Glory Satellite Lost To Taurus XL Failure

FullBandwidth writes "The protective nose cone of an Orbital Sciences Corporation Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA's Glory environmental research satellite apparently failed to separate after launch Friday, preventing the spacecraft from achieving orbit in a $424 million failure. It was the second nose cone failure in a row for a Taurus XL rocket following the 2009 loss of another environmental satellite."

Comments

$4 for every US Household

[theaveng]

Damn.

Skip eating lunch today, and "make up" for the loss.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[DigiShaman]

You mean the same 1% of media elites and politicians that demand the rest of us do with less while at the same time living their hypocritical lifestyle? I agree.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[Lumpy]

I prefer the bottom 99% show up at the 1%'s homes with torches and pichforks and solve the whole problem in a night.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[khallow]

I've got a better idea. Let's ask the top 1% not to open the second bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild at dinner for a week and pay for the space program for a year.

How about you put your money where your mouth rather than Other Peoples' Money? If you aren't willing to kick in, then I can't be bothered to get the 1% to kick in either.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[myth24601]

Of course this is a monetary loss, something worth half a billion dollars was destroyed. The half billion was spent to create something of value, had it been spent on something else that was not lost, we would have spent the money and had something of value to show for it.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[anyGould]

Second, why in the world is paying the same percentage the "fair" thing? Why not the same dollar amount? At best a percentage-based system is just a vague - a really vague - approximation of whatever kind of fairness principle you have going. You probably don't even have an identifiable principle on which you are basing it.

For the same reason a sales tax is percentage-based - it keeps the tax relative to the value. And it dates back to the classic church tithe (as in "give the church a tenth of what you make").

I would be thrilled to see a proper flat percentage, with the barest minimum of deductions for the poorest.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[inviolet]

Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.

These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural third world classroom built in his honor ($125)? Maybe instead of that iPad for that special someone, you could pay for the education of five girls at $100 apiece; provide a dozen vaccinations to children at $45; or teach ten women to read at $50 apiece. You can reintegrate eight child soldiers to their community through education and apprenticeship programs for only $58 each.

I was excited about that website until I read the fine print:

These gifts are examples of what Mercy Corps does to save and improve lives in the world's toughest places. To help deliver the most effective solutions to the greatest number of people, your donation will be combined with other funds and used as it is most needed, not necessarily to purchase or distribute the actual item shown.

Meh. It's general-purpose charity with a fashionable front-end.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[khallow]

So, unlike every other service, we pay for government based on benefit and not cost?

In short, yes.

This is one of the problems with government services and taxes. There is no market where people voluntarily choose to buy the service at the given price voluntarily offered.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[Lumpy]

So raising their taxes by another 2% will solve all the problems.

Thanks for volunteering that.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[PitaBred]

The middle class pays more by percentage of their income than the upper class (even if it's not more total). The middle class also lives much closer to the line of having to cut out various expenses if income changes, as compared to the rich. We already are putting our money where our mouths are.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[Lumpy]

He really does not know what he is talking about.... but I do.

I'll post the info for him...

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

the inequality is so huge that it's utterly disgusting when I hear even 1 of them whine about taxes. we can DOUBLE their taxes and they will not notice.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[PopeRatzo]

According to various studies over the years, Republican voters (aka conservatives) give 5 times more money per year to non-church charities then Democrat voters (aka liberals).

Every single one of those studies used charitable deductions on income tax returns as their raw data. There's another one that has the same results that is often trumpted by right-wing trolls that uses self-reporting for data.

I don't know about you, but I believe if you try to recover your donation via deductions against taxable income, it's not really charitable.

Now, NORC here in my home town did a study breaking down donations by income ranges and political affiliation. That told a much different story. It seems that among people making less than $50k/yr, Democrats give much more than their counterparts in the Republican Brotherhood. From $50k to $150k they are about equal. You only start to see the GOP-affiliated giving more after $500k (and again, the data comes from charitable tax deductions.

My guess is that the "charities" that a lot of the >$500k Republicans are giving to are opera companies, museums, foundations, and other things where you get a great deal of public recognition. Maybe donations to fundraisers by other members of their country club set. Gotta keep up appearances after all. I bet Mrs David Koch likes to see her name on the big plaque that you see over the door at the museum. Maybe giving helps her sleep, knowing that her husband is fucking over all the little people who live outside her gated community.

Re:$4 for every US Household

[PopeRatzo]

Rich people don't benefit more from police work just because they have more stuff to protect.

Sure they do. They use the courts more, they use infrastructure more, they benefit from increased access. They get more benefit from the Dept of Education because they hire people who have learned to read and write. They benefit from the Dept of Agriculture because thanks to the food stamp program there are not starving people overrunning their property and killing and eating their thoroughbred horses.

Remember, there isn't anyone in the United States who has gained wealth on the basis of their hard work and ingenuity alone. Not one. Their use of "the commons" and their benefit from "the commons" goes up along with their wealth.

Time for a launch loop

[Menkhaf]

Enough with malfunctioning rockets.

How many payloads have gone to waste because of rocket failures, and at what cost? Enough to explore the idea of a sort of launch loop?

Re:Time for a launch loop

[AikonMGB]

Nope.

Don't get me wrong, I would love easy access to space, but there are enormous up-front costs to constructing a mega launch service, like a launch loop or an elevator, not to mention significant technical risks, very few of which are in the process of being retired.

Rockets are a tried, tested, and true method of getting to space. They have put up many times the value of spacecraft as they have lost, not to mention a growing number of human payloads. They are also getting cheaper, with public ventures like SpaceX. I think it's going to be a good long while before you see someone investing heavily in alternative launch methods.

