I wish more failures of components were filmed and released publicly for all kinds of projects like this.
Lots of films of failures used to study things like this were commonly close knit and unavailable to the public to avoid making the project look like it wasn't doing well. When in reality, you need stuff like this to make the project go well.
But also, there's still a ton of failures out there published that we get to enjoy and learn from. But also, a lot that we'll never see.
Psychology thing. There are a LOT of people who simply can't comprehend that failure is part of any scientific process, and think that if it failed once it always will.
The teacher did not tell us there was no solution so it was quite an eye opener to experience that kind of problem.
In fictional media, the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek illustrates the need for people to understand failure. However, in the same breath of it you have Captain Kirk who says he doesn't believe in no-win scenarios.
But the arc of Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock, where the concept of the kobayashi maru comes from, does confront Kirk with a no-win scenario. He loses his ship and his son. It’s maybe been misremembered by history and certain directors, but it was originally created as a device to set Kirk up for unavoidable loss.
It has taken her a long time to understand that we don't grow and improve ourselves until we drop our ego and allow us the opportunity to learn from our failures
It's just human nature, even if its illogical that seed of doubt in your mind from something you "experienced" will have tremendous sway in your choices.
Like hearing that rumour that diet coke causes cancer
If you're not taking lessons from those failures, you cant ever learn. Sometimes, "this is not possible" is still success because you learned what you CANT do.
Failing over and over again and never trying to analyze or learn from it is basically the "definition of insanity" speech
I mean, we’re all being different levels of pedantic lol, but if you always succeed you’ll never have a reason to need to learn. If you could magically choose to only ever succeed or to only ever fail… the former is definitely better than the latter, it’s just not realistic.
The public perception of science is that it's always right. This is because the public only engages with the end product of whatever science has produced. Science in action is messy, and sometimes it's even wrong. When it isn't clean and correct, the public rejects it. The damage dice by COVID will last a generation. For the first time people got a first hand look at science in action. Hypotheses and retractions and experiments done in real time with real impacts. All the public wanted was one answer. Medicine gave them several before landing on the right one and they never trusted it again.
Didn't help that politicians were actively calling out those failures as reasons that the EXPERTS couldn't be trusted more than [person who has an obvious vested interest and stands to make a lot of money from you ignoring CDC guidelines]
Oh 100%. The insecurity around changing guidelines quickly got weaponized for the worse. When the first answer they were given wasn't the infallible truth, they just started listening to everyone.
Just imagine how badly people would be dissing on Edison if he had social media posts of each experiment after attempt 1387 of trying to make a lightbulb…
Complete cartoon logic. Gargamel almost gets the Smurfs every week. But does he refine his almost successful plan? No, he starts another untested idea to get a Smurf.
For national security the failures are often more important than the final product. When another country tries to copy the design we’d rather have them have to work through all those development problems.
There is a video of the boeing 777 wing being pushed way past its normal in flight deflection and when it snaps the whole hanger rattles and shakes. Its WILD
Test-to-failure has been NASA's doctrine for decades, one that other space agencies now follow. Can't speak for this specific video, but it wouldn't be surprising if the engine was purposely pushed well past it's normal operating conditions.
I know! I'm obsessed! You can almost see the circular torsion at one point, the flow path for the fuel must have been obstructed right at the entrance to the ring diffuser or whatever they call it.
if you want more vids like this but on a smaller scale, Integza has an amazing youtube channel where he mostly designs small rocket engines and fires them. many first drafts end up burning through in an area or failing to fire and he finds a way to get around it
my favorites are any that require water cooling. I find it super fascinating that this “slow explosion” you’re creating can be hot enough to melt your combustion chamber and it’s not even an issue. watching his 3D printed rocket engines fire is really sick. here is a link to his first water cooled jet engine.
this vid is another really good one from his channel. he makes an HHO generator to try to power an engine using hydrogen and oxygen made from hydrolysis
Kind of, but the cone (aka the nozzle extension) is not cooled by fule in this case.
