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

That's how it works

[dreamchaser]

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.

What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[jezor]

Different result, not "better result." Rutan's Spaceship One is good for one valuable task (human suborbital flights); SpaceX's rockets for a totally different one (cargo lifting orbital flights). Both were formerly the sole province of the governments, so both add to the possibility of private exploration of space. {Prof. Jonathan}

Re:Rocket Science?

[Aladrin]

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.

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 !

Engine bump and second stage control

[decaym]

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.

Incoming message from Slippy:

[dosle]

Do a barrel roll!

Oh the irony.

[devnullkac]

Comment:

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward...

Sig:

Winners compare their achievments to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others

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]

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

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...