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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.""
More is learned from failures than successes in most engineering endeavors. Hopefully they'll continue to refine their systems and will enjoy more success next time around.
Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward and the way people act Rutan is the second coming.
Look, they are doing a great job. Second flight at they reached 200 miles! Thats beyond the ISS.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Maybe they just need to keep like they are doing. The whole reason that these guys exist is that 'NASA or Lockeheed or somebody' aren't good enough at it. They are slow, extremely cautious, and amazingly expensive. Outsourcing to them would be the same as doing nothing and is definitely not going to get them where they want to be, business-wise.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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 !
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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.
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.
Also, there was a story earlier that the 2nd launch was delayed "due to concerns over a thrust vector control pitch actuator on the Falcon 1 booster's second stage". I wonder if this came back to bite them?
Finally, I'm impressed as hell that they could experience an abort after engine start yet still cycle back and launch in just another hour! When the Shuttle once aborted after engine start it took them a month to change out the engines and try again.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Do a barrel roll!
Comment:
Sig:What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
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.
World Beach List, my latest project.
And yet we've lost two Space shuttles in recent memory. Space is not easy, rockets are enormously powerful devices that require light weight and experience a vast array of environments. Here a relatively minor thing went wrong, too much rotation, and the whole thing is now gone. Knowing how to do something and actually doing it are radically different things...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
You can have your product done:
Please choose only two of the above options!
In the case of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, they choose options 1 and 2. In the case of SpaceX, they have instead choosen options 1 and 3. This is where they are indeed doing something different than the more traditional companies. That Mr. Musk has deep pockets helps some, but he is trying to do it on the cheap and is willing to have some delays before he can have his dream. For government operations, they have to get results in four years or their budget will be cut (in the USA).
If SpaceX were run like a government agency, they would have had their funding cut already, or some congressional oversight committee that would have mucked up the process by demanding more "oversight" in the form of increased paperwork and bureaucratic Bu**s***. Lucky for them, they only have to answer to one person who nearly everybody in the company knows on a first name basis... and he knows them too.
It's not really the fact that it's not from one of the bloated aerospace giants that makes this cheap (although I'm sure it doesn't hurt). It's also not true that they're not doing something that hasn't been done before. For example, I'm having trouble thinking of any rockets that use their particular mix of pressure and structural stabilization. For example, some Atlas stages use "balloon tanks" that will outright collapse under their weight if not kept pressurized. Most other rockets are structurally stable that, were it not for the lack of propellants, they could launch without being pressurized and remain intact. Pressurization is just added support. The Falcon concept is a hybrid of this: it has enough support that it can be transported and erected unpressurized... barely. This makes transport and handling costs cheaper and less error prone than for balloon tank-based rockets, but gives a higher payload fraction than rockets which have better structural support.
It's not without it's risks, of course. For example, it made the Falcon vulnerable to an accident a while back on Kwaj in which a reduction of pressure when draining a tank caused the tank to buckle. But in general, I think it makes for a nice design.
Falcon really is, for the most part, a "from scratch" rocket, so there's a lot of new ground covered. Not everything is from scratch, of course; I seem to recall, as an example, that their pintle injectors for the Merlin were pretty much borrowed as-is from Apollo. They're also not having to do much materials science, although they helping pioneering some fields (for example, friction-stir welding; a few older rockets have switched to using it as well, but it's still pretty new to rocketry).
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Yep, nay-sayers be damned, but to think this isn't a big, government corporation undertaking this, wasting our tax dollars with endless beaurocracy. This is the product of back yard and garage tinkerers (albeit several generations removed). Who can't look at that webcast and imagine seeing that for real, in the 1st person, someday? It gave me chills when the curvature of the earth came into the frame. I've seen dozens of rocket launches and shuttle launches, but that was pretty unique. Reminds me of when I was in grade school back in the eighties, watching the shuttles go up.
Regardless of the success or failure of the launch, this is mightily impressive. My hat's off.
There is simply too much glass..