Main Engine Cut Off - T+292: New Glenn Flight 1, Starship Flight 7

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Blue Origin flew New Glenn successfully for the first time, and SpaceX flew Starship for the seventh time. Both featured failures at different points of the flight, with the impacts on Starship being significantly bigger than those on New Glenn.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Frank, Lee, Joel, Theo and Violet, Harrison, Josh from Impulse, Matt, Warren, Will and Lars from Agile, Donald, Russell, Kris, Fred, Better Every Day Studios, Pat from KC, Joakim, Steve, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Ryan, Pat, David, Stealth Julian, Bob, The Astrogators at SEE, Jan, Joonas, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsNew Glenn reaches orbit on first launch - SpaceNewsFAA requires mishap investigation for failed New Glenn landing - SpaceNewsStarship’s Seventh Flight Test - SpaceX - LaunchesStarship upper stage lost on seventh test flight - SpaceNewsFAA investigating Starship debris reports - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Manage and Cut Off, I'm Anthony Colangelo. We had a couple of big flights in the last week. We had flight one of New Glenn, Starship, flight seven. Really interesting flights in a couple different ways, so definitely worth talking about. New Glenn we have been waiting on for a while now, but I'm really excited to have seen it get off the pad. Absolutely beautiful flight. You know, they did the test flight at night, which is always a little disappointing to

some extent. I think night launches do look really cool, especially so when you have methane powered rockets that have this amazing blue flame and everything, but you definitely want to see more to the flight I think a lot of times, but for whatever reason. I'm not sure we really got a particularly good reason for why they were flying at night. I don't know if it was calmer weather, calmer seas, so they could give themselves a better chance at recovering the first stage, if it was better airspace closures.

Jake Robbins, my co-host on OpNominal, theorized that that could have been an exclusion zone play because some of these methane rockets, until they're well characterized, have a really large evacuation area because of the explosivity, to put it one way. You know, the Relativities Terran 1 flight, I had heard that the exclusion zone for that was bigger than Falcon Heavy's. Relativities Terran 1 is a pretty small launch vehicle, or was a pretty small launch vehicle, compared to Falcon Heavy for sure. So that could be a variable as well, and all of that together might make a night launch better for their first go. But nonetheless, it was absolutely gorgeous launch. It had this tremendously low thrust to weight ratio right off the pad, so it kind of just chugged and chugged and chugged and took a while to clear the tower.

But everything went really well with the launch right up until booster recovery, which is obviously we'll talk about, but to start with the main part of the test flight, right? And there's some debate which part was the main part, but the launch went really well. First stage burn looked beautiful. The seven BE-4 engines burned well the whole time. Not a huge surprise on that aspect because we have seen them fly with Vulcan before. Stage separation went well.

The two BE-3Us fired up and put the second stage up into a preliminary orbit and then went for a second burn later into the flight to drop their final payload actually was themselves really in that case because the blue ring pathfinder system was not going to separate from the upper stage. So that remained attached. The second stage was put into an orbit of 2,400 kilometers by 19,300 kilometers, inclined 30 degrees. So they were able to demonstrate in-space relight, a really significantly big boost for that payload as well, to put it up into this orbit. So I think that's probably leaning in their direction of what they want to do to get certified for Space Force launches. A lot of times you do need to prove engine relight capability, higher orbits, the ability to hit higher orbits with good accuracy, and they did.

They were targeting 2400 by 19300. They hit 2426 by 19251. So within, I think they said within a percent. I haven't run the math, but I believe them. And inclination was 29.99 degrees not 30 on the dot so That could be part of their certification plan to prove that they can hit this orbit very accurately It's a higher energy orbit than just flying to Leo Really impressive flight as as your first out of the gate to be honest

To reach orbit on your first launch number one that happens. And to reach not just a standard orbit, you know, have an engine relight that goes well and puts you that close to your final target orbit, that's impressive, that's a really impressive first launch. Now obviously the first stage coming back in, we saw engine burn, or the entry burn start up with three BE-4s running, then telemetry froze about eight minutes into the launch as

reentry was underway. So we don't know where they lost the booster yet, maybe it was it continued on a little bit more before they lost it, but they did lose it on the way back in, potentially still during the burn. There hasn't been any information really released on that. The FAA is requiring a mishap investigation for this failure before they can get flying again obviously something that was going to do anyway considering that recovery is a big part of their plans. But all in all i mean this is better than expected i would say. You know to reach like i said such a complex orbit. Not that it's significantly complex but to reach a higher energy orbit than most people go to on their first launch and do it on your first launch, that's impressive alone.

