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Indian Launch Vehicle Explodes After Lift-Off
Indian communications satellite GSAT-5P was destroyed by the explosion of its launch vehicle, the Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle. The GSLV malfunctioned while still in its first phase of its Christmas launch, after less than a minute of flight. YouTube has a video of the explosion, taken from TV9 Kannada.
On the plus side I'm sure it was cheap.
Some of it is just statistics. Better luck next time.
A much better video in English here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH-0OH0MI2Y
This space for rent.
Pretty!!! That's one expensive fireworks display that they put on for Christmas!
Seriously though, the GSLV seems to have a pretty poor success rate; this is the third of five operational launches to fail.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
And completely misses the fact that several seconds before the first stage goes up in a fireball, the top of the rocket falls off and collides with the first stage.
Someone forgot to apply the indian version of lok-tite to some mating ring bolts. :)
Really goes with the video...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Of course we can, it's our biggest state.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
Merry Christmas?
Sent from my CR-48
You do realize that there's a pretty significant difference between the rockets used to put artificial satellites in orbit and the Space Shuttle, right?
We've been putting artificial satellites into orbit for over 50 years now. While it's complex, it isn't particularly difficult to do. There's a large base of accumulated knowledge on the subject, and these days it can generally be done flawlessly by many different nations and space programs.
The Space Shuttle, on the other hand, is so much more complex. America is the only nation that has been able to pull it off so far. Not only that, but it's not just sending some circuitry and solar panels into orbit. The Space Shuttle was dealing with real people who were to be returned safely. It's quite remarkable that in over 30 years and well over 100 launches there have only been two disasters.
To make a programming analogy that you can understand, this is basically the equivalent of India fucking up a simple "Hello World!" app. It's a fuck up that just shouldn't happen these days.
Just sayin'
Viewing the video, I had the impression that the first stage was unable to keep the rocket straight, which caused a high lateral pressure on the rocket, especially at the top. The top was then taken off by this lateral wind. For a long time the rocket kept the same inclination angle but was progressively destroyed.
So the destruction appears to have been caused by a power drop in the first stage, not by a direct explosion.
My experience with teaching students from India is that they do great on the theory, but in the lab not watch out.
blackberrys fault...
To be fair, Canadians have it easier, just put eh after every letter.
Other than those two, and a few other mishaps, the US has been putting people in space and bringing them back safely for over 40 years.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Why's it so hard to get this thing in orbit? I mean, it's not rocket scie.....wait a minute...
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
...they need you.
Seastead this.
Other than those two, and a few other mishaps,
So what you're saying is that if we exclude every event where things went wrong, the US has a perfect record?
Tell me something, do you work for the Federal Reserve?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I hate to say it but my careful observation (having worked with this particular ethnic group in the last 15 years) says that this culture is not ready for such things yet.
This is largely because:
1) Typical Indian culture tries to do things themselves regardless of whether they know how to do it or not
2) Rather than employing the knowledge base of resources that ARE familiar with such things (can we say, russia, korean or european specialists), as consultants they figure "Hey we are 70% of the consultant workforce anyway.. We can do it ourselves!!!).. sorry guys.. but this isnt someone elses outsourced tech support
3) In response to the above, its likely that said resources simply arent allured to living in india (at this time).. Again no surprise. I suspect as india matures into a more developed nation, this stigma will vanish (hey..most indians will be in america.. Indian real estate will be fairgame to develop into "REAL" estate (apologies for the pun.. i couldnt help it)
I hope someone reading this will ignore the satire and focus on what little wisdom is in this post. I judge not a people by the actions of a few.... I judge a nation by the example set by many
cheers
-crim
Alasondro Alegré has blogged on this at ill.com. He has the proof !!
I didn't know Indian had a Canada.
It looks like they need to do a serious evaluation on it. While it might just be implementation issues, the kind of thing you can work out as you get better, perhaps it is also just not a very good design. At this point I think it needs some serious evaluation.
