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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.
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.
I'd put it next to the carbon footprint of MRIs and medical treatments, and scientific investigation (LHC).
As in, "I don't care"
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
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.
I have no clue. Other than the slight roll oscillation someone else pointed out, I can't figure out what might have caused them to pull the video feed. I mean, the video cuts out at T+00:02:11 when just about nothing is supposed to be happening. Here is the timeline from the press kit available on www.spacex.com
T+00:01:09 - Max Q
T+00:02:20 - Switch to inertial guidance
T+00:02:38 - MECO
So, nothing interesting is going on at the time the video feed is cut, and stage separation doesn't even occur until T+00:02:39 which is about 28 seconds after the feed was cut.
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
Do you know how many dead monkeys there are in space?
A lot.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Project Mercury: six manned launches, all successful. total men in orbit: four. (that's fewer than the Shuttle carries on one flight, by the by.
Project Gemini: ten manned launches, all successful. total men in orbit: sixteen different men - four went up twice.
Shuttle: 123 flights so far, two unsuccesful. total men in orbit: about 800 (I don't feel like checking each flight for actual crew count, so it's only "about")
For the Soyuz fans out there: 99 flights, four unsuccessful (defining unsuccessful as either not reaching orbit or crew dying on reentry) OR ten unsuccessful (defining unsuccessful as ay of the above or failing to complete design mission (usually a failure to dock with Salyut when that was intended mission)), total men in orbit: about 245 (some were launched on one flight, landed on another - I may have miscounted some in sorting those out).
Note that Shuttle had 14 dead in its 123 flights (about 1.6%), Soyuz had four dead on its 99 flights (about 0.8%), but on a per flight basis, Shuttle had a failure rate of about 1.6%, Soyuz about 4% (or 10%), depending on definition of "failure". Neither Gemini nor Mercury suffered any failures (by either definition) but between them they put about 2% of the men into orbit that Soyuz and Shuttle combined did.
Note further that Shuttle put into orbit more men than all other space programs combined. By a factor of three.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I use to work on Kwajalein, and have a friend who was in mission control all day... I can guarantee you they had a lot of VERY expensive camera systems and radar keeping an eye on that launch. I doubt much if any of that data will ever be made public however.
As for the "anomaly" thing, the rocket didn't blow up, they hit the big red panic button to blow it up rather than have one large toxic rocket possibly land on something important (although one of the main reasons the Kwajalein Atoll is used, is because there's not much out there, that and the physics advantages of being near the equator).
"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.
That might be the reason that the government attempts succeed where private ones fail.
But reasons why something is true aren't proof that it's false.
You just proved that the government is better at some big things than private corps are.
And since just spending $billions on complex projects isn't any way to do anything but a lot of expensive work, there's clearly more to success than just a big budget. Even the government knows that.
--
make install -not war
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