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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.
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. :)
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.
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.
Then, you'll probably explain how India managed to launch 30+ rockets successfully in the past, and launched one rocket successfully to the moon as well?
See, this is what I detest about Americans. The sheer smugness, ignorance, arrogance and incredible lack of knowledge is mind boggling. We have all this careful "analysis" and "observation" in the parent's post, and I'll bet my ass that this chap didn't know anything about the past record of the Indian space program and simply jumped in to post an inane comment, assuming that "hey, it's Eeeendiaaa, them tech support guys, laaats of them can't speak proper English, so how can they launch rockets?" Disgusting.
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.
We're not all like that.
Unfortunately the vocal idiots make us look much worse than most of us really are.
Wehhehaehteh dehoeh yehoehueh meheehaehneh behyeh tehhehaehteh, eh?
They do, it's just spelled "Pakistan".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm an American, and I detest some, maybe even many, Americans for much the same reasons that the rest of the world does. But we're not all like that - imagine how disgusted and embarrassed we are about some of the crap done in the name of the US?
Until I have empirical evidence, it didn't happen, it's all hollywood, smoke, and big mirrors.
Certainly not. A few components, early on in ISROs history - sure. But not "most of it". Remember that India's foreign policy leaned towards the Soviets while being "non-aligned" officially, but neither did India have a Warsaw pact kind of treaty with them, nor was India ever communist, and the Soviets never fully trusted India. There was no way the Soviets would have given us full fledged space tech. From their perspective, there was no guarantee that in India's democratic model, the pro-capitalist opposition parties would not gain strength some day, making India move closer to the USA. In the eventuality of such an event, unlike East European countries, the Soviets, having no influence within India, would have been able to do nothing to prevent such a course of events.
Anyhow, this is irrelevant to the discussion here. I was just pointing out the stupidity of the grandparent post.
Certainly not. A few components, early on in ISROs history - sure. But not "most of it".
According to this article, the earlier versions of this rocket used Russian engines, and they lost another one in April due to replacing Russian engines with Indian engines:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indigenous-engines-bring-down-GSLV/articleshow/5814028.cms
Then, you'll probably explain how India managed to launch 30+ rockets successfully in the past, and launched one rocket successfully to the moon as well?
See, this is what I detest about Americans. The sheer smugness, ignorance, arrogance and incredible lack of knowledge is mind boggling. We have all this careful "analysis" and "observation" in the parent's post, and I'll bet my ass that this chap didn't know anything about the past record of the Indian space program and simply jumped in to post an inane comment, assuming that "hey, it's Eeeendiaaa, them tech support guys, laaats of them can't speak proper English, so how can they launch rockets?" Disgusting.
Either you are that stupid to not realize not all Americans are like, or you have been waiting for a "good" opportunity to level a disgusting generalization of us. Either way, you are not that much better from those you seek to criticize. I've meet quite a few tards from your own country (and from Pakistan) that claim as scientific stupid shit like the Romans couldn't do arithmetic while the Indians of the time could or some other inane shit to prop themselves above every other single race in the world.
It would never cross my mind to think about generalizing that stupidity over all people of your country. Guess why? It's called brains. You (and I mean you Bangalorean), you might be educated, but intelligent and decent, you are not. Until you realize how stupid it is to generalize, you will never be.
Meh.
People everywhere are short-sighted, mistake-making, bozos if you expect too much of them. We Americans have spent the last century parading around the globe talking about how high our ideals are. Often I've been in agreement with them, but we shouldn't be surprised if people hold us to some kinds of standards.
Detest, hate, these are very strong words. LIfe's too short to feel that way about anyone, if you can help it.
Oh come on. You can't possibly expect everyone to know that.
Those aren't nearly as interesting as the one that exploded on YouTube.
No, that's more of India's al-Qaeda. Or everyone's, really.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Calm down, he's just frustrated that we don't like Cricket.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
I was going to say "Blame Kannada!"
