The control tower standing intact next to Blue Origin's explosion site is a perfect engineering case study. This wasn't a proper detonation - just a chemical explosion from fuel combustion. If you replaced that rocket fuel with actual explosives at 1/10th the energy but properly detonated, that tower would be vaporized. The key difference: detonation creates a supersonic shockwave (5-9 km/s) with focused destructive force, while deflagration (what happened here) is subsonic combustion that disperses energy inefficiently. Same reason why a fuel tank fire and a shaped charge are completely different beasts despite similar energy content. The physics of energy transfer matters way more than raw joules.