SpaceX's Falcon Launches... Sort Of

JHarrison writes "Spaceflight Now is running a story on the SpaceX Falcon 1 launch yesterday. Those of you watching the stream will have no doubt noticed the telemetry failure at 04:50, and turns out that was more than them turning the webcast off.. "A year after its maiden flight met a disastrous end, the SpaceX booster lifted off at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 GMT Wednesday) from a remote launch pad on Omelek Island, part of a U.S. Army base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Controllers lost contact with the Falcon during the burn of the second stage that would have placed the rocket into orbit around Earth. "We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly," Elon Musk, founder and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said in a post-launch call with reporters. Live video from cameras mounted aboard the rocket's second stage showed increasing oscillations about five minutes after liftoff, just before the public webcast was cut off. The rolling prevented the necessary speed to achieve a safe orbit, instead sending the stage on a suborbital trajectory back into the atmosphere.""

Comments

Videos are up

[savuporo]

For those of you who didnt catch the webcast:
YouTube : launch
SpaceX official, high-res: http://www.spacex.com/video_gallery.php

Five minutes of fame !

Re:Why shutdown at that point?

[hmbcarol]

They never said they intentionally shut the engine down. The shutdown was an unavoidable side effect of a strong roll. Their quote was "If you have a significant roll, what could happen is that the propellants can centrifuge out."

If the spacecraft is spinning, all the fuel is pushed to the outside walls of the tank and away from the fuel outlet at the center of the tank bottom. This leaves the fuel pumps with nothing to pump. Engine shut down. Rocket fall, go boom.

Re:What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[ausoleil]

Considering that the Rutan/Scaled Composites and the SpaceX efforts had two completely different sets of objectives, and that Scaled met their objectives completely, that is, winning the X Prize, while the SpaceX second attempt failed in its own mission, what exactly is the point here?

To be sure, Rutan and company had setbacks in their early efforts. They engineered around them and ultimately met their goal and took home not only the prize but also the investments necessary for funding another generation of their technology. SpaceX will likely do the same, as it seems that they have a handle on what it was that caused the premature end of their test mission yesterday. That said, however, there is little basis to compare the two companies on. SpaceShip One was never meant to fly as high as is the Falcon. Nor was Falcon designed to carry human payloads, which entails another couple magnitudes of design complications and considerations.

Instead of negatively trying to compare one to the other, perhaps it is wiser to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.

Re:Engine bump and second stage control

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Did anyone else notice the bump the Kestrel engine took during stage separation? On the 40MB video from SpaceX, it happend at 3:28 in or at T+00:02:52 on the screen clock. Maybe this is normal for the engine, but it was rather odd looking to me. So far as is known, it didn't materially affect anything. The nozzle is made of Niobium which is quite malleable, and small dents only mildly modify the efficiency of the engine, and that's one of the known advantages of Niobium over other high temperature metals, and partly why it was used. So it probably only got dinged because they knew they could safely reduce the gap without worrying about the nozzle shattering or something.

Re:What was it carrying?

[decaym]

It was carrying a demo sat, which is just a simlulator for an actual sattelite. There was no paid cargo on this flight. They did have a couple of small test packages from NASA for relaying flight data through the NASA tracking network and testing in flight destruct commanding (not to an actual destruction package I believe). Nothing was going to be in permanent orbit and the Falcon 1 i snot intended to go to the space station.

Re:Insightful...?

[ePhil_One]

I remember the argument I read in the 80's regarding using the Shuttle vs Large Soviet-type rockets to launch the components for the space station, that went something like this: If the goal is to get chunks of this thing into orbit, why build the most complicated machine known to man, with myriads of potential points of failure, when you can use something big and stupid to man-handle stuff into LEO?

1. National Politics. The Shuttle was ours, we had fallen behind on behemoth launchers, and if I recall, efficiency and safety was not a strong point of the Soviets designs. The Soviets assigned a much lower cost to human life, most safety systems were there to avoid embarassment to senior party officials rather than out of concern for Cosmonauts lives
2. The main goal was to get stuff up there, but if you needed someone nearby to do any work with it, then having a shuttle handy is very useful. It also includes a safety aspect, putting something in close orbit to the ISS is the most dangerous time, having the shuttle around for emergencies is handy.

You know, what the poster is trying to say is that after 35+ years of designing, building and launching space vehicles, we should have a high level of mastery of the subject.

And I was pointing out technical mastery of a subject does not equate to success. I have the physics of the slam dunk down, that helps me very little when it comes time to put the ball through the hoop. These guys knew how fast the rocket should rotate, but whatever system(s) they built to control that rate failed when exposed to the heat/vibration/pressure/other forces that the rocket actually generated. They'll now analyze the data to see if a weld broke, the software failed, or whatever triggered the the problem so they can adjust. Mistakes lead to progress. If we always listened to your type we'd still be throwing rocks and hoping to scrape together enough food to survive another week. Farming is an enormously complicated thing versus wandering about gathering berries, too.