alt Hacker NewsNo, this would be crushing regardless. Even if Blue Origin had dozens of rockets ready to go, they can't fly without without the pad, which will take around a year to repair (based on previous examples).
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baq • today at 6:48 AM
Yeah exactly. Blowing up the rocket is the easy part. Reliably blowing up rockets on a high cadence is hard.
servo_sausage • today at 9:03 AM
If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one...
Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.
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This was an issue already in the Soviet times, with a couple cases of early rocket explosions destroying the pad and causing long delays, including one spectacular N1 explosion leveling its pad and needing lengthy expensive rebuild.
As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into something nearby than to explode at the pad.