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Amateur Rocket Launch a Failure; NASA Debuts Shuttle-cam
Anonymous Coward writes "CNN has posted the story of the failure of the amateur rocket launch that was reported in a previous Slashdot story. 'The launch was spectacular and the rocket was performing as planned. However, the rocket experienced motor failure during the flight and the flight was terminated," said Eric Knight, co-leader of the CSXT mission.' NASA is planning to mount a camera on the external fuel tank and broadcast an October 2nd shuttle launch.
"It won't be for at least another year. We're going to regroup and take a break, but people haven't heard the last from us," CSXT founder Ky Michaelson said.
:)
I feel bad for them, but he sounds like he should be sitting in a large black leather chair penting his fingers or petting a persian cat while saying this
why run from Vincenzo?
Allow me to be the first to say:
SONOFABITCH!!
GODDAMMIT!!
fuck
crap
*sigh*
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Is that what they call 'just letting the fucking thing crash into the ground' nowadays?
Just look at the original proposal and plans, and look what they've cut it back to. All it is a big jobs project. And the Space Shuttle technology is so old they are having to scrounge eBay for old computer parts.
I'm sorry, but it just makes me sick. And we actually think NASA some day will send someone to Mars. Yeah right. We need someone to come along and either replace NASA entirely, or at the very least scare them into cutting back the beaurocracy and actually performing again.
I love how they say the rocket test was terminated, sort of implying that the rocket packed its bags and went home to collect unemployment when in reality it was a burning metal tube of death, screaming through the atmosphere at the speed of sound looking for some poor schmuck to land on.
John! When is Armadillo Aerospace going to show these n00bs how it's done? Screw Doom 3, get your ass to Mars!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
That's why you launch these things from remote locations! As for NASA, you do remember the Metric-English Standard conversion debacle that resulted in the crashing of a orbital mars probe, don't you?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Actually, it probably was.
AFAIK, for flights such as these, even when the flight path has a low population index, you STILL need to have a "remote detonation" capability to keep it for veering off course and crashing into important things/people.
With rockets, since the fuel is itself reactive/explosive, they can usually keep the explosives package fairly small and secure against false authorizations (your "Picard four-seven-alpha-tango).
I'm more bummed that all the instrumentation was destroyed, so it's going to be *very* difficult for them to figure out why the motor barfed. I wonder what they were collecting from ground sensors... It would definitely be neat to see how their avionics package compares to say Carmack's http://www.armadilloaerospace.com lander...
I myself am wondering how these people are funded. I imaging that building a 511lb space-capable (supposedly, not today though) rocket probably takes quite a fair bit of money
Would also be interesting to know how they got rocket fuel. I'd assume that NASA or somebody is contributing (is it still amature if they do), as this stuff isn't really available at your nearest Esso station, although at one time Jet fuel was more publicly available.
Preparing funds for next year: "Sir, have you got any bottles for recycling?" - phorm
I mean, it's not rocket science...oh, wait...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Pretty much the same thing that would happen if an aged driver had a heart attack and crashed his car into a Department of Motor Vehicles service facility.
Or if a restaurant exploded because of a faulty natural gas valve.
Or if an airliner had a mechanical problem that caused it to crash into a suburban neighborhood.
Or if a cosmetic medical device caused unforseen side effects later on.
Liability insurance, my man. Liability insurance.
Guess who doesn't have to have it: NASA
Guess who doesn't have to pay if they fuck up: NASA
Guess who picks up the tab if they do: you and me
Edith Keeler Must Die
The Darwin Awards Club is calling it a "promising success".
:-)
Motto: "To boldly die like no man has died before"
Table-ized A.I.
From the article, it looks like this is going to be nasa tv only. Does anyone want to record/webcast this for those of us w/o all the extra channels?
...open source software is bound to fail and we should all use Microsoft software since they employ some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world and I would not trust anyone else to be writing operating systems to control my servers.
"Our experiment to study the smoke and debri dissapation patterns of atmospheric explosions has been a complete success!"
Table-ized A.I.
I just wonder if they had to recite "Picard four-seven-alpha-tango" to activate it.
Nah, it was Zero-Zero-Zero-Destruct-Zero.
Of course, they also had to get two other launch crew officers to concur.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world and I would not trust anyone else to be launching rockets in to the sky. I believe NASA should have a monopoly on space travel as they are the only ones who seem to get it right.
Oh? Feet != Meters
Argh!
And I say 2400 mph is the average speed, 3205 the claimed max speed.
To accomplish something major like this setbacks (sometimes expensive) are inevitable.
...nobody can be as good as NASA therefore nobody but NASA should be allowed to launch. But someone can't get as good as NASA because they can't launch...because they aren't as good as NASA...
Great plan, Mr. Heller, but even NASA had to start fresh at one point, and even today they fuck up now and then.
A far better plan would be to assign a voluntary 'chaperone' in the form of an experienced NASA representive work with these people and look things over until he's certain they'd be fine on their own.
BytesTemplar.com
Neat trick, considering he died in 1963.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
What's the scheduled launch time (EDT)?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
They havnt made it to space yet, but at least their rockets dont explode. Check out this amatuer rocket effort. They have some great videos from outside of their LV1 rocket. PSAS
Quitters never win, Winners never quit, But those who never win and never quit are idiots.