Wehhehaehteh dehoeh yehoehueh meheehaehneh behyeh tehhehaehteh, eh?
Collided with Santa Claus
GSLV success rate of less than 3/7
The youtube video seems to show the normally arrow straight vapor trail weaving noticeably prior to the explosion, suggesting lost of attitude control.
I think the problem with Indian enterprises is that too many components are likely sourced from outside the country, and too many cooks spoil the broth.
If you can't even make your own say fasteners, it's going to come back and bite you at some point.
Until I have empirical evidence, it didn't happen, it's all hollywood, smoke, and big mirrors.
Hmm, here's one more of our countrymen who's working hard to make our country more hated in the world than it already is. India happens to be the only major country in Asia which still has an overwhelmingly positive perception of the US (over 65% as per surveys), but jackasses like this guy are trying hard to reverse that and earn us the title of "the universally hated nation". Seriously moron, get a life.
it's just like my boss was telling me the other day "test more frequently and thoroughly, cuz ur shit's unstable"
Until I have empirical evidence, it didn't happen, it's all hollywood, smoke, and big mirrors.
U are wrong I have it from the source via Wikileaks the mirrors were not that big.
To be fair, three out of seven GSLV launches have failed. No US space program has that failure rate, even if you don't exclude the mishaps.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
American children have a saying...
'When you point a finger at me, three point back at you."
Re-read your rant and think about it.
Maybe there are some Kannada-ians out there who can explain some of the commentary? What does it say next to the arrow? It's pretty hard to enter the text into a translator (if such a thing even exists for Kannada) if you don't know how to use an input method editor for the language...
Your response to a singular fucking racist is to call all Americans racist.
Congratulations, you're the bigger racist.
The rocket, which was loaded with 150 untouchable astronauts hanging off the outside, swerved to avoid hitting a sacred cow that had just jumped over the moon?
I am sure these fireworks will keep the millions upon millions of illiterate and starving Indian citizens entertained and ahppey.
No need to translate!
Hmm, probably there was a copy of stuxnet on board ...
Maybe, just like the amount of money America spends on wars keeps the American illiterate and homeless very happy, not to mention the immense benefit it is providing to the recession-hit debt-ridden American economy.
While I agree that the GP's behavior is silly, rude and detestable, it is almost just as rude to assume that he's an American (less so because this site is predominately US inhabited).
Maybe, just like the amount of money America spends on wars keeps the American illiterate and homeless very happy, not to mention the immense benefit it is providing to the recession-hit debt-ridden American economy.
Yes and no. I applaud India for wanting to have the ability to launch satellites: the economic benefits from advanced weather prediction alone have been worth the investment. So investing in space is not automatically a matter of taking food from the mouths of starving children. Helping farmers produce more food, more reliably, does the exact opposite in fact.
Ultimately, the problem is one of critical mass, getting enough self-sustaining infrastructure in space so that we can begin to exploit resources elsewhere in the System.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Slashdot Posts: 137
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Ahem, excuse me, Mr. Indian Nation; turns out a side effect of "replacing" many of the math, science, and IT jobs within the Western world would be a serious lack of "Fuck" given to your "Space Programme".
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
I am sorry sir, but it is YOUR ignorance that is showing here. A launch vehicle capable of getting a lot of mass as far as geostationary orbit is not simple either.
Or on the other hand perhaps he is not generalising to the entire population of two continents and you have failed to comprehend what it written. I take it as generalising to the poorly educated, ignorant, jingoistic portion of the population that would write an ignorant pile of steaming manure such as the post he replied to. Instead it appears you see the word "American", ignore the context, then think it is aimed at yourself, George Washington and apple pie.
He's not yelling at you, simply at the smug "USA is greatest and the rest are all monkeys yawl" in the post prior to it.
We see time and time again that the Indians are stupid people who live in the mud, whose people ride on top of trains like monkeys and whose feeble attempts at technology always end up in failure. I speak from experience when I point out that companies only offshore work to India when they can afford to have it get screwed up by the trained monkeys over there.
