lasted something like 15+ months. So maybe I am being too optimistic about this issue only delaying it 4-6 months?
It isn't like this is really going to dramatically impact Artemis anyways. I was expecting the Earth Orbiting Artemis 3 to happen in 2028. Then the Artemis 4 mission to happen closer to 2030 anyways. I do think SX will send at least 2 or 3 test ships to the Moon before they dare put any humans on the ships. If Blue lands before that SX won't really care. SX operates at their own pace and they don't seem to care about things they can't control like what other companies are doing.
I don't think SX is depending on Orion or SLS to achieve the goals of Artemis 3 or 4. With the F9 and Crew Dragon they can test as they see fit. They should have 5 launch pads operations by the end of 2027. Landing the Starship and re flying them will be the 1st objectives then it will be orbital refueling. Only after that will the HLS testing happen in earnest.
I am sure there are solid plans for the HLS but they know landing and re flying Starships is the critical path forward. Also the bigger and better Starlink satellites are really SX's main objective if you wanted to make a $1 bet. It isn't the HLS. There doesn't seem to be any hardware ready to put on the Moon anyways even if the HLS was operational by EOY 2027. So orbital refueling testing can move at a more steady pace as long as the Starlink constellation is growing with the upgraded full sized V2 Satellites.
I haven't seen the billions in funding from Congress for the Lunar base equipment needed for a Moon base. I haven't even read an article about it yet. If I had to guess SX is working on that too. It would make more sense to build it in house, over waiting on Congress and NASA by the time a Moon base hardware was funded it will be 2040 at the earliest then it will be extremely expensive and delayed by another decade. In 2028 offer NASA/Congress a turn key Moon Base system that can grow like putting Lego's together and could also work or Mars. $30 billion total over 6 years for the Moon, including delivery. We all know if NASA builds out the hardware it will cost 4x and at least 3x longer.
NASA is at the mercy of the changing winds of USA politics. It can change tomorrow. Even if NASA cancels the Artemis contract with SX, SX knows NASA will be back. SX also isn't going to freak out about China. China doesn't control their plans.
Blue has plenty of time. Story worrying about the HLS. Figure out a fully reuseable launch system. Simplify the 2nd stage of NG. Go for a much cheaper 2nd stage, for Amazon's LEO. Then figure out a fully reusable 9-4 with all BE-4 engines. Ditch the H2 of the 2nd stage.
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Thanks to market availability for launch opportunities, that's now a choice, rather than the inevitable result of one rocket's launch failure.
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Not delivering on your launch contract is a top line issue.
Not recovering a built-to-be-recovered part of your launcher is a bottom line issue.
And Blue Origin's basic indifference to either is a Jeffrey Bezos issue.
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Wow some people really do live in a fantasy world of their own making. My counter prediction is none of that happens. Some of it litterally can't hapen (i.e. NASA cancelling HLS contract). Some of it is just asinine (i.e. 9x4 NG with four BE-4 upper stage engine JFC it would have TWR of >3 on an upper stage).
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Absolute worst case scenario is it loses one actual out of eight potential satellites.
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Any model would need real-world data to support its assumptions, and at launch 3 of a new vehicle, and the first reflight of a booster superstructure, that's so lacking in general (and was likely nonexistent when the policy was taken out) that its pricing likely involved copious amounts of handwaving and wild speculation.
I have zero confidence that an insurance company would be willing to pay enough technical staff to gain any meaningful proprietary insight into this specific vehicle's chances of delivering its payload to the intended orbit.
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There's a fair amount of data on how risky new vehicles are in general. I'd bet data on the early days of past rocket types is used for setting the insurance premiums for any new rocket type, and is fairly useful in that role.
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In the on-screen telemetry, the second stage altitude dropped from 110 to 102 miles in the last minute before SECO. That is not normal. There was already an engine or GNC problem during that first burn.
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Nobody pays sticker price for launch though, so that isn't saying much. When you're paying for a one-of service that costs ~100m USD specific contractual terms for the customer are standard, not a rare case.
That's a huge assumption. Actually it could well make sense for the provider to self-insure the cost of launch for several reasons, especially when it's a new launch system which really wants to get customers during the high risk early period.
1) The launch provider has more information about the risk of failure than the insurer, and in the case of BO may very well believe that their risk of failure is much lower than actuarial models would suggest.