I'm impressed, since JFK was killed Nov 22, 1963! I remember that day well - I was in high school at the time.
The only good weather is bad weather.
"Rockets" are hard to get right. If they weren't, everyone would have ICBMs by now.
-Paul
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world ...
That's the same bunch who screwed up metric --> english conversion and crashed a martian lander, right?
Boeing employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world....
Thats the same bunch who had a hydraulic system fail and a plane crashed right?
NASA has launched more missions than anybody else, and they have had more successful missions that any body else. They have also had more failures than anyone else, but thats thanks to a little thing called the law of averages.
Face it, NASA has been sending things in the sky for 40 straight years now. In all that time, they landed on the moon, helped fly four craft to the farthest reaches of the solar system, landed 3 successful missions on Mars, and have helped run two successful space stations.
All this, with only 7 astronauts lost. How many people do you spposed died in the first 40 years of aviation? How about the first 40 years of automobiles?
So don't give me any of this "NASA can't even even get metric conversion right" crap. For the last four decades, NASA has regularly pulled off shit that other countries only dream of.
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
I wonder if this has any affect on Rocket Guy's, AKA Brian Walker, thinking... Bad things can happen.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
When people as get as old as you, it's common for them to forget dates. Don't worry too much about it. Have your grandchildren put you in a home where you can longer interject your log^H^H^H misconceptions into intelligent conversation.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Hey aardvark...
It appears that young people like you don't read too well. Us old folks screwed up the school systems, ya know.
I had the date right: Nov 22, 1963. The original poster was wrong.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Still, a remarkably good safety record.
Or maybe, JUST MAYBE, it is a little more complicated to get a large rocket make it into space than just scaling up an Estes Big Bertha by strapping 3 D engines on it.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I helped out at this launch attempt as part of the recovery team and I can tell you the following:
Amateur rocketry, like all rocketry, is used to failure
If you've met or heard of Ky, you'd realize that he has had plenty of successes and failures to deal with. And Ky is just the CEO of sorts to what amounts to a massively talented technical team. Having gotten the rocket off the ground was an accomplishment itself; the FAA puts enormous safety restrictions on the launch, of which very few are satisfied at any given moment.
The failure itself wasn't that dangerous either. The rocket did not explode like a fireball. It just made a sort of "pop" sound and broke into pieces. The selection of the launch site has a lot to do with ensuring that such pieces don't come down and harm anyone.
Strapping a camera for a shuttle launch is not going to cost NASA too much in the grand scheme of things.
For an agency that is in desperate need of government funding, however, I think it is a wonderful idea.
Little things like the camera will only get people interested in space and science and bring public support for NASA.
I cannot wait to see the video. The animation was great as it was.
Now I just need to find a friend with a true satellite dish. A web-cast days later will not be the same.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Think of the extend of the powers an agency had to have to erase so many History records in order to have him officially delivering them those same powers an year after he was killed.
> NASA has launched more missions than anybody else
NASA has launched more manned missions than anybody else, but the Russians have launched nearly TEN TIMES as many space mission.
This is when someone adds "Yeah they had to, because their electronics suck, so they need to replace their sats more often", but that doesn't change the point about launches.
John Carmack
Darn, happened to moderate this "troll" by mistake. So I post to erase it.
Well obviously we need to outlaw cars, restaurants, airliners, and medical devices.
not collecting stamps is a hobby
Yes! I finnaly completed my collection! I don't have ANY of them!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Feet != Meters
Well duhhh! Everyone knows a meter equals a yard, not a foot!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Allow me to be the first to say:
SONOFABITCH!!
GODDAMMIT!!
fuck
crap
*sigh*
I believe those terms were also used by American engineers working on the post-Sputnik failures.
And I wouldn't be surprised if one of the Wright brothers made the same comments pre-Kitty Hawk.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
If you want to see some other videos taken by this camera, visit our RocketCam Gallery. They're not of the shuttle, but they're pretty inspiring nonetheless.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
The number I saw quoted was $150k, not $250k.
John Carmack
I've always wondered this:
Why drop the tank? I know it's empty but imagine leaving the external tank connected to the shuttle. Dock the shuttle to the ISS. Send the shuttle crew home on a fre Soiuze(sp?) return vehicles.
Using the next few shuttle missions and dedicated American and Russian supply rockets, re-fuel the external tank on the docked shuttle with hydrogen and oxygen.
During this refuel, resupply stage a dedicated, unstaffed rocket is launched with a lunar lander module. The module is sent in to lunar orbit. The module would be launched with minimal fuel to get it to the moon and in orbit.
Finally, with one last shuttle mission load the stored shuttle with the space hab unit (not used much recently). Install a crew and send the shuttle to the moon for an extended stay. They meet up with the lander module, dock and fuel the module from the external tank. Then send down 3-4 people. to rove the moon. On return, the lander is left in lunar orbit, again fuel-less. The crew return to the ISS.
If they could get three people there for a two weeks or so with those small Apollo capsules, imagine what kind of crew we could send like this, and the science they could do. This mission idea also extends the ISS in to being the first interplanetary space dock (well, sort of).
We could then have two sets of on-going shuttle missions: One set from Earth to ISS. One set from ISS to the Moon.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased