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 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.