Aikon-

Re:Time for a launch loop

[Sockatume]

I think we're a long way from any 2000km-long megastructure being a viable solution to the problem. There's a lot of good ground between rockets and sci-fi megatech that should be explored first.

Re:Time for a launch loop

[strack]

you think the launch loop is a good idea because you have no idea just how chaotic a system a cable, being accelerated through a curve at some very high mach number, is. and the most minor of wobbles is enough to crash it into the sheathing and kaboom. not to mention sending something along it, that is magnetically suspended close to it. and the wear from flexing at those speeds, and the heating, and having a flexible tube in which it can be magnetically suspended in as it passes through it. a tube that must also maintain a vacuum. and a myriad of other near impossible obstacles.

Re:Time for a launch loop

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Well you engineers can't seem to get the process of nose cone separation right, let alone the rest of the rocket. How about let's not lose any more missions because a nose cone didn't come off. Redundant systems hello???? When the thing failed to come off, there should have been two more systems behind that ready to crack that nose cone off the rocket.

Or maybe engineers are just a bunch of monkeys jacking off after all.

Sincerely, REPUBLICANS who fucking hate smart people.

Re:Time for a launch loop

[dave420]

Very close? The longest carbon nanotube ever observed was only 18.5 cm long. I think LEO is a bit higher than that.

Re:Time for a launch loop

[heathen_01]

Why not develope a cure and save them all? Why not develop a more efficient gateway to space and save the $424 million next time?

enormous up-front costs ... significant technical risks

Re:Time for a launch loop

[0123456]

The real world can't do this, because some Republican who hates smart people moans about costs being too high.

When was the last time that anyone else lost a satellite due to failure to separate the fairing, let alone two in a row? I remember the Agena docking target on one of the Gemini missions in the 60s and one other failure in the last few years (which may have been the other Taurus launch mentiohed).

As rocket science goes it really seems to be a solved problem that's been done successfully thousands of times before.

Re:Time for a launch loop

[Combatso]

$424 million wasn't lost. The only thing lost was a satelite. The money got spent building the rocket and satelite. People got paid, now they get paid again. Cry all you want about the tax payer, but the sad reality is, they would have taken your money anyways.

Atleast this way its slightly distributed, and the aerospace community learns something. Consider how much fuel is spent, per day, fighting two wars. How much it costs to build a fence acrosss the border (which is the same security they use to keep preteens from sneaking in to the county fair). How much it costs to keep travellers from taking a bottle of water on a plane.

Two environmental satellites lost in a row?

[lxs]

I bet Big Oil is behind this.

Fix to overcome problem next time...

[Anonymous Coward]

IANARS

Just make the fairing lighter and stick a bit more fuel in the rocket, problem getting to orbit solved! As for getting the satellite out, perhaps they could stick a baby chick in who can peck their way through the shell?

(Absolutely no idea why NASA didn't hire me, what with all my lack of qualifications and everything. I have loads of useful ideas ;)

Re:Fix to overcome problem next time...

[ciderbrew]

(Absolutely no idea why NASA didn't hire me, what with all my lack of qualifications and everything. I have loads of useful ideas ;)

Don't put yourself down Senator.

Re:seriously wtf?

[EraserMouseMan]

Yea, the whole batch of self-sealing stem bolts is probably bad.

Like what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, I'm seriously curious.

What is the middle ground between rockets and sci-fi megatech?

1. Rockets
2. ...?
3. Launch-loops / space elevators / etc.

Re:Womp Womp

[PopeRatzo]

And they're about to lay of a lot of other peoples dads. Bad news here.

I don't know, Orbital's board of directors looks like a who's who of republican lobbyists and military contractor sweethearts.

A few lunch checks get picked up, a few golfing trips to Manele Bay and everybody's good. Oh, there will still be layoffs, but as Speaker John Boehner put it, "So be it."

Re:Womp Womp

[Whalou]

I don't know, Orbital's board of directors looks like a who's who of republican lobbyists and military contractor sweethearts.

Conspiracy alert: They caused the nose cone problems to prevent those environmental satellites from confirming global warning!

:-P

Re:Rockets.

[Q-Hack!]

I think technically they blow.

Re:Outsource?

[oneiros27]

Even if the launch itself were cheaper, you then have to look into getting the payload over to the launch location ... and that might not be a risk they're willing to take.

When there were massive flight delays for some of the groups that I've worked with, they've talked about trying to get into the queue at Vandenberg, rather than Canaveral, but that'd require either trucking it across country, or a flight. Even with launch delays at Canaveral, it was costing them more to hold it on the ground at Canaveral than it would've cost to hold it at Goddard ... but bringing it back to Maryland and then to Florida again was decided to be an unacceptable risk.

I know what you're thinking -- they test these things for vibration on launch, and such, but I don't think that's the same forces as a hard landing from an airplan or hitting a pothole; also, they'd get a cargo plane large enough to ship it ... you can't just send it fedex when it's an oversized load. And for cross country, they have to map out the route so they don't run into any overpasses they can't fit under, etc.

Re:Womp Womp

[gatkinso]

Unfortunately after this they will be laying off more dads.

This just in

[geekzealot1982]

Rocket science is still a challenging science. Where is Werner von Braun when we need him?

Big Oil, China and the Republican Party

[sinequonon]

Oh come on, we can make the conspiracy bigger than that. China is the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and the Republican Party wants to kill NASA's Earth monitoring program. Their motto: "What we don't know, can't hurt them."

It would not surprise me

[ThatsNotPudding]

if the US House of Representatives sabotaged it, given it's mission - and theirs.

Three Amateur Radio sats also lost

[Muad'Dave]

Also lost in this launch were three Amateur Radio Satellites.