Yes, Rocket Lab is blowing up engines. No, it’s not a big deal, CEO says.

"We are in the part of the program where we are doing very nasty things to the engine."

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[Procedural_Username]

There are tens of thousands of aerospace engineers (or SpaceX alums) to hire that know the answers to the questions. In the timeframe of Redstone, testing was used just to figure out the right questions to ask.

Then why has almost every starship flight failed? Surely those guys have access to SpaceX engineers. It's almost like systems integration is hard and you can't actually do all the testing in simulation and on the ground.

Electron's record is fine. It's much better than soyuz was an equal number of years after first launch.

 

[robbak]

Because what Starship is trying to achieve is as far outside the box as what Redstone was attempting.

I consider the V3 starship program to have been a perfectly managed test campaign - they tried so much that the early ones failed, but got the data they needed and applied fixes and finished with success. If they hadn't had multiple failures, then they wouldn't have been trying enough, and wouldn't have learned enough. Now on to V4, which has already started down the same path, so I'm reasonably hopeful, at least on the technical side.

 

[lukarak]

Same thing at a silicon fab I worked at,
Some of the gases used to process the wafers will explode just from contact with the air. The bottles get their own room, with reinforced side walls and ceiling (because it's under the fab floor), and a thin outer wall with lots of "don't be here" yellow paint outside.
Still less scary than the "deadly at ppb levels" other bottles next door.

So, the room is essentially a rocket engine with a strong reinforced combustion chamber and a flamey end on one side?

 

[Fatesrider]

“Eric, you are trying to make a story out of nothing,” Beck said. “We test to the limits, that’s part of developing a successful rocket. We often put the engine into very off nominal states to find the limits and sometimes they let go, this is normal and how you ensure rockets don’t fail in flight.”

Upon arriving home, Beck's wife asked, "How was your day dear?"
"We blew up another Archimedes engine," Beck replied.
Wife says, "That's nice, dear. What would you like for dinner?"

AKA just another day at the office for steely eyed rocket men.

 

[thechannigan]

Anyone got a link to those sat images of the test stand after failure? The roofs on the test stands look mostly like corrugated steel, so I'd love to see just how catastrophic it looks.

 

[Rhutanium]

I thought the back fell off.

There are hundreds of these rockets going up all the time and very seldom does anything like this ever happen. It's perfectly safe.

 

[Demosthenes642]

Yep. As I recall, DuPont gunpowder manufacturing facilities were designed with one wall significantly thinner and weaker than the others (and nothing important beyond that wall) so that if / when an explosion happened, you had a reasonable chance of the damage going in a safe(r) direction.

I had an office in a building that had been used for manufacturing of magnetic tape before being converted to offices. It was a huge steel frame building with a concrete core and three of the four outer walls and the roof were designed to pop off the framing in the event of overpressure. Unfortunately that meant that, 50 years on as offices, the building was rather porous. My office was on the outside wall and it leaked down the inside of the walls every time it rained, insulation was rather theoretical, I could put my hand through the gap between the outer wall and the office wall next to me, and of course it accumulated wildlife like nobody's business.

 

[Bill Swallow]

I thought the back fell off.

Well, that's the thing. With rockets. it's well expected that the back will fall off - in use. With rocket engines, not so much.

 

[Graith]

There are hundreds of these rockets going up all the time and very seldom does anything like this ever happen. It's perfectly safe.

Was this launchpad safe?

 

[lurknomore]

So, the room is essentially a rocket engine with a strong reinforced combustion chamber and a flamey end on one side?

In the same sense that the Pythom trailer was a "rocket engine".

 

[walkthelight]

“Eric, you are trying to make a story out of nothing,” Beck said. “We test to the limits, that’s part of developing a successful rocket. We often put the engine into very off nominal states to find the limits and sometimes they let go, this is normal and how you ensure rockets don’t fail in flight.”

I recognize that Beck likely knows Eric Berger personally, but using his name here sounds especially aggressive.

 

[koolraap]

I recognize that Beck likely knows Eric Berger personally, but using his name here sounds especially aggressive.

Nah, I reckon we all should get excited by this piece of science news. Have you looked at other stories on the Ars homepage? All together: Woo! Totally intentionally explosions!

 

[cbrubaker]

OT and useless comments follow…

About 11 years ago I was contracting as a cell tech for Sprint. They had a site on Stennis, it was a real POS, two T1s coming in by uW. After I finished (the area is 100% escorted) I asked the escort if he had time to the 10 cents tour. He stopped at every stand and gave me a brief history, including the barge area. That was incredible as Stennis does not give tours, at least back then.

More useless info. I get Indeed alerts for Rocket Lab. Man I wish I were a 25 year old Engineer. The one job I could qualify for was assembly of solar panels onto satellites. A 10 or 12 hour shift in a Clean Room (I had to look up working in a Clean Room was like) looks a lot physically harder than when I was a kid on a 12 hour shift on a dairy farm.

So for general interest, look at Rocket Lab’s website and look up what it’s like to work in a clean room.

Continuing the OT:

Meh - clean room's not so bad, as long as its Class10+ - we keep our clean room at a slightly chilled 19 C, so that in the bunny suit you're pretty comfortable. The air is held to a perfect 40% humidity, and the air is so filtered that allergies are a thing of the past.

The environment is so clean (about 2 orders of magnitude cleaner than a neurosurgical suite) that I once accidentally sliced my finger with a very sharp razor blade (one of the double-edged stainless blades that are 0.1 mm at the thickest point; the edge is microscopic).

