New Glenn's First Failure - What Do We Know?

0:04 Hello, it's Scott Manley here.

0:06 Yesterday, Blue Origin made the third flight of New Glenn,

0:10 and this was going to be the first one to have a commercial customer.

0:13 Previously, they had a NASA as a paying customer, this Escapade spacecraft,

0:18 which of course they successfully sent off into deep space.

0:21 But the booster from that flight, "Never tell me the odds",

0:24 had indeed defied the odds and it

0:26 landed successfully on the recovery barge Jacqueline,

0:29 being taken back to shore, and it had the booster had been refurbished.

0:34 Now, this refurbishment included replacing all seven engines,

0:38 which sort of makes sense when this is

0:40 a very early in the test flight program, let's say.

0:44 Swapping out the engines would allow them

0:45 to perform more test firings and verify

0:48 that the engines are working while having

0:50 the rest of the booster continue to fly.

0:53 And in this case, perform a mission, which on paper looks a lot simpler than

0:57 launching two space probes onto a hyperbolic trajectory,

1:01 which will take them to Mars.

1:02 This was a satellite which merely needed to go to low Earth orbit.

1:07 Interestingly, this would actually be the first attempt by Blue

1:11 Origin to launch a payload into low Earth orbit.

1:14 Their previous payloads had gone to a medium Earth orbit,

1:17 had gone into a hyperbolic trajectory.

1:19 Blue Origin had successfully demonstrated the more difficult trajectories.

1:24 Low Earth orbit was supposed to be easy.

1:26 This was a 5-ton payload from AST SpaceMobile.

1:31 It should have had huge amounts of excess performance,

1:34 but as you have probably heard by now,

1:36 there was a problem and the payload was not launched into a nominal orbit,

1:41 and the payload is now expected to be lost.

1:45 And yeah, I woke up yesterday morning to this information

1:48 and I had considered pushing out a video quickly,

1:51 but my day was really, really busy,

1:53 and I'm sort of glad I waited 24 hours because turns out

1:56 that we have some new information which

1:58 really makes the situation a lot clearer.

2:01 So, the paying customer in this case was AST Space Mobile.

2:05 They are aiming to provide cell phone service using

2:08 satellites and their Bluebird satellite which is being launched

2:10 is about 5 tons and on orbit it unfolds

2:14 into the largest phased array antenna which is in orbit,

2:17 at least the ones that are unclassified.

2:21 This is supposed to go into a 49° inclination orbit at about 480 km altitude.

2:28 Again, this should have been very easy.

2:30 It's a 5-ton payload.

2:31 New Glenn, while it takes off really slowly,

2:34 does have a 45-ton payload capability.

2:39 Indeed, a 5-ton payload into low Earth orbit

2:41 is something the Delta II could have done.

2:44 I can't be sure, but I suspect that AST

2:47 Space Mobile probably get a great deal on this launch

2:50 and Blue Origin were going to use it to further

2:52 test their rocket and develop market confidence in their launch vehicle.

2:57 On the first two flights, uh Blue Origin has defied the odds

3:00 and they've successfully put their payloads into target orbits.

3:04 This doesn't tend to happen with debuters of new rockets.

3:07 They always tend to have problems unless you spend way too

3:10 much time developing and testing them on the ground, say like SLS.

3:15 But, the more I look at this flight, the more I realize that Blue Origin was

3:19 still being exceptionally cautious in their flight plan.

3:22 In many cases, we see the rocket performing maneuvers

3:26 and making trajectory choices which will improve the risk tolerance,

3:31 but also will affect the performance of the rocket overall.

3:34 And that's fine because they have large margins.

3:36 Taking this as an example here, after stage separation,

3:40 you can see the second stage now rotating, pitching its nose upwards, right?

3:45 It was on a flatter trajectory than it would otherwise be on.

3:49 Why would it do this?

3:50 Well, it means the booster is in a lower trajectory.

3:53 Therefore, it's going to come in at a you know, more gentle angle.