I saw the video of the gentlemen running the consoles. As soon as the launch went South, these two scientists vanished. It reminded me of what it's like trying to find an accountable manager in an offshoring project.
In the rocket video, the two leaders were gone the instant there was trouble and then they came back only to say they were going off air. They behaved like children or monkeys with no attempt to explain the catastrophic failure that all had just witnessed.
That still doesn't explain why in the hell ANYBODY is using rockets for non live payloads these days.Lets face it: Rockets are damned dangerous, expensive, depending on which fuel you use can dump a ton of crap into the atmosphere, it just doesn't seem like the most efficient way to go about it.
I still say Gerald Bull had the right idea almost 50 years ago, first with Project HARP and finally with Project Babylon which ultimately got him killed. I think his idea was just so far ahead it wasn't feasible with the technology he had to work with, and now it is.
We all know the US Navy has successfully been firing a Mach 8 railgun and just as it was military rockets that got our first payloads into space, so too do I believe this military technology is the key to lowering the costs of launches and even making manned missions to Mars possible, by combining this technology with HARP.
Imagine a railgun set up on lets say a mountain in the Marshall Islands. The rail gun would allow the craft to build up incredible speeds before launch, and then at the top of the trajectory a much smaller and more economical solid fuel rocket would carry it the last leg. A good 90% of the fuel used is cutting through the lower atmosphere and building up escape velocity which the railgun would take care of. We already know how to generate, store, and release large amounts of electricity, so this wouldn't require any exotic new technology we don't currently possess, and finally this would allow quick turn around and large payloads with more reasonable cost, and we could use the money generated by launching commercial payloads to help offset the costs of our exploration. We could launch unmanned sections which would be put together in space and allow exploration of Mars and other relatively close neighbors.
We have been using rockets since the 50s, and while the costs have gone down some they really haven't gone down enough to really open space up to us. With resources being used up in an ever increasing rate and by an ever growing population, exploration for new resources and places to colonize like Mars will require new ways of doing things if we are ever gonna really get out there. As Stephen Hawking said "The human race must colonise space within the next two centuries or face oblivion". I don't believe we can achieve that goal with rocket tech but we can using Gerald Bull's idea.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They called the helpline, but could not understand the accent :)
Mr Rocked Engineer dude could you please do the needful?
Its nothing in front of 2G telecom ($22 billion) and many huge scams. :)
don't stop... keep going
I would like to know what "mountain" in the Marshall Islands you are talking about that would be suitable here? Most of that country is a bunch of coral atolls that are just a few meters above sea-level, and the combined land area of the entire country is about comparable to a small typical mid-western county in America, or one of the smaller counties in the UK. That isn't a whole lot of room to be able to build something on the scale you are talking about here. It is a fine place to launch rockets because there is a whole lot of nothing around at least in terms of people and houses if you decide to launch from the area in a rocket.
You might be able to find some more appropriate mountains in Indonesia, but regardless there are some substantial problems that come from any sort of similar kind of system. By far and away the largest problem is simply the sheer amount of initial capital that would be required to put one of these systems together. Land acquisition costs would be the minor part, where purchasing part of Manhattan and demolishing several acres of buildings would be by comparison cheap.
Sure, you can build demonstrator projects that can show the principles of the system... you've already suggested that has been done repeatedly so the initial statement "why in the hell ANYBODY is using rockets for non live payloads these days" should be painfully obvious: because nobody can afford to build the system necessary to get it to work out. For what is by definition an untried and unproven system (these things don't just scale up to larger sizes) not only are private businesses unwilling to spend money on something that may not bring any sort of financial return, governments are equally unwilling to spend that kind of money on an untried and unproven system too.
