So what are we to make of the August 24th failure of Blue Origin's spacecraft failure? We should not be surprised that spacecraft will occasionally fail when we are testing new ideas and concepts. So in that sense there is little to surprise the space community. However, I am surprised that it took an intrepid reporter to even learn about it rather that the company coming clean immediately. Not all that encouraging when NASA is funding this company.
On September 2nd, Blue Origin's website reported the failure, noting
...last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We're already working on our next development vehicle.
This is a simple upbeat version of events, which is what I would expect from any forward-looking organization. So why the delay? I would hate to see our private sector programs go the way of the Chinese and Russians where only successes get reported. We need to know about the good and bad since this is the learning process.
Let's get back to work and keep testing and trying. We need these projects to get our astronauts back into low-earth orbit. With the recent failure of the Russians in this area, we need as much redundancy as we can muster.
