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SpaceX Launch Fails To Reach Space
azuredrake and many other readers have written to tell us:
"The New York Times reports that the third SpaceX launch has failed following the second-stage ignition of the Falcon 1 rocket. The SpaceX launch had three satellites on board, all of which were presumably destroyed in the incident. This marks the third failed launch for SpaceX — twice they failed to reach orbit, and once the Falcon 1 rocket was lost five minutes after launch. While the company vows to carry on, this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry."
Reader Nano2Sol points out a video of the launch from a camera on Falcon 1, and notes a small oscillation just prior to the footage being cut off. Spaceflight Now ran a mission update blog leading up to the failure, and they also have more coverage on the loss of the rocket.
...and a whole industry is pronounced dead. Can you be more dramatic?
Musk's Giant Firework Company seriously believe they can have Falcon 9 up and running in a few months, and have people inside it 'soon' afterwards.
I've said it before and this seems to confirm it - entrepreneurs aren't good at rocket science. They look at government funded space programs, and see the redundancy as waste and the precision as bureaucracy. Then when they try and do space cheaper without these things, there are predictably explosions.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The New York Time reports that the rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series.
Statesman
this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry.
The government failed quite a few times before they got anything up. Let's not write off private space travel because of three failures.
Yea, right. That is what they told Thomas Edison.
What's the global warming footprint on these things?
this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry."
It's official. Netcraft now confirms...
ah fuckit
Hey, I'm a child of the 60s. I watched every launch, and attempted launch, that I could. I can't tell you the number of times that NASA blew things up in those early days. Had they quit after only three failures, the world would be a very, very different place today.
Keep launching SpaceX! You'll succeed and the world will change again...
I watched this launch last night as it was happening and it was quite a thrilling experience. Better than any NASA launch I have ever seen. They aborted the launch a few times but still went for it. The camera they had on the rocket as it lifted off gave a breathtaking view of the Earth very slowly ascending from it's island launchpad location. Then it just crapped out before it looked like it was anywhere near orbit. I wasn't sure if the mission had been a success or not until the webcast updated that it had been a failure. This is totally awesome. We've been hearing about Space-X on Slashdot for years but this is the first time I've ever given them any real attention. They have 2 more of these Falcon-1 rockets ready, and another launch window near the end of this month. Musk seems absolutely determined to succeed, and I would suspect in 10-15 years these Space-X guys will be the next Lockheed Martin or Boeing.
Spaceflight Now ran a mission update blog leading up to the failure, and they also have more coverage on the loss of the rocket.
Both of these links tell us nothing we didn't already know. Nothing like following a link labeled "more coverage" to get an almost word-for-word repeat of the blog.
You'd think they would have a camera filming the launch from the ground somewhere. You can't rely on the camera onboard the vehicle to provide you with any helpful information in the moments of and after an "anomaly". (why do they always call it that? why can't they just say "it blew up"?)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The US Apollo Program suffered only two major setbacks: Apollo 1 killed 3 astronauts, and Apollo 13, already in space, nearly killed its 3 astronauts, but didn't. That programme went from nearly nothing to the Moon in 7 years. With no precedents, with a much lower technology level than today, feeding on a much smaller pool of scientists and engineers, managing a vastly more complex project from scratch.
Not bad for government work.
Today, we watch as several parallel teams take decades just to reach orbit. With much higher base technology, and also knowing it can be done, because the Apollo Program (and other government programmes) proved it before.
Government might be better at some kinds of undertakings. At the very least, government is at least as good as private enterprise in some undertakings. And some undertakings that government has achieved are the greatest accomplishments humans have ever achieved.
--
make install -not war
The argument that space exploration moved to the private sector won't work has flaws.
NASA and it's CONTRACTORS that actually build the ships for NASA have lots of experience gained during the many many failures throughout the 1950s and 1960s. I also would be surprised if these private companies are sharing their knowledge with these start-ups. And lastly, almost all NASA designs are derivatives of the same tried and tested designs, these new small companies are trying out different concepts and ideas which have to go through their trial and failure test cycles.
Well, that sucks. Still, this is rocket science. Never mind, there's always next time.