They did start the engines back up. Hopefully they got enough data to figure out what went wrong after that and make their way to recovery. But for all the talk in years gone by of Blue Origin saying we're going to land the first one and reuse the first one, I don't know how many people out there really believe that. I don't even know how many people internally believe that to be honest And there was a time where I had heard talk from internal Blue origin planning meetings that they were only gonna build one or two stages and fly that That plan went out the window shortly thereafter when they realized no we do need a production line even SpaceX maintains a production line We need to build more of these boosters and get a higher flight rate By way of both reuse and production. So that wasn't really on the table anymore. Even in the

interviews running up to this launch, Jeff Bezos was talking about how they've got more boosters in build down at the Cape and they should be in a position to fly one by the springtime again, which sounds pretty accurate to me based on how this first flight went. So, you know, Sounds pretty accurate to me based on how this first flight went. Um, so, you know, was landing a priority in the mission? Of course it was. And I think the gatekeeping around was this mission, uh, a failure because they didn't land or whatever. I am so uninterested in that conversation.

Um, I will talk about the failure in a minute because I want to talk about it in relation to the Starship flight seven failure that we saw. But all in all just a really great day for Blue Origin. Awesome to see that launch vehicle jump into action and become you know active like that. So very thrilled. Now as far as that May date or spring date, May is where I was thinking that they would land on the second launch for New Glenn. It's leaning forward in a way that I think other launch vehicles have not seen. I mean, to compare it to the class of rockets it's in,

Arian 6, they've been six months since their first launch and they're still not back on the pad yet. ULA went eight months between Vulcan launches, the first two Vulcan launches. I mean, back in the day Falcon 9 went six months between the first and the second flight. But everything's always different within these launch vehicles The first launches aren't always the same the thing that needs investigation or rework is different on all these flights We don't know anything else that happened on the flight that Blue Origin might have seen in the data on the way up Maybe they're not happy with performance of a certain engine here or there or they had some avionics things They want to work out there could be smaller stuff internally that didn't lead to a failure on the mission,

that they still want to go back and make sure that they've got everything crossed up. There are, again, differences between the first rocket that you fly and the second one. There's things that you might rig up a lot more telemetry on the first launch than you will on the second. So there might be some hardware changes that you have to go and make sure that everything's in good shape if you are removing some of that hardware. Maybe they're going to leave all of it as is, but they're still just not done building the second vehicle yet. We have so little insight into Blue Origin and what's going on in those buildings that it's tough to say, but I would not be surprised. It's not going to be next month when they fly.

I wouldn't be shocked with a late May date or something like that. There was talk at one point of like, we've got capacity for eight to twelve launches this year. That's not happening. I think if they got three off, they would be absolutely thrilled with this year. It would be a tremendous first year for a launch vehicle like this. And then obviously once they get flying and certified, they're going to start competing for some of these other Space Force missions.

And we'll see what kind of contracts they can bring in and what kind of customers they begin flying once they get into their active phase. Amazon, not quite ready yet to fly, you know, batches of their Kuiper satellites. If they were, they would be flying them with Atlas V or Vulcan right now. They are not.

So, you know, maybe the New Glenn flights are still a ways off for the Amazon vehicles. So are there other customers that New Glenn can be flying? Are there some contracts that we've heard about that will actually come to fruition? All of that is up for debate now as they get into their active flying session here. Starship Flight 7, quickly to just talk about what happened there. A strange launch, probably the strangest of the Starship launches launches overall because it just didn't go how we thought. So this was the first flight of starship v2 there are some changes to the vehicle that they want to test here.

I said the forward flaps the ones up near the nose of the ship they were reduced in size a little bit and brought. Kind of up away from the reentry heating to minimize reentry heating that we've been seeing on those flaps on the way back in. They've increased capacity of propellant by 25% on the ship. They've added some vacuum insulation to the feed lines within the ship. They've redesigned the avionics internally, so there's a lot of small changes as well as they've been testing over the last couple launches. Different heat shield configurations, removing some tiles in certain spots, testing out different secondary layers to really work out the reuse there.

What's unfortunate is that because of how the flight unfurled, they've got to test almost none of that. I mean, you can say that they tested the propellant system, the vacuum insulation may have led to what we saw, which I'll talk about in a second. The avionics got a little bit of a test for a couple of minutes into the flight, but what happened was launch went well. First stage did its job, delivered the second stage up to its typical point of separation. The booster flew back and was caught successfully by the chopsticks for the second time.

