The Man We Sent to the Stars
https://open.substack.com/pub/ottoshahin/p/the-man-we-sent-to-the-stars
https://redd.it/1ts2tw7
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Why did Blue Origin fully load New Glenn for a test fire?
As my title suggests, it only makes sense load the required methane to avoid such a large explosion if things go wrong.
SpaceX usually fully load the LOX and only a partial load of methane for their 15 second test burn. Or was Blue Origin going to test for significantly longer than 15 seconds?
https://redd.it/1trv07w
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SpaceX and ULA knock out Friday launches despite Blue Origin explosion
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/05/29/despite-blue-origin-explosion-spacex-ula-launches-still-go-for-launch-today/
https://redd.it/1trkix9
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Apollo 11 Landed on the Moon with a Computer That Had Only 4KB of RAM
theworldaroundme/apollo-11-landed-on-the" rel="nofollow">https://hive.blog/hive-196387/@theworldaroundme/apollo-11-landed-on-the
https://redd.it/1trjysb
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ways that I consider unfair. I have seen similar criticism directed as SpaceX due to their large number of Starship failures. People need to remember how hard this stuff is, and I hope my explanations help reframe some of the discussion about failures like this.
At the end of the day, it serves us all well that there is a healthy, competitive environment in spaceflight. Personally, I have the utmost respect for SpaceX, Firefly, NASA, Rocketdyne, and all of Blue Origin's competitors and partners. Nearly everyone at Blue Origin came from those other companies, and when we were working through a tough problem it made no difference what your background was. If anyone is still reading this very long post, I'll leave you with this: this stuff is incredibly hard to get right and these rockets are uniquely challenging. We will see more failures - big and small. But try to keep perspective: we have the opportunity to watch the best-of-the-best engineers duke it out in a modern-day space race that may end up with us settling the solar system.
Sorry for the long post.
https://redd.it/1trg9pw
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Blue Origin explosion threatens to delay NASA's moon program
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-origin-explosion-threatens-delays-for-nasas-moon-program/
https://redd.it/1treyrh
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Other New Glenn booster Never Tell Me The Odds, which was located in the HIF facility on LC-36 has been damaged
https://x.com/sciguyspace/status/2060407487962984802
https://redd.it/1tr8qoe
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First aerial photos of SLC-36 after New Glenn anomaly. One lightning tower & transport-erector are a total loss, with the other lightning tower having being damaged as well. HIF seems to have fared better than first thought.
https://x.com/tweetsiphotos/status/2060361859509653580
https://redd.it/1tr3w1l
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Here’s why the failure of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is so catastrophic | “I hope that it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage.”
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/heres-why-the-failure-of-blue-origins-new-glenn-rocket-is-so-catastrophic/
https://redd.it/1tr14yu
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Blue Origin rocket explodes on launchpad during ground test
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/29/blue-origin-new-glenn-rocket-explosion-florida-test-nasa-artemis.html
https://redd.it/1tqy7wz
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New glenn just blew up on the pad.
I was working inside the integrity capsule in the MPPF when the whole building shook. Scared the shit out of me.
https://youtube.com/shorts/URAD0vk4XNk?si=5aGQED3PTRbyXzP-
https://redd.it/1tqms5d
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Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded
https://bsky.app/profile/baktelraalis.bsky.social/post/3mmxdx3zrvk27
https://redd.it/1tqmkha
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NASA’s Webb Reveals Black Hole That Formed Before Its Galaxy
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-reveals-black-hole-that-formed-before-its-galaxy/
https://redd.it/1tq83az
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Thousands of hidden planets found in old NASA telescope data
https://www.earth.com/news/thousands-of-hidden-planets-found-in-old-nasa-telescope-data/
https://redd.it/1tq4dub
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US Space Force confirms SpaceX will build sensor-to-shooter targeting network | “We aren’t trading speed for scale; we are demanding both,” says the military’s program manager.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/us-space-force-confirms-spacex-will-build-sensor-to-shooter-targeting-network/
https://redd.it/1tq0rnn
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Mars's manganese 'bathtub ring' reveals ancient ocean timeline and its potential for life
https://phys.org/news/2026-05-mars-manganese-bathtub-reveals-ancient.html
https://redd.it/1ts2kfx
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NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Primary Mirror Gets Last Look
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-roman-space-telescope-primary-mirror-gets-last-look/
https://redd.it/1trv9zu
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Astronomers finally solve Saturn’s decades-long spin mystery
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260529043658.htm
https://redd.it/1trkpi8
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What The Blue Origin Rocket Explosion Means for America's Return to the Moon
https://time.com/article/2026/05/29/blue-origin-rocket-explosion-nasa-moon/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial
https://redd.it/1trgbt8
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Perspective From a (Former) Blue Origin Engineer
In light of the recent New Glenn hot fire test failure at LC-36 I wanted to share some thoughts about Blue Origin, the challenges of rocket development, and what this all means for us as humans. I worked at Blue Origin in a variety of roles for several years, but I won't go into more detail to remain anonymous.
