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SpaceX's Falcon 1 Destroyed During Maiden Voyage
legolas writes "SpaceX's Falcon 1 is the world's first privately funded satellite launch vehicle. After a successful static engine test on Wednesday, it was launched today. Unfortunately, the rocket was destroyed shortly after launch."
It also looked like it went unstable with a wobble. Spaceflight Now is reporting that the flame looked funny right before video was cut but this could be due to a weird orientation of the vehicle relative to the flight path. (ie sideways)
Hopefully we get more info soon and Elon flies the next one as soon as they figure it out. Take a page out of NASA's early history and just keep putting them up until you get it right. Luckily at $6 million a pop they're pretty reasonably priced compaired to other vehicles out there.
And this The 34-year-old South African native made his fortune in the dot-com world by co-founding the PayPal electronic payment system, then selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Considering all the consumer complaints I've heard about PayPal, I don't think I'd want to do business with one of the people who started that company.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Its interesting to compare this with the scram jet trials currently scheduled by Qinetic (British Defence Contractor thats just been privatised)
Qinetic are about to test fire a £1 million scramjet directly into the ground. If it works it will fire for 6 seconds before it hits earth at mach 7.
The problem with seeking venture capital is the the investors usually want a return of their investment within a specified (Probably too short) time frame.
Successful space exploration takes man decades not man hours.
I dont read
TFA put the satellite at $750,000. A lot of money, but not an insane amount as compared to the cost of actually putting the rocket up.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
the change in plume could have just been because of a change in the orientation of the vehicle relative to the trajectory (ie turned sideways). Nothing really points to an engine malfunction yet. Could have been avionics, which have been known to cause problems for rockets in the past.
Spaceflight Now observed:
A further look at the imagery seen from the onboard camera mounted to the Falcon 1 shows a noticeable change in the color and shape of the flame coming from the Merlin first stage main engine as the vehicle seemed to roll. It was at that point the webcast provided to reporters covering the launch immediately stopped. Repeated efforts to reconnect to the feed were unsuccessful.
Seems to be a problem with the engine, a leak, or pump failure. A turbopump that has seized could induce a sharp roll.
an ill wind that blows no good
Since the payload was a student project, it has no doubt already accomplished it's primary mission: to give engineering and science students experience in a large-scale, real world project designing and building a satellite and it's experiments. It's sad that they won't get to see the final fruits of their labors and the product of their effort was destroyed, but this doesn't really affect their overall education. The science loss is pretty small, as I'm pretty certain other satellites have studied similar phenomena in the past.
I think the Air Force giving SpaceX a launch contract was partially throwing them a bone to help get another launch provider off the ground (no pun intended), and partially saving money. No doubt had SpaceX not happened to be up-and-coming as they are, this would have gone up on a Pegasus or piggybacked with another satellite on a bigger rocket, like I believe the first Falcon-Sat was.
NASA's first failed attempts at orbit also had payloads on board.
I hope they have enough flight data to re-create (virtually) what happened in the lab. I'd be very interested to find out if this was a software error... and if so, what could have prevented it - different language (Ada95?), better test tools (www.polyspace.com?)...
The on pad static fire was just a chance to confirm that all the systems worked together. It was not a proving for the engines or the flight software (which has to be exposed to a myriad of conditions you can't replicate during a static hold-down fire). In fact, firing the tanks dry with the rocket still on the ground receiving back blast probably wouldn't be a good idea. Over the past two years, however, SpaceX has tested the engines thoroughly on stands in the desert, logging several times what it takes to reach orbit on single engines. As Elon has said, they are pretty confident in the capability and reliability of the engines. I think faulting the schedule, especially when they've already been willing to delay a couple times for relatively small issues, is premature and a little unfair.
They have also thoroughly simulated the flight software, I believe with the hardware hooked up under simulated loads, as well. Of course, it's impossible to truly predict every contingency that the software will have to deal with, and given that the rocket began to exhibit uncontrolled roll rather than loss of power or anything like that, I suspect the problem does ultimately lie in the software rather than the power plant. We will have to wait for them to discuss their analysis to find out. I understand they have a relatively small code base, so hopefully they will be able to track it down quickly.
One other possibility I think fairly likely is vulnerability of their communications inside the rocket. Supposedly this is the first rocket to rely principly on ethernet, which reduces cost significantly over propriety methods. This is untested in flight, and interference or vibration may have caused problems.