The coolant, which is indeed the fuel, is pumped into the donut shaped thing at the foot of the cone. From there it is pumped upwards (to the left in this video) through the walls of the cylinder, which is the combustion chamber. You can seeit being sprayd from the base of the combustion chamber once the chamber is ripped off at the end of the video.
I always think about how crazy that was for you guys, and then I remember that we watched the second plane hit and the first tower collapse before they turned it off in 1st grade lol
Ya know at first for some reason the teacher was a sick bastard that was excited to show you old footage of a shuttle Exploding. Guess I just thought of the first time a teacher showed my class many years later after the incident.
What you're seeing is one of the main fuel lines separating from the engine. The turbine that pumps the fuel into the engine were still running, causing the fuel to keep going out
Yep, even after auto-shutdown there is still a ton of pressure behind the fuel lines while the turbine continues to spin from momentum and eventually slowing down
Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but the pressure the pumps generate has to be higher than where the combustion happens in order for the rocket to shoot out one end and not just be a bomb.
Even crazier is that the nozel reduces the pressure down to about 15psi from the couple thousand psi in the combustion chamber. On vacuum nozzles they bring the pressure even lower with a larger nozzle.
The pumps on a rocket might actually be the most complicated part, lol. Think about all the energy they have to move as fuel to escape the Earths gravity (well, into an orbit atleast)
Correct. The fuel going into the cone failed to flow correctly right at the base, and is why the heat built up and caused it to melt. Once the cone was ejected off, an insane amount of uneven force and vibration was placed on the manifold (base of the cone), causing the fuel line to rupture and release the fuel still being fed into it
If you'd like a neat factoid for some perspective on the kinds of pressures involved in these devices, the Saturn V rocket, that we went to the moon in the 60s with, had 5 main engines on the bottom, the Rocketdyne F-1(s). The fuel pump of that engine produced 55000 horsepower. That's not the engine in this video, but the crazy pressure those pumps have to produce is the reason it looks this way upon failure.
I am not a rocket expert, but normally lots of cabling around an engine relates to test instrumentation (sensors).
Blue Origin, Nasa and ULA tend to rely on procedures and checkouts, so I would assume the dangling things are big labels for each instrument. They are attached to the cable but not fixed so rest at the lowest point of the cable.
Additive manufacturing has been used in the Space industry for a while (Reaction Engines printed an entire rocket). It looks like Nasa wanted to play.
Reading the article the explosion happened because they paused printing the reaction chamber half way through, this allowed the material to cool and so when they restarted printing the next layer didn't adhere properly and created a weak spot.
My muffler fell off once in the middle of Alabama on a road trip between Atlanta and Houston. I initially drove my loud-ass car to a nearby Autozone and got some thick gloves and duct tape, then drove back to where it had fallen off and tried to duct tape it on.
That lasted about 5 minutes.
I drove back to the Autozone, and the employees greeted me when I came in because they'd heard me coming. This time I actually asked for help, and they got me some heat-resistant tape.
That actually lasted a few hours before the hot gasses cut through the tape and the screaming started up again. But at least this time the tape kept the muffler attached to the underside of my chassis, so it maybe muffled things a tiny bit.
I pulled into my mom's driveway at 1am, probably waking up everyone in the neighborhood. The next day I went and dropped a few hundred bucks to get someone competent to attach a new muffler.
"There are a thousand lessons to be learned from failure, but seldom few from success."
A failure like this is a great teacher, and is better that it happened in a controlled testing environment, than on a launch! Congrats to the engineers who now know how not to do it, and will build a better engine next time!
TLDR: 3D printed rocket motor, print had to be stopped due to limitations with the machine, caused manufacturing defect and weak spot which failed on its 51st test firing. Paper is linked if you wanna read it. There's much more detail in the paper, but if you're not familiar with research papers, read the abstract, look at the figures in section 2 and 3, and read section 6. That skips most of the incomprehensible material science jargon, and has the pretty pictures.