First I want to say that the people I worked with at Blue Origin were the best of the best. Everyone I worked with there was kind, incredibly smart, and hard working. I look back on my time there as some of the best of my career.
Seeing NG-4 blow up on the pad was gutting. I want to extend my condolences to the people at Blue Origin who put in loads of hard work, late nights, and persevered through many technical challenges to get NG-4 ready for launch. Seeing such a dramatic failure is a huge morale killer. Beyond that, losing their main/only launch site will cause months (or more) of delay to multiple programs. I really hope that Blue Origin and everyone there can bounce back quickly.
To get into the technical side of things, I want to address the differences in the development approach at SpaceX and Blue Origin. SpaceX famously likes to move quickly and break things. There is a lot of merit to that approach, but also some downsides. Blue Origin on the other hand takes a slower, more methodical approach, where they test at the component and subcomponent level before risking a full system test. Again, there are merits and downsides to this approach as well. Ultimately neither approach is flawless - rocket development is extremely complex and unpredictable, as the many recent failures at Blue Origin and SpaceX have proven. I'm fairly experienced in this field and I can't tell you definitively which approach is better. In my opinion, the issues holding Blue Origin back for years were separate from their engineering approach, but this is a topic for another time (or never thanks to NDAs).
What I think most people don't really appreciate is how incredible New Glenn and Starship really are. Compared to a rocket like Falcon 9, it's not even in the same order of magnitude of complexity. Falcon 9 is relatively simple in the context of rockets. It is relatively small, and the Merlin engines are open-cycle engines that use RP-1 for fuel. That is about as simple as it gets in liquid rocket engine design. The real innovation of Falcon was the landing which came later. I don't say this to knock SpaceX at all - my point is that we need to recognize that we cannot expect New Glenn or Starship's development to go as smoothly as Falcon 9's development (which also was not flawless). New Glenn and Starship are so, so, so much harder to get right - and they may never get it right.
I could write a book about this stuff, but I'll just demonstrate my point by looking at the first stage engines at a high level. Compared to Merlin, the Raptor and BE-4 engines are on the complete other end of the spectrum in terms of technical complexity. Raptor is a full-flow closed combustion cycle, which is about as complex as it gets. BE-4 is an ox-rich staged combustion cycle (also quite complex) and uses LNG which burns significantly cleaner than RP1 - which makes it ideal for high flight volumes, but introduces challenges. Just looking at thrust - Raptor generates 408,000 lbf of thrust, and BE-4 is in the realm of 600,000 lbf of thrust. Merlin is tiny in comparison at 190,000 lbf. Beyond just the engines themselves, New Glenn and Starship are behemoths - very few rockets ever come close in terms of sheer size. Starship uses 33 engines simultaneously on their first stage - just think about how hard that is to do. It's hard enough to get one engine working!
