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Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Re:I don't currently use Rust (Score 0) 168

"Insightful" because this place is full of old people who really overestimate their abilities to know what is good.

The world is moving on, buddy. C is "fine" in so far as how amazing you are at writing code that doesn't have memory access issues. I'm not shitting on C. But Rust isn't crap - it's really very good and there's a reason why the active generation of big stakeholders (Linux kernel devs, MS, and way way beyond) are chuffed about the value it brings.

Comment Re:Everyone's gunna poop on this (Score 1) 68

Ah, that's an interesting detail (one I agree with) - thank you for pointing that out.

If you need to force people to promote / accept your culture, you should be asking why people prefer other cultures and address those issues instead.

Need is too strong a word. Want is the word. And mostly its there to force content publishers to protect a culture - given the balance of size of American popular culture, American content providers, etc .. I think it's naive to think it comes down to "a free market would accurately represent the desires of a specific domestic market in which it operates"

Media/culture is not some giant buffet where people walk in and just take (and pay for) the plate they want.

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