Rockets at least can be built in somebody's garage at the price a mere mortal can afford, even if you happen to be an independently wealthy millionaire to start out with. They can make it out into space, and have done so by multiple groups of people in multiple countries around the world. I don't know what a man-rated railgun system that would be capable of putting an astronaut into low-earth orbit would cost right off the top of my head, but it is at least in the hundred billion dollar or larger size budget if I had to guess, possibly trillions of dollars. Even a purely cargo system carrying just fuel or water (which can be turned into fuel when in orbit) would hardly be cheap.
Such a railgun system might be more economically feasible than a space elevator or some other kind of crazy systems that have been proposed, but I would dare argue you don't even know the engineering questions that need to be asked if you build such a system. There are certainly a great many reasons why it hasn't been built, and the Marshall Islands would be in particular a lousy place to build such a system, for a great many reasons.
GSLV will be back ...
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34612834
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34647708
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1922942&cid=34665368
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1924664&cid=34669668
An amazing amount of India bashing in this discussion.
Let's see what those evil Indians did to earn such wrath.
Uh... They got jobs.
Was it any of the reasonable criticisms of the Indian nation? (as all nations have things they can be criticised for)
No, not really. Some of them are trotted out as insults, but what's the real reason for them being so hated? They got jobs.
They had the unmitigated gall to go out and try to support themselves by manning call centers and doing IT work. Sometimes moving from where they were to Bangalore and other cities.
What utterly monstrous evil scheming wretchs.
How dare they get jobs.
I haven't heard so much vitrol toward a country since Steelworker's union and UAW meetings 30 years ago discussing the Japanese.
You're a doubly-confirmed fucking moron.
Any attempts at explanations in the heat of the moment make no sense, because you'd be pretty much making shit up. No one explained anything right after Challenger's blow-up, and you'll hardly find anyone anywhere explaining anything before the formal investigation gets going and they have an inkling as to what happened. If you want to listen to some hilarity, find Challenger broadcasts on youtube, right after the explosion.
As for the "launch going South" and the "monkeys" at the consoles: the launch is controlled by on-board systems as soon as the umbilicals retract. You could, pretty much, shut everything down in the command center and go home just then, as far as the launch vehicle is concerned. Payload is another matter, but then it's often controlled from a different control center. The people at the consoles -- after the liftoff -- are there pretty much only to make sure they get all the telemetry -- that's one of the real assets from every launch, and worth millions of dollars easy.
So, once again: past-liftoff, the only souls on the ground you care about in an unmanned mission are the payload controllers and range safety.
As for riding on trains like monkeys: I'd take that any day over the sue-happy, mind-the-hot-beverage and don't-let-toddlers-play-with-plastic-baggies warn-people-or-else mentality, thankyouverymuch.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Consider what the announcers had to say when the Challenger blew up:
So we see in the case of the Challenger explosion, the pros at NASA had a lot to say, all of it observational and pertinent.
Rockets at least can be built in somebody's garage
Actually I built two on the kitchen table this Thanksgiving after dinner. Took me about an hour, with a glass of good scotch in one hand during most of the construction.
Cost me about $50 all inclusive (two rocket kit w/ launch pad, a dozen motors, and a glass of Glenrothes), and the larger of the two cleared the 1000' mark (~300 meters) on the second flight.
Here is the exact kit I used. They have two stage rockets that will clear 2000' for less than $50.
When we stand on the shoulders of giants, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
India, please do the needful.
Major malfunction my ass. That was the hilarious bit you've picked up on just as I wanted you to. Don't you see the ridiculousness of it? It's no worse and no better than the Indian response. It belongs in a comedy skit.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
'major malfunction'?
it fucking blew up!!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
India will be 3rd world slum forever, if for no other reason than the cadre of delusional posers that surfaces everytime to claim Indian credit for everything others have done.
If Indians are so capable why is their home country a total fucking uranus
I'm surprised these wannabe posers haven't claim credit for water being wet.
Delta III
Does it mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1 is a fluke?
Govt must constitute a panel to rewrite US Constitution and Quran