I'm pretty bummed out by this, but their progress in the last couple of years is still impressive, and I'm looking forward to their eventual announcement of a second launch date. I wonder if it was a non-issue the recovery ship was out of position...or a good thing they moved it.
"...before range safety got to it?"
That reminds me of an interesting talk I attended by an X-ray astro-physicist back in college. He had been involved in several launches. Not surprisingly, they are very personally invested in the payloads, since they spend quite a few years fighting for budgeting and designing and building, and plan to spend several more years analyzing data. He said there was one launch where the rocket went off course and the Range Safety Officer gave the order to blow it, but the lead scientist jumped on the guy in charge of the button in a rather desperate attempt to save his project (which was doomed anyways). Since then, the customers have been kept in a seperate room from the RSO's.
Smells of a tall tale, but probably based on fact.
Actually it is the "partially" in the sense that the first stage should parachute and be reused, but the second stage is space junk.
This is the right way to do it, too. Lower stages are larger, so you can save more money making them reusable. They're less important for overall rocket performance, so when making them reusable reduces their performance it's not so bad. They don't reach orbital speeds, so you can recover them without reentry shields or even without flyback capability. If we're going to move toward reusable rockets (which could be a very good idea) at a gradual pace (which the Shuttle program has proved is a good idea), the way to start is from the bottom up.
Shuttle NEVER flies flawlessly. It survives due to redundancy, the efforts of the people working on it, particular the foresight of some engineers, and in no small part, luck. When it fails, it fails due to lack of redundancy, a failure to be creative enough to foresee the failure mode, and an unforgiving environment.
So Elon was absolutely right but the true comparison is with software that may not be perfect but must at least handle problems gracefully (particularly with manned spaceflight) so that maybe the mission is degraded, but not finished. How do you get there? Shuttle still hasn't figured it out, so Elon can't really be faulted for a failure on the first try. He might even survive a second failure. Third time would be a death knell to commercial activity, even if he wanted to try further. It was mentioned elsewhere in the discussions that he'd stop if he got three failures and no successes--it'd be appropriate.
Our office (one of our jobs is to estimate rocket failure probability) pegged the likelihood of failure at 70%, so we weren't surprised. We were hoping he'd succeed, just realistic. Hopefully they'll learn from this one and succeed on the next one, but if you have an even money bet on his next launch, take failure.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
For example, if the blanket wrapped around a feedpipe for the engine and then got tugged by the plume or the airflow it could easily have disabled the engines.
Blankets like that are a known reliability issue, that's why the Shuttle has spray-on insulation on it's ET (not that that's been exactly briliantly reliable either, but it's probably more reliable than it would have been if it had had external blankets.)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I thought the Pegasus rocket by Orbital Sciences Corporation was the first privately funded launch vehicle? Or does corporate money not count?
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
The bottom line on space flight is that if you plan on moving enough mass to orbit to make a profit the machine cannot be a performance pig. WIthin the engines and most other systems are objects that are highly stressed- and simply adding mass is normally not a solution. You are compelled to make elegant and efficient designs. That will cost more than the hardware in your espresso maker.
BTW Atlas V reduced costs to LEO by 50% from previous vehicles. A little known fact. And you can actually buy one and launch it next year if you want. Whether Elon can even match that is yet to be seen.
Lets be realistic- Elon is yet another rich guy who has a fascination with an expensive hobby. He is an outsider who had no prior spaceflight experience. And like most newbies he confused the booster operation with serious spaceflight. The smoke, noise and flames always does that. Yes a booster is necessary but it is only a first step. Reinventing it with some mediocre rocket engines will not push us to another level.
True progress in spaceflight is all about the performance of the upper stage and its in-space capabilities. If you don't make progress there then all the wonderful space missions we all want to see done are out of reach. Elon should have picked up the phone and called the Atlas team. For a fraction of the money he has spent he could have gotten a long-duration Centaur that could have opened up commercial manned missions to lunar orbit. His kind of money and attitude could have really made a difference. And he wouldn't have to create a new team to do it. He could have stood on some shoulders. You get farther that way. You just have to readjust your pride settings and focus on the real goal.
Every damn "space entrepreneur" does the same damn thing- and they mostly piss away hundreds of millions of dollars to do what has already been done. There is not a thought about what to do next. This is mostly because it is much, much harder to do. If these guys gave it a moment's thought they would just go see the experts. We are as smart or smarter than they are- but don't have the luxury of millions in VC or buyout money burning a hole in our pockets. If you add money, an enthusiastic customer and a mission trust me- we will deliver some amazing machines. Essentially they could add their innovations and ideas to ours- and get something better than either could do alone
And its not like we are sitting around doing nothing- the next four generations of launchers and upper stages are already in conceptual design. But there is no mission yet that needs these new capabilities. Cost reductions to $1300/lbm to LEO can be done with present technology but the investment is significant. With present launch rates there is simply no business case. But if you wanted to make a commercial lunar orbiter that could be done in less than four years for less money than you think.