3:57 That will probably improve its targeting on the landing ship,

4:00 and it will also reduce the amount of stress that the booster feels.

4:04 And this is what I was seeing on the previous flight.

4:06 And it makes complete sense as the team at Blue

4:09 Origin are pushing to find the limits of landing

4:12 capabilities to ensure that they can successfully do all

4:16 these things to the the full like payload capability.

4:20 Now, another example of something that looks like a prioritizing

4:23 booster recovery and risk reduction is uh the launch trajectory.

4:27 So, the launch azimuth they were trying to go to a 49° inclination orbit.

4:32 Now, normally to do that, you would actually end up going north up the coast,

4:35 but there of course, you know,

4:37 this point they're still uh not great weather in the North Atlantic.

4:40 This trajectory going south can't go far enough

4:44 south to get directly onto that 49° orbit.

4:47 Now, if they went further south,

4:48 they would start getting into the waters and the airspace

4:51 of the Bahamas and the other islands down there.

4:54 So, it would make sense for them to fly

4:56 this relatively untested booster in a slightly northerly trajectory

5:00 that avoids all this, but then that forces the second

5:04 stage to mark tart making a turn to the south.

5:08 This is what we call a dog leg maneuver,

5:10 and it ultimately would deliver the payload

5:12 to a parking orbit with an inclination of about 36°.

5:15 Of course, at the same time, you know, we have the booster coming back down.

5:19 So, well, let's talk about the booster landing.

5:22 This footage is from a NASA WB-57.

5:24 And if you look carefully,

5:25 you can see the shockwave refracting the background clouds behind it.

5:30 Uh that's of course because it's still going supersonic,

5:32 but it of course needs to start slowing down.

5:36 Somewhere down below those clouds,

5:38 there we have the landing barge at Jacqueline.

5:41 Now, it's coming down at, you know, obviously supersonic speeds.

5:44 It's going to slow to a hover just before

5:46 it reaches the barge and as it does so,

5:49 it'll transition from a control regime where it's

5:51 using the fins to hovering and using gimbaling

5:55 and the thrusters on the top to control

5:56 its attitude and put itself on the barge.

5:59 You know, the actual coverage that we got live

6:01 was a bit spotty in places due to communications issues,

6:04 but thankfully Jeff Bezos was really proud of his baby

6:07 and shared this awesome footage after the fact.

6:10 We were all super excited at this point cuz

6:12 we'd seen Blue Origin successfully recover reuse a booster.

6:16 That is a big deal.

6:17 It took SpaceX a very long time to get to this point with Falcon 9 and it

6:23 really does show that if you design and build

6:25 your rocket with recovery and reuse from day one,

6:28 then you can start reaping the benefits very quickly.

6:31 When I visited the Blue Origin factory a couple of weeks ago,

6:35 what they were really building lots of was the second stages because we

6:38 expect a lot more of them to get used than the first stages.

6:42 Now, while of course all this was happening,

6:44 the second stage was still continuing on its way to orbit,

6:48 carrying its hardware, payload, accelerating it.

6:51 And you know, the thrust-to-weight ratio

6:53 on the second stage isn't that great either,

6:55 but it certainly has lots of performance.

6:57 It's huge.

6:58 It's bigger than most boosters, to be honest.

7:01 But uh, you know, we eventually got the telemetry back

7:03 on the main feed and when we saw the telemetry,

7:06 we could see that it was like continuing to pick up speed.

7:09 It was at an altitude of about a hundred and something miles.

7:12 It was slowly descending, but that's actually perfectly normal.

7:15 It actually optimizes the trajectory to have a small

7:18 descent later on as you're picking up speed.

7:21 But uh, yeah, it eventually gets to a speed of about 16,000, you know,

7:26 800 and something miles per hour and some people said,

7:30 "Wait a second, that seems a little slow.

7:32 I thought it was like 17,500 miles an hour it's supposed to be at." Well,

7:37 the these parameters, right?