Have gnu, will travel.
See, this is what I detest about Americans. The sheer smugness, ignorance, arrogance and incredible lack of knowledge is mind boggling.
So, we're both ignorant and suffering from an incredible lack of knowledge? Wow, we must all be pretty stupid then, low-IQ sub-humans who can, at best, feed ourselves and perhaps learn to tie our own shoes. I guess all the scientific, technological and military progress we've made in the past century is just a figment of your fevered imagination.
... but in none of those cases do I assume that I can extend my knowledge of them to make any judgment whatsoever about their fellow citizens. To do so is bigotry, and the picture you just painted of yourself is one of a bigot.
... well my friend, in this thread you're it.
See, this is what I detest about bigoted non-Americans. Matter of fact, I detest it in anyone, from any society. This bland assumption that one can extrapolate from obviously limited experience with another people (in this case, to a nation of some THREE HUNDRED MILLION) goes beyond merely mind-boggling to being truly Biblical in nature. For myself, I know people from a variety of different cultures: some are remarkable individuals, some are truly ignorant, and some are just assholes
I wish you would just read back your own message, and ask yourself, "How would I feel if someone made such an uninformed, demeaning remark about my country, my people? Would I like it?"
I rather suspect you're not capable of such intellectual honesty, but that's not my problem, fortunately.
I recommend that you just grow up. It's hard, but once you do you start to see a lot of good in people of other countries. It's a big world out there, and not everyone is as they seem, not everyone can be placed into neat little pigeonholes in order to satisfy your ego, your need for some feeling of superiority. If anyone is being smug, arrogant, and expressing ignorance
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Calm down, he's just frustrated that we don't like Cricket.
Yeah. Or soccer (I mean, football.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
YouTube Views: 436
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.
The sheer smugness, ignorance, arrogance and incredible lack of knowledge is mind boggling.
...speaks the person who is not arrogant ;-)
Seriously, why get wrapped around the axle on this? The US has 300 million people; India, one billion. It should be apparent that we've got a diversity of people in both places. RELAX, smoke a bhang, take a walk, build a another rocket, etc.
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.
Sir, the vast majority of your population is illiterate, lives in the mud and rides on the tops of trains. Your country and its workers are famous--like it or not--for producing crap with poor quality. Whether it's your software (I have a decade of experience with this) or your total lack of innovation in any field, Indian equals crap. Your me-too space program is a joke. Your previous launches worked because they used foreign made parts, such as the Russian cryogenic engines. The only thing India is justly famous for is its movies and religions. Neither one has any need for quality control. Your caste system is inhuman and another reason why your rich and privileged are soft, lazy, uncreative and useless. Working in an office with Indians means dealing with Indian men who don't even have the courtesy to flush their own toilets. They behave like little children.
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.
Kannada is a language.
Sent from my desktop computer
Oh, but if you want to hear real bigotry against Indians, you have to talk to Pakistanis.
Truly amazing some of things I've heard them say.
But, to be fair, I've certainly heard some pretty bigoted remarks by Indians about Pakistanis.
Didn't India get most of its rocket technology from the USSR?
And do you know where the USSR got most of their rocket technology? Yes, it was from the same source as the US got theirs.
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.
I'm Indian. I wasn't a registered member of slashdot for a long time, due to sheer laziness. I registered only a few months ago. But I've been reading slash for over 6 years now. It no longer surprises me that whenever there's an article about Indian technology, the comments section degenerates into Bangalore bashing and India bashing. I absolutely love the articles posted on this site. This site makes my day in more ways than one. I just wish people wouldn't make sweeping generalizations without much knowledge of what they're professing to know. Saying that Indians lack innovation in any field is utter crap, and you know it. It's true that a huge percentage of our population is below the poverty line. So what's your point? How is that related to innovation? Your post is just an outlet for your hatred of some Indians in your office.
GSLV will be back ...
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.
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
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.
Delta III