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Falcon 9 Launch Aborted At Last Minute
ClockEndGooner writes "Sadly, SpaceX had to abort its launch of the Falcon 9 to the International Space Station this morning due to higher than expected pressure levels in one of its engine chambers. NASA and SpaceX have another launch window scheduled for early next week."
Probably better than an engine failing during launch; hopefully everything is worked out for Tuesday.
I guess it's better than blowing up!
"It's a setback for NASA's plan to have private companies take over much of what's been an exclusively government enterprise. "
Not really, the thing intelligently averted a possible problem. Look at the reams of government rockets that blew up on the pad or feet off the ground. Are folks set back? Maybe a little, but if it had blown up it would have been more of a learning experience than a setback. Rocketry is almost nothing but constant failure. The fact that they didn't lose the hardware is an amazing success in my book. Typical CBS trying to paint private enterprises as being unable to compete with the government. Sure private companies can't force citizens to pay for their goods, so are forced to maintain costs to a greater degree, but an amazing set of engineers working anywhere can do amazing things, and are only limited by the bureaucracies they work inside of corporate or government.
I am glad to see this private enterprise is going with caution as opposed to rushing their launch no matter what. Microsoft and many other software companies can start to take notes. Looking forward to see a Falcon 9 servicing the ISS safely when ready.
Tomorrow is another day...
Kudos to the engineers and their managers that realized that technical problems are not technicalities. It took two Space Shuttles and a few unmanned missions to figure it out, but I guess we are learning, and that is a good thing.
An aborted launch may not be a successful launch, but it also isn't a failed launch. Good call.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
When I'm launching my rockets full of explorers from the planet Kerth, we don't do aborts! If the engines are still attached to the ship, I'm punching the throttle and hitting the stage selection control! We're going to the Mun (or at least leaving the ground) no matter what!
Also, I don't do any pansy ass "test flights" guided by computer to some orbiting tin can! Every one of my flights is crewed by red blooded, beer chugging, motorcycle riding Kerbals who LOVE it even when it all goes wrong.
SpaceX and NASA could learn a lot from my experiences...
When you have a $3.6 billion contract and a rocket that cost $300 million to develop and $200,000 just to fuel up, you are going to be very conservative when it comes to safety. The last thing you want is for your investment to literally blow up on you.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
From TFA:
Even NASA's most seasoned launch commentator was taken off-guard.
"Three, two, one, zero and liftoff," announced commentator George Diller, his voice trailing as the rocket failed to budge.
They just keep following the old script, even when things change. Fresh blood, in the form of the private space industry, is great.
Aborting a launch automatically based on sensor data is not a failure; it is a success.
I'm sure the folks on the ISS have enough toilet paper and freeze-dried icecream to make it through the weekend, until the next launch window.
Even NASA's most seasoned launch commentator was taken off-guard.
"Three, two, one, zero and liftoff," announced commentator George Diller, his voice trailing as the rocket failed to budge. "We've had a cutoff. Liftoff did not occur."
Commentators do not have realtime views of the raw data that would indicate a cutoff.
Space shuttle mission STS-68 had a similar last-second abort; at 1:00 in the video it even shows the countdown clock at T-0 seconds, even though the main engines actually started the abort sequence a couple seconds earlier. But with the shuttles, it was very obvious to the commentator when liftoff didn't happen because there were solid rocket boosters that didn't fire.
I'd have to agree with you entirely, minus the misdirected political assumptions.
The journalist is looking at it from the standpoint that SpaceX was supposed to launch today and something went wrong, so it's a setback. In reality, what happened today was somewhat impressive in-and-of itself. The Falcon rocket auto-detected a problem with software and half a second before liftoff shut itself down without any damage.
Would NASA have ever been able to do that? No. NASA would have sent the rocket into space with the problem because it had no such software. This already seems way better and safer.
However, the journalist probably just didn't think about it that in-depth and so sees the failure to launch as a small failure (which it is, albiet not a serious one and a strong success at the same time). His talk of government is just boilerplate background not a biased pro-government agenda.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
They could have achieved this without lighting the engines.
NASA has been outsourcing more routine builds for decades now. The difference is in the method of tendering for contract.
The development money and the greater part of the designs and all the launch centres have come from the US government (with a good bit of guidance from old Soviet designs). Whether the engineers' paycheques are from NASA or from Musk with him taking a cut is pretty much irrelevant.
To re-cap:
1) Public money;
2) Most of the work thanks to public employees;
3) Final implementation responsibility partly private.
Whether Falcon9 succeeds or fails says really nothing much about the public or the private sector. The only thing we can say for certain is Boeing&co. were making a fucking killing from the US government before now - and they still will, but not so much from NASA.
The technology to abort a takeoff in the last 1/2 second is truly amazing, and because of high combustion pressure in an engine is a perfect catch. If the Boeing Delta II in 1997 had had the same type of status checking, it might have discovered the 17 foot crack in the booster, and aborted also, instead of blowing up on launch: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9701/17/rocket.explosion/index.html. And a Delta III had a rocket engine failure in 1999, which ruined the mission: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19990626&slug=2968601. So the ability to detect an engine problem and shutdown before liftoff is again an amazing feat, and shows advancing technology. SpaceX is doing this right!
I read somewhere that the problem was with (slightly?) high pressure in engine number 5 (out of nine). The commentator mentioned that on the first Falcon launch, the engine at the same position failed/had problems.
Does anyone know if it was the same (high pressure) problem? Is engine number 5 in an unusual spot (in the center?) that could cause it additional problems? (I don't know how the clustering of the engines are.). This is pretty wonky I know but I'm just curious if there is some correlation.
I also read somewhere that one of the reasons for the failure of the Russian mega-rocket, the N-1, which was to put their man on the moon first, was because the first stage had 30(!) engines and it was impossible (at that time) to control them all. By comparison, of course the Saturn V had 5 engines in its first stage (each generating a million and half pounds of thrust!). I would assume that modern digital systems have made these control problems a thing of the past and that the Falcon 9 is not vulnerable to that problem. So more is better right? Could the Falcon 9 have made it to orbit even losing one?
Show me the rocket that NASA built... and I'll show you the rocket built by a contractor.... which incidentally is private enterprise.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
They could have achieved this without lighting the engines.
The issue was high pressure in engine number 5. They would NOT be able to achieve this until combustion began, at which point the pressure they are measuring is generated. The guy hosting the webcast said something to the effect of "The computer analyzes everything after we light the engine, but before we release the rocket for flight, and will shut down if it detects a problem before we actually launch."
A safety system worked as intended. All-in-all, a good safety system to have in place.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
The hold-and-release launch system they use (which many rockets don't) is what allows them to do this. They light up the engines, do their checks, and then if they're satisfied they release the clamps and launch the rocket. If they don't like what they see, they abort.
From a technical standpoint, a Falcon 9 can operate normally with one engine failure, so they could probably have just shut off the affected engine and launched anyhow. Of course, they'd have no margin for error at that point... And they had no pressing need to launch now, since this wasn't a critical launch (it's not like the astronauts on the ISS are running out of food and will die if the delivery is late)
That said, while Space X touts the reliability of the Falcon 9 due to being able to continue with one engine failure, that only applies to the first stage... The second stage only has one engine. Wouldn't this be a single point of failure? They can suffer an engine failure so long as the engine that fails isn't the one critical out of ten total engines?