You remember from flight six they diverted offshore. Flight five they did catch successfully. So this is the second successful test of the chopsticks to catch the booster. Incredible as always. I think it looked better this time. So clearly they're trimming in the performance and what they need out of the booster to pull that off. They're going to bring those margins from luxurious way down to as tight as they can over time. So we'll see increasingly aggressive approaches to the tower, I'm sure. But this one looked pretty well. So then Starship went on to continue its burn after booster

separation, but then we started seeing some engines shut down almost eight minutes into the flight. So seven minutes, 40 seconds in, we saw one of the six Raptor engines shut down then two other engines shut down 20 seconds later and then by Eight and a half minutes into the flight or so only one Raptor engine was firing on the second stage and then we lost telemetry Later we see all this video come out over Turks and Caicos and elsewhere in the Caribbean of just an absolutely brilliant display of Starship re-entering, exploded, whether it was flight termination system or just a rapid unscheduled disassembly, as SpaceX puts it, on its own accord, I don't know that we 100% know yet.

Elon Musk has tweeted out that there was an oxygen and fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity. So they had a leak kind of near the engine compartment that led to an explosion. So what's problematic about this launch is that the debris incident that happened here led to a bit of a dust up for flights in the area this was not exactly you know one of the. What are the expected ways of this was gonna go obviously and having that much debris falling down into an area even if it was. You know close to the designated areas of something may happen here there was to be going outside of that area which had the f a trigger the activation of a debris response area, which is a capital letters thing that they call debris response area, which allows them to kind of manage air traffic because of the debris in the area that was unexpected. So there were aircrafts that were delayed, they were diverting, some of them

were circling, some of them had to kind of fly through the debris area because they had some lower fuel than they wanted. But apparently this only is triggered if debris is outside of the designated hazard area. Early statements from SpaceX said it was all within the hazard area. This response from the FAA means some of it was outside of that. We have now seen video of people covering heat shield tiles and other debris, you know, on the beaches of Turks and Caicos. So this is going to be something that can delay them quite a bit. You know, there's going to be an FAA mishap investigation into what went wrong here. There's going to be some talk about how the debris area was managed. There's potential for property damage in Turks and Caicos. It sounded like the FAA is investigating that, but they

haven't officially said anything yet or declared anything yet. But this could be something that does take a while for SpaceX to get back flying from. And this is where I want to put these two failures kind of in context to one another because it's pretty indicative of some of the conversations we get into in the space industry when things like this happen. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports this show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are almost 900 of you supporting the show every single month. I'm so thankful for your support. This show is produced by 32 executive producers thanks to Frank, Lee, Joel, Theo, and Violet,

Harrison, Josh from Impulse, Matt, Warren, Will and Lars from Agile, Donald, Russell, Chris, Fred, Better Everyday Studios, Pat from KC, Joe Kim, Steve, Tim Dodd, David Ashenot, Ryan, Pat, David, Stealth, Julian, Bob, The Astrogators at SCE, Jan, Eunice, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. If you want to join that crew and get access to MikoO Headlines, a subscriber-only podcast that I do, I run through all the stories happening in space, keep you up to date on what you need to know, head over to www.managingcutoff.com and check it out. With spaceflight failures, there's a little bit of a I'll know it when I see it kind of thing going

on in terms of what kind of failure you just witnessed. And I think this is what drives us within the industry nuts about the headlines that we see after test flights when it's like, you know, SpaceX's giant rocket blows up again in a ultimate failure of its test launch, right? And for something like flight four, flight three, where it's like, well, it's not incorrect, but it definitely was what we thought would happen, and it was leading them down the path of development. That's the stuff that we bristle at, right? When it's positioned in a way that like, the thing failed in an unexpected way, and this

shows that the hardware is no good, versus they were testing this part of the flight and it blew up kind of like we expected. There's a difference and it's hard for people that aren't deeply invested in the space industry to to suss out that distance difference but you and I can't right and and these are the these are two good examples of of what that I'll know it when I see it thing kind of is. In the case of New Glenn, it failed in a way that is leading them down the same path of development that they thought they would be on. And maybe even a little bit better, right? Did they think they would hit perfect orbit on the first

launch? Probably not. Did they think they would get the booster back? Probably not. One of those two things happened though. That's amazing. And that means that they have a little bit less work ahead of them than they thought to get to the next flight. And they can put their efforts in the areas where they kind of were expecting to anyway, like let's digest what happened to the booster on recovery. Let's figure out what the failure mode was so that we can progress through that gate to the next flight. I think the upper stage team probably thought they were going to have to do a similar thing. Now instead they can look at all of this great data and say, wow, the flight went really well. Here's some spots where you might trim in and tighten up some margins or clean up what we're doing here operationally or maybe optimize a couple areas here. But we can get

on to the next thing, which is deploying a payload. And that's a very, and forward leaning mode to be in for a launch vehicle. Starship Flight 7 was very much not that in the history of the Starship program. Where if I were to draw out the trajectory of a Starship flight and have you just kind of circle the areas where you think the failure would occur. For flight 1 and flight 2 and 3 and 4, even up to 5, you probably could have circled the spot where, well 5 was like pretty great all around, 1 through 4. You probably could have, with good confidence, you know, the failure would have been contained within one of your circles, I would assume. It went wrong mostly where we thought it would go wrong, and it didn't interrupt SpaceX from continuing down the roadmap and the development pipeline that they already had set up. We knew that they were