7:39 These are in the Earth rotating reference frame,

7:43 which means you need to add in the rotation of the Earth to this velocity,

7:46 which made it kind of hard to figure out what orbit it was actually on.

7:51 But ultimately, we would find out there was indeed in a nominal parking orbit.

7:56 But at this point, the mission wasn't over.

7:58 The second stage was supposed to relight its

8:00 engine and raise the orbit into a circular orbit,

8:03 and it was supposed to change the inclination to the final inclination.

8:08 So, we waited, and we waited for an announcement

8:10 of a successful second engine burn, and it didn't come.

8:14 And as time ticked on, we wondered what would happen.

8:16 Then we got an announcement from Blue Origin saying that they

8:20 were in an off-nominal orbit and the payload had been deployed.

8:23 We didn't know what off-nominal meant and just how bad it was.

8:26 We knew that the payload had ion thrusters,

8:29 Hall effect thrusters that would enable them to make corrections to their orbit.

8:33 We didn't know if it would have enough performance to raise

8:35 an orbit if it was too low or, you know, to correct whatever mistake was made.

8:40 Eventually, we got another notification from AST SpaceMobile who

8:44 announced that the payload was going to be deorbited.

8:47 It was not in a high enough orbit.

8:49 And it was also ascertained that the payload was in fact insured.

8:53 And that while Blue Origin had

8:54 had amazingly successful first and second flights,

8:57 the third flight was where they were going to have their failure,

9:01 where they did not deliver the customer's payload to the target orbit.

9:05 But we didn't know what orbit it was going to be on.

9:08 So, yesterday there was a lot of speculation.

9:10 First of all, we did get uh some orbital elements from Space Force,

9:14 and they told us that it was in like the parking orbit.

9:17 That was the parameters they gave us.

9:19 That wasn't very helpful.

9:20 We knew that it had got to the parking orbit.

9:22 We didn't know where it was going to end up from there.

9:25 But then this morning, Monday morning,

9:27 we got some newer elements that said that it had raised its orbit about halfway,

9:32 and it had made about half the inclination change that it needed.

9:36 Now, this required about 1 km per second of delta V.

9:39 This was not a small, you know, orbit change.

9:43 So, they were probably needing about 2 km per second,

9:45 but they only got one and something went wrong.

9:49 This indicated that they had at least successfully relit

9:52 the engines and then run into some problem partway through.

9:56 So, the exact numbers we have is a 265 by 485 km orbit at 43°.

10:02 That's still lower than the F-49° that it was supposed to ultimately get to.

10:08 So, to be clear, the original insertion orbit

10:10 was 144 km perigee and 494 km apogee.

10:15 And they wanted to raise that to be a circular

10:17 orbit with the apogee and perigee about 490 km.

10:22 And I think that would normally take a velocity

10:24 change of about 100 m per second or less.

10:26 You know, so we're talking hundreds of miles an hour change in the velocity.

10:30 But, because they were having to change the plane of the orbit,

10:33 that meant that they needed thousands of meters per second

10:38 of delta V to get into this correct target orbit.

10:41 Most of this velocity change was actually by firing the engine at like 90°

10:46 to the direction of travel to just twist the orbit in the correct direction.

10:49 It's interesting to note that if

10:51 the the parking orbit had the correct 49 inclination,

10:55 then they would have got their short burn,

10:58 they would have put it into orbit, they would have deorbited the stage,

11:00 they would have never run the stage

11:02 long enough to encounter whatever problem they observed.

11:06 Now, we also got notification from David Limp

11:09 this morning telling us that during the orbit raising burn,

11:13 they observed one of the BE-3U engines not

11:16 performing as expected and that led to the underspeed.

11:20 As you know, that sort of narrows things down a little, it's an engine problem.

11:24 But, my big question right now is whether

11:26 the second stage is still in orbit at this time.

11:30 And the problem is we don't know.

11:32 Space Force has only issued orbital elements for one object right now.