The blade was so sharp it took me a moment to realize that I had been pressing on the back-side of a double edged blade to force it between two bonded silicon wafers (I am not a complete idiot - I had taped over the backside to prevent incidental cuts, but in a moment of frustration, I forgot that there was concealed nastiness under that tape). Once I realize it, I stared for a moment, coyotelike, at the ~5mm overlap between the blade and my fingertip.

Then i carefully pulled out the blade to prevent slicing or tearing my finger or the gloves I was wearing, and pressed the edges of the wound together. They sealed up instantly, and it was as if the cut never happened. Minimal pain, no redness, swelling, or bleeding.

Of course, sub Class 10, you are looking at wearing the space-suit style with on-board air filtering/air supply. And those are nowhere near as cool as the Y2K era Intel commercials made them look.

 

[DarkJerms]

When you get down to the brass tacks, there is only a small difference between a rocket engine and a pipe bomb. BOOM is going to happen

 

[GFKBill]

There are hundreds of these rockets going up all the time and very seldom does anything like this ever happen. It's perfectly safe.

And they did tow the rocket outside the environment.

 

[Statistical]

But part of that is working out the kinks in the first few years of operation (not just for a new rocket, but a new company), and then hopefully reliability is improved after that. Looking at the bar chart in this Wikipedia flight-list article, three out of the four failures happened in the first four or five years of operation (23 total launches), and since then there's only been one failure in 70-ish launches.

Exactly. If you count the loss of secondary payload on CRS-1 Falcon 9 had 2 failures in 20 so a 90% success rate. If 95% success rate is "meh" then nearly every rocket is meh for the first 50 launches.

 

[sebaska]

One thing no one mentioned here is that there are 3 categories of tests:

1. Dev tests
2. Qualification tests
3. Acceptance tests

In the case #1 - blow stuff away - you're learning it, trying new things, etc.

In the case #2 - you don't want any explosions, except in carefully planned margin verification tests. Those are very infrequent.

In the case #3 - you don't want any explosions, period.

Rocket Lab was supposed to be doing qualification tests for over a year now. So those explosions should give one a pause. Especially with BS story for firefighters about that electric box issue (unless this is like: "I have this electric box; it has a nozzle and combustion chamber, but this is just an electric box, pretty pretty promise!")

 

[AdrianS]

I know of at least one racing car that retired due to "electrical failure". The electrics do tend to fail when the alternator is destroyed by a conrod escaping the engine, so not technically a lie.

 

[Wickwick]

One thing no one mentioned here is that there are 3 categories of tests:

1. Dev tests
2. Qualification tests
3. Acceptance tests

In the case #1 - blow stuff away - you're learning it, trying new things, etc.

In the case #2 - you don't want any explosions, except in carefully planned margin verification tests. Those are very infrequent.

In the case #3 - you don't want any explosions, period.

Rocket Lab was supposed to be doing qualification tests for over a year now. So those explosions should give one a pause. Especially with BS story for firefighters about that electric box issue (unless this is like: "I have this electric box; it has a nozzle and combustion chamber, but this is just an electric box, pretty pretty promise!")

It's totally possible that an engine controller overloaded, caught fire, then failed. And as a result of the loss of said controller, the turbomachinery went into a condition that damaged connectors releasing fuel vapors that ignited and popped the top off the test stand (as intended). The only fire in the test stand might have been ignited from the electrical box while might have continued on-fire until the fire department arrived.

 

[Wickwick]

I know of at least one racing car that retired due to "electrical failure". The electrics do tend to fail when the alternator is destroyed by a conrod escaping the engine, so not technically a lie.

Or, imagine that your engine controller died and failed such that the fuel injectors were all locked in the "hold" position. Do you think you might bend or throw a conn rod when the cylinders try to compress the liquid fuel?

 

[AdrianS]

Or, imagine that your engine controller died and failed such that the fuel injectors were all locked in the "hold" position. Do you think you might bend or throw a conn rod when the cylinders try to compress the liquid fuel?

I knew the team involved.

It was a carburetted engine, with clockwork ignition (historic rallying), and was almost certainly massively over-revved. But "electrical failure" absolves both the driver and engine builder from any blame.

 

[Wickwick]

I knew the team involved.

It was a carburetted engine, with clockwork ignition (historic rallying), and was almost certainly massively over-revved. But "electrical failure" absolves both the driver and engine builder from any blame.

I wasn't suggesting the specifics of my hypothetical referred to that issue. I'm suggesting that an electrical failure can lead to bent or thrown conn rods.

 

[dcp123]

is not necessarily in conflict with:


And I would like to take this opportunity to point out the roofs on these two test stands are designed to be frangible. That is, they are supposed to fly off at the least little bit of pressure. That prevents a situation where a build-up, ignition, then confinement of combustible materials leads to substantial damage. I do recall commenting in the Centaur V testing mishap articles that I was amazed that such buildup was possible at their test facility. Rocket Lab is doing this test the right way.

Thanks for mentioning that the roofs were meant to blow off. That was my immediate thought on looking at them and is consistent with what I saw my very tenuous association with the aftermath of an accident involving the disposal of solid rocket fuel and hypergolic propellants.

 

[dcp123]

That's kinda the purpose of journalism, yes? That Eric (or any journalist) can make it from very little is evidence of talent!

I think it's better said that Eric Berger was trying to uncover a story and while I doubt this catastrophic engine failure was a catastrophic setback to their program, I'm certain that:
-This was not expected.
-It was bad news.
-It was at least a bit of a setback.
-If it wasn't news, we wouldn't be talking about it.
-The CEO was trying to understate what happened, which is fine.
-Saying that Eric was "trying to make a story out of nothing" was false, insulting to an important and knowledgeable journalist on the subject of his industry, and delivering that insult was both rude and a bit unprofessional.