2) The launch provider only has to worry about the cost of launch to them, not the price of launch that they charge
3) The launch provider can offer that internal insurance at cost rather than price in a profit on the insurance.
Historically, for a typical launch this didn't make sense because historically you were launching a billion dollar GEO bird on a 100m launch and because launch firms simply didn't have the financial strength to insure the bird so it made no sense to split off the insurance of the launch cost.
But in this case the cost of the launch is much greater than the cost of the bird, and Blue Origin has Daddy Warbucks paying the bills.
New space launch firms may well choose to start offering launch insurance on the cost of the launch.
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I'd be staggered if insurance for such a valuable cargo (10s, 100s millions if not billions) strapped to a highly explosive delivery mechanism doesn't have clauses that allow re-assessments.
Just speak to the shipping companies who have annual insurance policies but have their insurance companies altering those to levy 1%/2%/3% (or more) of the ship+cargo value just for a 24hour navigation of the strait of Hormuz, or the Bab-el-Mandeb, for each individual transit.
I'm sure you will find that those policies either have terms that allow for adjustments based on material facts that were used in the original policy that effect the reliability of those original facts, or the ability to just outright cancel the coverate due to material changes.
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They are exchanging height for velocity. Compare to the NG-2 flight. During the first upper stage burn, max altitude was 123 miles, but that was only 100 miles at SECO.
Ariane 5 and 6 use a similar flight profile.
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They are still fairly early in their rollout. They might still be trying to iterate and improve the design. And therefore, want to get satellites in service as quickly as possible to collect data rathat than wait for a multi satelllite payload to finish construction.
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the question that comes to mind for me is how they managed such a massive deviation on the inclination and still nail the booster landing? That to me would indicate the problem must have been in the second stage (did they dogleg "the wrong way" or something?) Because if the trajectory of the booster had been 13 degrees out of direction, wouldn't the landing pad have been way off trajectory for the booster to get to it?
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That's why the DoD has such stringent reliability requirements for NROL contracts. Those birds are expensive and difficult to replace.
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Satellite launches typically involve multiple insurance policies, often from different providers, covering pre-launch, launch, and post-launch activities. When 'launch' begins and ends is critical for determining which policy pays out in effect in the event of an 'oops'.
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It would depend on the specific terms of the contract and liability law. US law generally forbids blanket waivers. If the insurer can demonstrate an insufficient level of care then they would be entitled to damages. As you say, that's unlikely.
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Of note is that those are all hydrolox second stages. It's yet another way that hydrogen is less efficient in practice than the Tsiolkovsky equation would suggest.
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It seems you're taking advantage of the Oberth effect. The burn time for the Ariane 6 is about 30% longer than for a Falcon 9, which is more, but not obscenely so. So the approximation to a zero-duration impulse isn't much worse. The bigger difference is that because the first stage did more of the delta-V, you're crossing more distance in that time so you can play some optimization games unavailable to Falcon 9.
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No we shouldn't. SpaceX had a partial failure on flight 4 and a complete failure on flight 19 of F9. They also lost two consecutive upper stages with paid customer payloads on Falcon 1.
Expecting perfection in any rocket is dumb. Expecting perfection in the first 20 flights of a new rocket is incredibly dumb.
BTW Space is hard.
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I would suspect that any of these "locked down" insurance policies include language which says that if there is a failure of types x, y, or z in the next n launches, the cost will either increase, or the value of coverage will decrease in response. The people doing the underwriting aren't stupid and will have covered their bets as best they can.
The underwriters will have also offloaded from of the risk onto the secondary insurance market to spread the losses across a larger pool of insurers. Who else remembers Hank Greenberg and the big insurance company that went bust? Name escapes me at the moment, but the insurance business is huge, even for niche markets like this.
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Gravity drag. The longer it takes to reach orbital velocity the greater the loss incurred. Ariane's first stage wastes delta-v gaining altitude to make up for the second stage's inability to account for it's own gravity losses. Falcon 9 doesn't do that because it doesn't need to, not because it can't.
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Looks like the NG upper stage did relight, but couldn't complete the burn.
For reference, the initial cataloguing of the upper stage had it in a 154 x 494 km x 36.1 orbit.
Jonathan McDowell said:
For reference, the initial cataloguing of the upper stage had it in a 154 x 494 km x 36.1 orbit.
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I would be surprised if they didn't pivot half of this years sats to SpaceX, and tell BO they will still launch as per contract signed when ready, next year or whenever NG looks more reliable.
