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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.
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
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.
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.
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.