Incidentally: why does the RocketCam footage always cut off the instant anything goes wrong? That's happened on all the Falcon 1 flights so far. Even if the vehicle gets destroyed by Range Safety, you'd expect at least a few seconds between something going wrong and the decision to terminate being made. Instead, every time we apparently transition from flying (relatively) normally to no data. Given that RocketCams typically have their own downlink connection and, I assume, power, I'd have thought that we should see something --- indeed, on termination there's a chance that we could see some views of the debris before everything goes silent.
Anyone know anything about this?
No, it doesn't. It raises questions about SpaceX and their ability to produce a launch vehicle with an acceptable flight record. It raises questions about private willingness to accept failure on a design they think is fundamentally sound. It doesn't raise any more questions about the "future" of private spaceflight than when an Pegasus blows up or when SeaLaunch has a failure. The ENTIRE spaceflight communit owes a debt to and exists on a continuum of government influence. That doesn't make government the only entity that can test those waters. It just means that in the 20th century spaceflight was subsidized heavily, by and large. Since the entire industry was basically created by government action and most products either had only a government use or were dual use, even corporations who were ostensibly private relied on these pioneering steps made by governments. Even with that in mind, plenty of companies out there operate without government subsidy--and if you consider a government contract earned (and not a subsidy....but I don't), many do so. There are THOUSANDS of companies supporting private aerospace and private spaceflight, just not exclusively.
We need to get out of the mindset of "only government can do X". Sometimes that is true. Sometimes governments are the only ones who can provide certain services (or more accurately, they are the only ones willing to). But in the case of spaceflight, this is not always true. In the 1960's, only government was willing to go to space because the cost was large and the payoff in dollar terms was small (and highly uncertain). By the 1970's cable companies and phone companies were paying to go into space. IF the space race had never happened, we would probably have built launch vehicles to enter low earth orbit anyway. It would have come later (maybe much later), but it would have happened.
Failures don't represent a fundamental flaw in an industry. SpaceX had insurance, so this failure is not financially fatal for them--insurance is a good counter to the argument of "too much risk" in private spaceflight. If they fail, someone else will take up the mantle.
As the Onion News put it after the Columbia Tragedy
In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, many are questioning the wisdom and necessity of NASA's manned-space-flight program. What do you think?
Bill Kuntz,
Auto Mechanic
"The space program should be scrapped. Fourteen deaths in 20 years? Imagine seeing those kinds of statistics in, say, the trucking industry."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It seemed like it was a technical success to me. The rocket may have failed in the end, but it didn't explode on the launch pad and it got to a substantial height. They are being pretty careful. They stopped the first launch at T-00:00, the rocket had already started its engine! The failure had to do with the stages not separating, which sounds to me like a fairly easy fix for next time.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Good thing they launched from kwaj, so they're not raining space junk down on the continental US.
Liability and insurance rates will probably put and end to private space rockets
I've said it before and this seems to confirm it - entrepreneurs aren't good at rocket science. They look at government funded space programs, and see the redundancy as waste and the precision as bureaucracy. Then when they try and do space cheaper without these things, there are predictably explosions.
You learn by doing, and that includes learning by failing. Space-X is learning a lot.
Basically, when you try to revolutionize an industry, you have to accept some risk, and that means risk of failures along the way.
I'm still cheering them on. Space-X has changed from a group of charmingly enthusiastic but naive innocents into a team of battle-scarred rocket veterans, and done it the hard way. The space entrepreneuring field has far too many naive innocents that promote paper spaceships, and far too few steely-eyed rocket veterans. While I'm saddened and even horrified that they lost their third rocket, nevertheless, if they can hold their team together and stay focussed despite the stumbles along the way, I'll say, keep at it, Space-X; keep at it!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Come on people. It's not like this is rocket sci----OH. Nevermind, carry-on.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Many fans of SpaceX encourage the company to carry on, pointing out that NASA's current success rose out of numerous early failures.
That's fine and dandy, but if SpaceX truly is a PRIVATE space launch company, let the failures be paid for by PRIVATE INVESTMENT and NOT BY PUBLIC FUNDING.