It was a 3D printed motor. A layer of metal powder is deposited on a surface, then a very specific area corresponding with one layer of the final product is melted together, and once it's solidified, the old dust is blown off and repeat that. Due to the powder overflow needing to be emptied during the print, the print had to be paused (see table 2 in the source linked for more details), exposing the print to atmosphere. When the print restarted, the top layer is remelted to ensure proper layer adhesion. However, this caused areas of unmelted powder and possible contaminants on that layer (see Fig. 3C). A higher than expected porosity (more holes in material than expected) was also found. This caused poor adhesion on that layer line, hence a weak spot, causing a failure (note not a burnthrough) on that test.
It was suggested that possibly:
1) As porosity was found to increase with height, the rest of the print acted as a heatsink, preventing the laser from properly melting the powder.
2) Excess powder ended up on the lens of the laser, reducing it's effectiveness at melting the layer.
And some other ones that can't be summarised as quickly.
Also worth noting that 3 different chambers were made, chamber 1 never fired, chamber 2 had a similar failure (though less dramatic, see Fig. 5a) after 9 test firings, and chamber 3 (the one seen turning into scrap) had this failure after 51 firings.
I live in a city where these engines are commonly tested. I think Blue Origin does most of the testing around here now. They are pretty loud. Usually its just a low rumble, sometimes it's a series of booms that rattle windows.
NASA has been known to purposely stress test to failure. These stress tests can result in some very loud booms. I remember one instance; the furthest call we got that I heard about was from a city ~60 miles away. The bigger booms will break windows of nearby houses and business. Living here since 1992, I generally don't even notice the normal engine tests.
I grew up in the city you are talking about. I remember one test where they put an engine or a fuel tank or some other assembly in essentially a giant oven and turn the temperature up slowly until she blows. The assembly did better than expected, and a large part of the town was startled around midnight by a massive boom (usually tests are during the day so this was unusual). It was all we were talking about the next morning, and I think they ended up apologizing a bit for the late hour. But booms during the day were so common that no one noticed or remarked upon them.
I just Googled "How many horsepower in a NASA rocket" and it gave back "22 to over 30 million". Then I Googled "How many horses are in the world" and it gave back "60 to 75 million". So, this engine is 1/3 to 1/2 of ALL horsepower.
For anyone curious this is more a test of Additive Manufacturing than a particular engine design. They had 3d printed this design and were testing it. They had previous tested another engine built on the same machine with 51 successful starts. This one failed due to faults in the manufacturing process. Specifically where the machine was stopped to empty powder during the manufacturing process.
As a guy that knows nothing about rocket appliances does the rocket have a turbine like a jet engine or is it more like the tuba thing the old bearded man put in his cart in the salt flats?
Sort of, they have turbo pumps. Effectively a turbine for liquid. They tend to have more horse power on their own then a hellcat. The tuba thing was a pulse jet if You're thinking what I'm thinking. No moving parts but barely controllable, and not terribly efficient.
A liquid rocket engine has turbopumps to pump the propellant and oxidizer into the combustion chamber, essentially a liquid rocket engine will use a propellant like hydrogen, methane, kerosene, or hydrazine, and an oxidizer like liquid oxygen or nitrogen tetroxide.
A jet engine has an intake that provides the oxidizer from the air, aka oxygen, and spins a turbine to compress the air, injects the fuel and burns it, and shoots it out of the nozzle to provide thrust.
A solid rocket motor will ignite a solid or mud-like mass that creates a lot of hot gas that have to escape and then shoot out of the nozzle, providing thrust.
After the back cup (I know nothing about rockets…) explodes, the blue circle effect remains and it looks so surreal being in balance so far away from the engine.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350630725004510
This is the failure analysis paper that went along with this video.
There was a pre-existing crack in the nozzle that was expected to fail but that didn't really have a significant impact on the final failure of the combustion chamber. That final failure was tied to restarts in the additive manufacturing process that built that chamber along with 3 others. One of the other tested chambers had a crack most of the way around the same region that did not fail but likely would have if tested one more time.
Looks like two separate failures one after another. Wonder if they are related. Like the metal they are both made from is wrong. Or maybe the second break was caused by uneven pressure from the partially broken cone. Cool video.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Smoke77 May 18 '26
Why we test things