working in the areas that failed previously. This one was not that at all, and it comes with the additional kicker of if this debris really was outside of the hazard areas, that's defined at the FAA, they now have a whole other portion of work to do to characterize the debris, to figure out what went wrong with the debris response, to figure out if they need to change their hazard areas. Is that going to impress restrictions on their flights down the line? They have to get this all cleared through the FAA in a more stringent manner than they might have with other launches because this did actively impact flights in the area and endangered flights in the area that had to fly through the debris area.

Much as we don't like that, this is a much more important investigation than we've seen with other ones where, you know, like the Starship Flight 1, you know, it blew up basically where we thought it would. And they clearly needed an FAA investigation to that, but it was not as... it was different. It's a different flavor this time around when it, again, blew up in an unexpected area, in an area with land masses, with flights, they had to actively manage flight traffic around this debris response. It was very visible. It was a highly public failure as opposed to, you know, it blew up somewhere in South

Texas that there's not that many people hanging out and most people were there, were there to see the launch. It's a different thing and it adds a layer of work to SpaceX that wasn't there previously. And so that will delay them following the path that they need to for the development program. And then more importantly, when you look at the actual flight itself,

like I said earlier, they didn't get to test out the forward flaps on the way back in on reentry. They didn't really get to push the propellant system to see how they could do with the extra 25% capacity that they were flying on this and understand the performance and do the different engine firings they were going to do in space, deploy the starlings that they had on board. They had these starling simulators they were going to deploy out the payload door. They didn't get to test that out. Obviously could have been something with this

vacuum installation that led to a leak who knows if that was involved. They did get to test out avionics to some extent but not to the whole flight profile so they need to go again and fly this flight as flight eight once more. Once they get through all the investigations they figure out what went wrong they make any changes they certified after their own process and they have to fly flight eight. Doing the task from flight seven So this does set them back a couple of weeks, couple of months. You pick, you know, salt to taste on that one, but it doesn't... This is not a smooth path through from here to flight 9. This is a setback that is different than the ones that we've seen elsewhere on the Starship program. There's a little tickle in my brain.

I was tweeting about this a little bit with a couple of people, but just a little part of my brain is tickled by like, maybe Texas is a bad launch site. I haven't fully committed to that take yet, but I'm like, those hazard areas are over an awful lot of islands and flights that are going between different countries and different places in the Caribbean. They only have basically one line. I think there's two paths, right? But they're like almost parallel to each other. Out of Boca Chica, that miss significant portions of landmass puts them into a very specific orbit. As opposed to very unconstrained launch azimuths that you get on other launch sites. You've got like two

corridors to fly out of Boca Chica. Which fits with what we've always thought all along that this was kind of like the research and development area and really heavy duty operational launches would take place out of Florida. I think this might bring up the importance of getting the Florida launch site active for Starship. It might bring the importance up a little bit. It's just, I don't know. Like I said, I haven't fully committed to this take yet or say like I definitely think Texas is a bad launch site for operational launches, but this one tickled me a little bit in that way. I'm curious if it did for anyone out there as well. So let me know if that's something that was striking you about this launch.

But yeah, all in all, I mean, a great day for New Glenn, rough day for Starship, great catch of the booster. But I think when you look overall at what their plans are for 2025, this is a bigger setback than we would have hoped to see on a year that should be pretty pivotal with them working their way through Starship V2, trying to get up to apparently Starship V3 where they're going to do in-space propellant transfers. So early in the year, it's a bit of a setback for Starship in a sad way. We will see how quickly they get flying again. I would presume that Starship flies before New Glenn does again, just to set the table on that one. But again, they're going to have to refly these objectives from Flight 7. They'll probably add one or two as well with Flight 8, but they do need to test out the things they were hoping to test out here before they get

flying again. Now, in the case of New Glenn, what are they going to fly next? You know, they've got Escapade on the manifest coming up. You know, I don't know exactly what their launch windows look like for that this year because they basically can just yeet it onto Mars from any time of the year. They don't really need to wait for a launch window because it's a gigantic rocket and a tiny payload. So we'll see what gets on the manifest for them. If the next flight is an active payload, I presume that it would be. So there's that aspect of the schedule as well.

But, you know, I'm going to assume that we see Starship in like March or April and we see New Glenn in like May or June That's kind of the sense that I have But let me know let me know what you think about that Let me know if you think Texas is a good or bad launch site My brain's still tingling a little bit about that so Let me know. and I will talk to you soon.