How many cars and car parts do you think get tested, smashed, and redesigned before sold to people? It's called development. How many computers are stress-tested before being sold at a local Big Box store? Don't want those things burning down the house. It's called development. Development (and thus failures) are a natural step in the evolution of good things. Build something. Test it until it breaks. Go back to the lab and improve the design. Repeat. The problem that SpaceX has is the test models are very expensive - so where a regular business would test 100 door latches produced for homes to see if they can open/shut 100k times each without breaking, they have one or two parts that cost more than an entire subdivision of homes and you get to experiment once. Meanwhile everyone is watching every "test" - not like finding out if a batch of turn-signal light bulbs fail after three blinks in the bulb-makers development lab resulting in a decision to test with larger filaments - no shocking news story but real situations that go on with everything people use. When you have a rocket problem then the news feeds pick it up. SpaceX issue here still seems like progress.
What ever happened to John Carmack's rocket company?
and outside pressures were allowed to override sound engineering decisions.
Apollo 1 happened because of a combination of "Go Fever" (the pressure to beat the Soviets to the moon) and poor workmanship by a PRIVATE INDUSTRY contractor (North American Aviation).
Challenger happened because Reagan wanted to use the "Teacher in Space" as a talking point at the next night's State of the Union address, and political pressure caused NASA to override the recommendations of the booster engineers who knew about the behavior of the SRB joint O-rings in cold weather, and launch despite their objections.
While Columbia was damaged because of lingering unresolved problems with ET foam shedding, her crew could possibly have been saved if NASA listened to their own engineers, and took high-resolution images of the shuttle while on-orbit. The extent of the damage would have been made clear long before reentry was attempted, and a rescue mission could have been launched.
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I mean, it's not rocket scien...
Oh.
, when the technologies behind rocket propulsion were still in their infancy.
Nowadays, there is a half-century of experience with which types of designs work and which don't, freely available to the private industry groups. Despite all this, a private group has yet to even equal the abilities of the X-15 rocketplane, much less reach orbit or land on the moon.
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There were 2 "near misses" on Gemini VIII, when an attitude thruster stuck on and sent the spacecraft into a violent roil, while the spacecraft was out of radio contact between tracking stations. It is only because of the skill of the command pilot (a rookie named Neil Armstrong) that he and his crewmate Dave Scott weren't thrown off into deep space never to return.
Scott Carpenter's Mercury flight could easily have gone horribly wrong, as well. Due to a malfunctioning autopilot, he depleted his maneuvering fuel, and had to line up for re-entry manually, nearly missing the narrow entry corridor and burning up.
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NASA's failures have happened when bureaucracy and outside pressures were allowed to override sound engineering decisions.
And? This just underlines the grandparent's point. Entrepreneurs might cut corners to save money. Governments cut corners for other reasons. Nothing inherently superior about the government approach though it is more expensive.
Why do so many people think there is a "chinese wall" between NASA and private?
As far as I know, NASA provides management and taxpayer funds to private industry. And private industry has a history of successfully building NASA projects.
The difference appears to be in the money and the management.
Can private industry "manage" things better than the government? And are taxpayer funds necessary?
A management scheme is a management scheme. However consider the profit motive. There is pressure on private industry to maximize shareholder income.
When NASA funds industry, it is typically a fixed price or "cost plus" contract...usually government accountants go through the books occasionally and check that minimal Fraud/Waste/Abuse is occurring.
There are a lot of government haters posting here. But ground breaking research, like that NASA funds, is way too expensive for privateers.
SpaceX and Scaled Composites ("Sir" Richard Branson and Burt Rutan) can brag about private industry all they want, and denigrate NASA and the taxpayers, but the reality is they use a lot of science and materials that most likely would not exist unless the taxpayers had funded it decades ago. You're welcome, guys.
I'm glad the government does checking on industry that receives taxpayer dollars. The last thing we need is Enron (or that type of management/executive staff) stealing taxpayer's dollars any more than they already do.
It turns out the government is more competent than the private sector. Socialism actually works.
I probably won't have the funds for whatever they will charge to take me into space, however if I did, I don't think I would trust their spaceline's maiden voyage. Maybe after their first year of operation I'd be tempted.