I am not here to justify what happened last night at LC-36 as "acceptable" - it was clearly a significant oversight of some kind. And not the kind of mistakes we (collectively) can be making if we want to get mankind back into space long term. However, I have seen a lot of commentary directly or indirectly criticizing the team at Blue - in
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explodes in massive fireball during prelaunch test.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/blue-origins-new-glenn-rocket-explodes-in-massive-fireball-during-prelaunch-test
https://redd.it/1tr8bf3
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The once backup ship Shenzhou-22 successfully brought 3 Chinese astronauts back to Earth, after their 7-month mission on the Tiangong space station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZpLTCR03Y
https://redd.it/1tr2pki
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A 'lost planet' may have given Jupiter and Uranus their moons
https://www.space.com/astronomy/solar-system/a-lost-planet-may-have-given-jupiter-and-uranus-their-moons
https://redd.it/1tr2tlg
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Advisory on the May 25 meteor sighting over Mayon Volcano
https://philsa.gov.ph/news/advisory-on-the-may-25-meteor-sighting-over-mayon-volcano/
https://redd.it/1tqu52j
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Blue Origin rocket explodes on launch pad during test | Space
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/5/29/blue-origin-rocket-explodes-on-launch-pad-during-test?traffic_source=rss
https://redd.it/1tqwrqy
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Blue Origin's New Glenn Blows Up During Static Fire Test
https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/2060164928472854821
https://redd.it/1tqmuhb
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Something just went boom at Cape Canaveral!
I'm camping nearby at jetty Park and a huge boom rocked our camper and there's a mushroom cloud over Cape Canaveral. I have some pictures if I can figure out how to upload them.
edit. Google photos link
https://photos.app.goo.gl/1GtEgysRcSsDBCsC8
edit 2.
looks like new Glenn exploded on the pad.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Jm8wRjD3xVA?si=jbZuyMsecAJIlWKI
https://redd.it/1tqmfvy
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NASA Announces “Realignment” Toward Human Spaceflight - Eos
https://eos.org/research-and-developments/nasa-announces-realignment-toward-human-spaceflight
https://redd.it/1tq4qrw
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Two independent methods for measuring the universe's expansion rate disagree by 10 percent at 5-sigma significance, and a decade of searching has not found a systematic error
The Hubble constant (H0) is the single number that underlies most of modern cosmology. It determines the age of the universe, the distance to remote galaxies, the predicted abundances of hydrogen and helium from Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and virtually every other derived cosmological parameter.
Two methods measure it. The first uses the cosmic distance ladder: parallax to nearby stars, pulsation periods of Cepheid variables, Type Ia supernovae calibrated against those Cepheids, and finally the redshifts of galaxies billions of light-years away. The most recent result from Adam Riess and collaborators (ApJ, 2022) gives 73.5 km/s/Mpc. Independent late-universe techniques including the Megamaser Cosmology Project (Pesce et al., ApJ, 2020), Mira variable stars, and J-band luminosity standards all cluster in the range 72 to 77 km/s/Mpc.
The second method uses the cosmic microwave background. The Planck satellite measured CMB temperature fluctuations with extraordinary precision. Fitting the full Lambda-CDM model to that data predicts a present-day expansion rate of 67.4 km/s/Mpc (Planck Collaboration, A&A, 2020).
73.5 versus 67.4. Both measurements have error bars under one percent. The current significance of the disagreement is approximately 5 sigma, the conventional threshold for a discovery in physics.
The megamaser result is particularly difficult to dismiss. It bypasses every rung of the distance ladder and rests directly on angular diameter distances calculated from water maser orbital mechanics. If Cepheid calibration were the problem, the maser result should not agree with the local value. It does.
James Webb Space Telescope observations of Cepheids in the infrared, where dust extinction is minimal, are consistent with the local value and do not shrink the gap.
Proposed explanations range from conservative (some undiscovered systematic) to profound. Early dark energy, a transient dark energy phase in the first 100,000 years after the Big Bang, is the most studied extension to Lambda-CDM. A 2025 MNRAS paper by Szigeti and colleagues proposes that a very slow cosmic rotation (\~500 billion year period) could systematically affect inferred distances in a way that reconciles both values. Neither proposal is confirmed.
By the early 2030s, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and next-generation CMB experiments (Simons Observatory, CMB-S4) will reduce measurement uncertainties enough to force an answer. Either a systematic error finally surfaces, or the standard model of cosmology needs something new.
Which camp do you find more compelling at this point: residual systematics, or genuine new physics?
Primary source: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac5c5b
https://redd.it/1tq3t0e
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10-Month Antarctic Isolation Shows How Difficult a Mission to Deep Space Would Really Be
https://www.extremetech.com/science/10-month-antarctic-isolation-shows-how-difficult-a-mission-to-deep-space
https://redd.it/1tpwz20
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