The weird and perversely funny thing is that another newbie- Mike Griffin - is doing exactly the same thing as Elon but with taxpayer money to build a few more mediocre vehicles with a virtually newbie team that has never designed a rocket. It is highly probable that they too will follow this painful path. But education is a good thing I suppose. But we could have gone so much farther as a NASA-industry team. Sad.
Looks like from the video and the comments from the rocket buffs at SpaceX comment thread, the thermal blanket didn't completely come off during the take off. Supposedly, it's attached to the rocket with velcro and a lanyard of some sort is supposed to pull it off at launch. But if you watch the video, you can clearly see something flapping or moving around that looks like a blanket. Then there is a puff of dark gray smoke, flames start shooting off in some weird direction, and the rocket starts going sideways, then the video cuts out.
Bogus.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
If I understand the general critique of the space establishment from the "rich hobbyists" is that you may well have any number of very bright engineers, but your corporate masters make a hell of a lot of money off cost-plus contracts using the same old stuff and have no incentive to actually build anything new and better. Even if somebody like Musk had have come along you wouldn't take his money because the tech that gets developed would ultimately reduce the value of future government work.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Actually, "underwater ships" already existed by the time Jules Verne wrote his story.
As for traveling to the moon, that's just not comparable. The physics for going to the moon were well understood and within reach; that was just a question of technology and engineering.
For manned interplanetary and interstellar travel, it's not so much that we can make a reasoned argument against it, we don't even have a hint of the physics needed to make it work; current reactor, propulsion, and shielding technologies are many orders of magnitude away from what they would need to be for manned travel. And the technology being developed by SpaceX is completely irrelevant; it's a commercial launch vehicle, and an inefficient one at that--it has nothing to do with interplanetary or interstellar travel.
It's a different thing for unmanned interstellar travel: technologically, if we devote enough resources to it, we can probably send a small interstellar probe to a neighboring star system within the next century--it would be hugely expensive, but feasible.
Actually, I think the most likely path to manned space exploration is to reengineer people: radiation hardening, hibernation, vacuum resistance, and changes to the skeletal system, among others. If you do that well, you could send people in small pods and they might be able to work when they arrive. But I give it a century before people overcome their squeamishness to permit genetic engineering with people, and another century to do it. But you and I are never going to set foot on another planet.
Space is far too hostile and Homo Sapiens is far too frail and squishy for any large scale space travel. Somebody during the Apollo program made an estimate (conceivably pulled out of their butt) that there was a 10% chance per flight that there would be a solar flare large enough to kill the crew or at least abort the mission. There actually was a lethally large flare between Apollos 15 and 16. (Note that this doesn't mean it was all a hoax and they didn't go: it means they were heroes).
I firmly believe that intelligent life from Earth has a great future ahead of it in space. I just don't think it will be human life.
rockets shouldn't be the only way of getting up there. there should be some better way, and someone should go research that.
How come on the failed Sci-Fi show Master Blasters, they could shoot a Mini-Cooper 1000 feet successfully with a week of construction, but these guys, with a real rocket, built over months, couldn't do any better?
Is there something I'm missing here?
We have very well-known research that dates back to Goddard and a little later, the V-2, which launched successfully from cruder facilities.
Why is it that we continue to have a non-bulletproof system after all these years of engineering? This is like building cars 50 years later that still only go 12mph and sputter and smoke and backfire, and have to be cranked to run. How is it that we have cars that go 100mph easily, that are comfortable, fairly safe, and affordable by the average person?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
But know this: the technology for getting to orbit and beyond is not tapped out. There are so many directions for improvement that it represents enough work for thousands of engineers for decades. Structures, engines, avionics, fabrication even aero can all be hugely improved. But they are trapped in near stasis by lack of resources. NASA, who used to take on these technological challenges, has become consumed with making rockets that replicate already existing capabilities and going to the ISS to do ant-farm science. It is basically a jobs program where the jobs are fancy but not too hard. Since they have most of the resources for development and are wasting them on old crap these great advances are stalled. But they are so obvious to anyone with any real insight that they will be addressed slowly and steadily- probably by the Chinese.