Ave Molech Setting
The secrecy surrounding this incident is stunning.
It is completely unacceptable if private enterprises can limit or deny the public information about incidents happening in space exploration.
In the case of private space travel, there should be completely open and public crash investigations like in the airline industry.
The last launch failed because of a stage separation problem too. It seems to me that stage separation is one of those things that they can't realistically test on the ground, so it's impossible to verify that a design will work reliably without actually launching the rocket. Maybe they should consider copying the stage separation mechanism of a successful rocket to avoid having this happen on their next launch.
Still going:
http://armadilloaerospace.com/
Regards
elFarto
So lets get to my original point. Just because more people have died on the shuttle than in the Soyuz doesn't automatically mean the Soyuz safer. Why? The Soyuz and shuttle have had the same failure rate of spacecraft with humans aboard. Except instead of 14 people dying, four people died because at the time only one cosmonaut was aboard Soyuz 1 and three aboard Soyuz 11. Okay, is that perfectly clear? Comparing the safety of a spacecraft only on the number of fatalities is stupid, especially when those two spacecraft are completely different in the number of people they can carry.
"While the company vows to carry on, this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry."
I cannot imagine that there exists on this world one person knowledgable in the field that would not have been hellishly impressed if SpaceX HAD succeded on their third try.
Actually BEING knowledgable in the field I can state with some authority that the poster is not.
Name one new launch vehicle that was succesful on its third launch. No derivatives allowed. And this isn't just a new vehicle, but a new everything. The whole stack, all newly designed.
It took over two years to determine the correct process to START the space shuttle main engines. To START them. The engine was already designed and built.
While unfortunate, this launch failure only proves that point which is already well known: engineering launch vehicles is damned hard.
Why should we expect the "private" space industry to work any differently than the "private" pharmaceutical industry, the "private" energy industry, or any of the other industries that reap the benefits of public sector research and resources.
"Privatize the profits, Socialize the costs" seems to be the way of the "free market", no?
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Yes, but Welshie's ashes are still safe on Omega 3, presumably kept as a collectible by Melllvar.
Given what's been said about Jimmy Doohan's negative personality quirks, I'm guessing some remaining Star Trek actors may not be terribly concerned....
sigfault (core dumped)
...and with this failure, portending the death of private space exploitation, the final, fatal, failure of humanity cannot be far behind.
How's that?
No, it raises questions about the viability of this particular company.
Liberty in your lifetime
You may be surprised to learn that NASA'a blown up quite a few rockets as well.
A separation problem. The last failure was related to separation as well. - The stages "hit" resulting in full sloshing. The first idea that comes to mind is the explosive bolts. Tradtionaly considered to be extremely reliable, but have been causing trouble recently with the Soyuz re-entry. I wonder why? Do the US and the USSR have old stock that is not ageing well? Anyhow, I will follow Spacex with enthusiasm and optimism :-)
Anyway, I didn't understand why SpaceX choose an entirely new design, instead of a tried and tested engine. Doesn't seems like a good idea.
Trivial really. If he buys from others, they control price and tech. Right now, he CONTROLS his company and the price. More important, the engines have performed DEAD ON. The first failure was due to a fuel line leak caused by corrosion. The second was due to engine running out of fuel to the engine(several reasons caused that). The third remains, but the first stage worked. It was separation that was the problem. IOW, then engines have done great.
Finally, his engines ARE tried and tested. A lot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To me it looks as if they had a serious engine failure: The color of the exhaust is not normal. It starts with some clouds, then it becomes black smoke. Normally they tune the engines to the point that there is certainly no black smoke coming from them. (that would indicate incomplete oxidation, which would mean inefficient, and you would not want to hoist unusable fuel in your rocket)
There will be women astronauts. And we'll all live in cities on the moon!