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FAA has grounded New Glenn until BO completes an investigation. The upper stage failure classified as a mishap.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/202...in-new-glenn-after-labeling-mission-a-mishap/
As a point of reference the FAA did the same thing when first booster landing failed. It took about 2.5 months before New Glenn was cleared for flight.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/202...in-new-glenn-after-labeling-mission-a-mishap/
As a point of reference the FAA did the same thing when first booster landing failed. It took about 2.5 months before New Glenn was cleared for flight.
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But with solids, these hydrolox systems don't experience as much gravity drag as they would if they were just hydrolox. These systems may be at the apex of a parabolic profile and are starting to fall, but a parabolic profile is actually an ellipse with a very low apogee. So long as the second stage is primarily thrusting sideways, it's not fighting gravity drag. It's simple increasing its perigee (that then becomes the apogee it's lifted so high) for what was a highly-elliptical orbit. Think of it more as a
So long as the dot product of your exhaust and gravity don't doesn't have a large magnitude, you're not actually suffering gravity drag.
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Gravity losses are not just time. It is time and angle. Ariane 6 much like any rocket with significant solid rockets tend to have relatively low gravity losses. The booster create a huge amount of mostly upward velocity allowing them to turn over quicker and harder. Nearly all the gravity losses come from the first stage not the second stage. In any even semi-competently designed rocket the upper stage is almost perpendicular to the gravity by the time there is SES.
New Glenn right now likely has higher than average gravity losses but this is primarily due to the low TWR of the booster not the upper stage. The engine uprate should help that. AFAIK the Saturn V has the highest gravity drag (~1,575 m/s) of any rocket that has reached orbit although there is speculation that Delta IV M (no +) is close. New Glenn is likely similar.
The rocket with lowest gravity losses and in fact lowest overall dV to LEO that I am aware of is the Delta II 7925. The 9 is for nine, yes nine solid rocket motors. It shot off the pad like lightning with a TWR of 2.2. Gravity losses are around 1,100 m/s and total dV to LEO (including the reduction from Earth rotation) is about 8,800 m/s vs a more typical 9,300 m/s.
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I wonder if Eric Berger or Stephen Clark could do an interview with an underwriter from one of the major launch insurance providers like AXA XL or Beazley on what goes into pricing a policy and the coverage exclusions and limitations. I think many of the Ars readers would find this interesting.
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I mean you could try but making better risk/reward predictions than the competition is like their whole business model. They wouldn't want to clue the competition in on anything they missed so I imagine you'll get the blandest corporate answers possible.
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Off topic but the Voyagers are getting new updates soon. Hopefully that means we'll get an ARS article on those incredible machines.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/voyager_big_bang_upgrades/?td=rt-3a
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/voyager_big_bang_upgrades/?td=rt-3a
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The Falcon 9 is certainly a simpler design.
The Falcon 9 upper stage uses a vacuum version of the same engine as the lower stage, with, correspondingly, the same fuel. An advantage is that servicing on the launch pad is simpler with the two stages having so much in common, with another that a lot of what is learned about the lower stage from its recovery can be applied to the upper stage.
The New Glenn upper stage, on the other hand, has basically nothing in common with the lower stage: different engine, different fuel. So lessons learned from recovery of the lower stage don't give much/any help to resolving issues with the upper stage. Worse, the upper stage uses not just any different fuel, but the hardest to handle of all rocket fuels: hydrogen. Tiny molecules make hydrogen very prone to leaks, and with a very low temperature for liquification. It is hard to see how the New Glenn upper stage can ever be as reliable or easy to work with as the Falcon 9 upper stage. (This doesn't mean that it can't ever be reliable enough for commercial – or even manned – use, just that it is going to be harder and likely take longer to get it there.)
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One thing I'm curious about: Was there a deorbit burn planned for the second stage? And is it going to be deorbited now in a clean manner? Probably not if there was a failure with the second burn already.
With the current orbit not only the satellite but also the stage will decay quickly and reenter in a mostly random location in a few days or weeks. Dry mass should be about 25t and I doubt it will fully burn up. I think this will be not the last we heard about this stage...
With the current orbit not only the satellite but also the stage will decay quickly and reenter in a mostly random location in a few days or weeks. Dry mass should be about 25t and I doubt it will fully burn up. I think this will be not the last we heard about this stage...
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