11:36 If there's two, we would like to know very

11:38 quickly because that second stage is actually pretty big.

11:41 In fact, it's a comparable in size to the Long March 5B core,

11:47 which if you remember,

11:48 we've had multiple uncontrolled reentries from that vehicle

11:51 that everybody sort of gets about worried about.

11:54 And this is, you know, could potentially be comparable.

11:57 Although to be fair, an upper stage doesn't need the same kind of, you know,

12:01 structural rigidity and heavy build that a booster core would

12:05 have which has like multiple boosters strapped around the outside.

12:09 Nevertheless, we'd like to know if there's a big

12:11 chunk of space debris that is potentially coming down.

12:14 And if that is the case, we'd really like to know from Blue

12:17 Origin that they have successfully passivated the stage

12:20 by dumping the excess propellant overboard so

12:23 that it's just an empty shell rather than,

12:25 you know, something that potentially has some mass left in it.

12:28 But also, it would kind of help me understand

12:31 what went on because if they if they started

12:34 firing the engines and started trying to make

12:36 this correction and then one of the engines was underperforming.

12:39 The second stage has two engines.

12:41 And so, why didn't it just switch over

12:44 to a single engine mode and therefore complete the mission?

12:47 The guidance and navigation should be looking

12:50 at the change in the velocity and, you know,

12:52 looking for that change rather than simply

12:54 counting how long the engines are firing for.

12:57 So, did that engine continue to run?

12:59 Was it simply just dumping propellant overboards and they ran through

13:02 all their propellant and only got half the performance they expected?

13:05 That seems unlikely because of the number of sensors that are

13:09 on board modern engines that should catch this kind of failure.

13:12 Was there some kind of catastrophic failure in that second engine that took

13:16 out other engine and therefore the spacecraft was left dead in space.

13:20 At that point, it would make absolute sense for them

13:22 to detach the payload and then leave the spacecraft in orbit.

13:27 Or if we find the upper stage has been successfully deorbited,

13:31 maybe this is a case of Blue Origin

13:33 being good orbital citizens and deciding they did not

13:37 want to risk leaving a stage in orbit

13:39 as they saw this new bad engine situation developing.

13:44 They might have decided to stop partway rather than risking a failure which

13:48 could you scatter debris up there rather

13:50 than risking leaving the stage in orbit.

13:54 And this would actually fit in with their initial

13:56 choice of launch azimuth and trajectory.

13:59 Blue Origin being extra careful trying to demonstrate

14:02 the limits of the rocket trying to make

14:03 sure that there was no situation where they

14:06 would be potentially threatening people on the ground.

14:09 I fully expect that we'll find out in the coming days whether there are in fact

14:13 two chunks of hardware up there and if there is still that stage up in orbit,

14:18 we will be worried about where it comes down,

14:20 but I don't think it will be that big a deal.

14:23 But on a longer time scale, while this isn't great for AST SpaceMobile,

14:27 they aren't sure they're going to fly

14:29 more satellites with potentially other providers.

14:32 Blue Origin, they're going to have to get to work.

14:34 They're going to have to identify the problem

14:37 and isolate it and ensure it doesn't happen again.

14:39 And this does potentially push back their next launch

14:42 and their launch of their Blue Moon Mark 1.

14:45 And that could definitely have larger implications

14:48 for NASA's Artemis program which is very much

14:51 relying on New Glenn to be able to launch and re- fuel spacecraft in orbit.

14:56 As of right now, the FAA have classified this as a mishap.

15:01 We won't see Blue Origin flying New

15:03 Glenn until they have addressed this particular issue.

15:06 I'm not sure how much information we will actually get from them,

15:09 but I I really do hope to see this flying again this year.

15:13 I'm Scott Manley.

15:14 Fly safe.

15:21 Mhm.

15:24 Mhm.

15:27 Mhm.

15:29 Mhm.

15:32 Mhm.

15:34 Mhm.