The first flight was a test and had experiments for air force students. The feds paid for the launch. I seriously doubt there was insurance. The 2'nd had no payload. The 2'nd had a demo sat. The 3'rd had a gov load as well as some minor projects riding for free. I seriously doubt that ANY insurance money was involved. More importantly, I doubt anybody will be willing to until they see 2 or more successful launches. Then they will. I am hopeful that the next launch is a winner. And I suspect that it will be before Nov. time frame. The simple fact is, they have no problems whit engines. I would guess that having their rocket sit on the pad for so long probably allowed some corrosion on a wiring. Hopefully, they did not blow the rocket, but we will find out.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Looks like our independent rocket jocks underestimated the power of pogo for their particular type of rocket. Pogo resonance is a big enemy to the spacefaring boosters
dependent upon design of the engine and pump mechanisms.
How much money was spent developing EELV ? No less than several Billions. More importantly, how much does each launch costs NOW? 150-200 million for a heavy. Even a lightweight is over 100 million.
So, we go with Shuttle. Oops, 1 billion/launch.
Ok, how about ares? Oh, that is no less than 7 billion JUST to get the ares I up by 2014-2015. What will launch costs be? Well, Right now, the SRB are the most expensive part of the shuttle.
Gee, how much is this private stuff costing the feds? Less than 1 billion for BOTH companies. Hmmmmm. Sounds like a good investment by the feds.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nobody will be flying them in the first year. Even the dragon is expected to be cargo only for the first year until they get a few loads up there SAFELY. The really good news, is that the falcon I is designed to be where all these issues are worked out. The same engine will be used in the falcon 9. The same software will be used in the falcon 9. Much of the same equipment will be used. All in all, they are working out their bugs REAL cheap, and then will put up the falcon 9. I suspect that at MOST, they will have 1 failure of a 9, and even that will surprise me.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While what he's doing certainly isn't space travel but he's engaging in a somewhat dangerous voyage in a privatized way. Here's to hoping he gets out on his maiden trip better than this. This seems to be bad for the private space industry as a whole though. The only company that's legitimately in the business has failed repeatedly. I wonder what the results would be if we saw contracting companies like Boeing and Lockheed try..
Just throwing money at it doesn't guarantee success, but the upfront engineering, process controls and testing is money well spent. Launches are expensive and failed launches are extremely expensive.
"Cap'n Cap'n I can nawt geet it oop... I gawta have thutty minutes."
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
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Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Good luck trying to find info on NASA's unmanned launcher success... they don't have one. When NASA needs to launch a satellite they use a Delta II or Atlas V, depending on the size of the satellite and where it's going.
And they have extremely good success with those vehicles. The failures you think you've seen are with the satellites themselves, not the launch vehicle. My work is launching rockets, so I have a bit of insight into this. The only failed launches in the major private industry that I can remember were the first flights of the Delta IV Heavy config and the Delta III test vehicle. Yeah, there have been some anomalies with second stages that caused the satellite to either not make the intended orbit (but still be mostly usable) or not get as close as they wanted.
As far as your statement that
"presumably their unmanned launchers have a considerably worse record simply because unmanned launchers always have a considerably worse record."
Well, that's just incorrect. Manned spacecraft are considerably more complex than unmanned, and whenever something is more complex there is a greater chance for part of it to fail. Also, the Space Shuttle design just sucks balls. There's a reason the new launcher designs are going back to the Apollo style vehicle. The Delta II has had only one total failure out of 136 launches with over 81 successful launches in a row (around 99% success rate). The Atlas II went 100% with 63/63 successful launches. The Atlas V is at 14 launches with only a partial failure during the coast of the second stage.
Three launch failures of a brand spanking new rocket is nothing unusual in this field.
Actually, nowadays it is. The Delta II, Atlas II, Atlas V, Delta IV (non-heavy), Atlas III, Arianne, etc all had zero failures for their first three launches (as far as I've found). The Shuttle took many launches before its first failure. The major difference is what SpaceX is trying to do: they want to make their launches be their check out tests. They don't test components on the ground very much before flying. That's how they save so much money: they just don't test. THAT is why they fail 100% of the time. As you can probably tell, I heavily disagree with this philosophy. Lockheed and Boeing probably had tons of failures during ground tests, but they didn't affect the first flight because they had tested every component 100 times. SpaceX doesn't test nearly as much so of course there will be spectacular failures.
Your overall point that NASA's success rate is low is still valid, though.
IANAL, but I play one on