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NASA Morpheus Lander Test Ends In Explosion
First time accepted submitter DishpanMan writes "For every success story from NASA like Curiosity, there is a failure story, like today's Morpheus project test flight at Kennedy Space Center. The project is trying to build a low cost Moon and Asteroid lander using clean fuels on a shoestring budget. While tethered flight test were successful, today's actual flight test ended in a crash and a ball of fire followed by a spectacular explosion. Initial feedback points to hardware failure, but the investigation is still ongoing."
Waaaw, nice video of the crash! And immediately the action in the first 10 seconds of it. Well done!
Too bad for the money and work that went into it. But then again, this is what tests are for, this result helps progress forward as well.
Sometimes I hit the parking lot.
But then, they can name the next lander "Neo" and see if they get better results...
A "Failure" means loss of the mission. This is an unsuccessful test and is part of the process to ensure the hardware will work with a high degree of confidence so that the mission won't "fail" in its actual landing on the moon.
Something to learn from and move forwards on.
myke
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"For every success story from NASA like Curiosity, there is a failure story"
Yes, and if you never try you'll never fail. Bravo for you.
Those of us who explore and push the boundaries do have failures, learn (if we live) and try again. Failure is the norm. Success is the wonderful exception.
I didn't know something so small could be *that* on fire.
An unsuccessful test isn't "failure", it's "data".
sic transit gloria mundi
Why would anyone want to approach a burning spacecraft? Let the fuel burn out, then extinguish the flames of what's left for disposal.
I'm still waiting for the "failure" part.
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Well if they'd shown up immediately, then after 2:00 the second team would have been scraping firefighter parts off the scenery. And so, after 6:21, would the third team.
There's just no way to get a burning rocket fuel tank under control. Also no point; the craft is a loss anyway, and there's nothing else close enough to be in danger.
And yet it took more than 8 minutes for the Fire truck to arrive at the rocket test site.
I wonder how long it would take if they didn't expect this sort of thing...
Rule one of firefighting: don't put anyone needlessly in harm's way. This was an unmanned test flight, with nobody in any imminent danger.
After the initial crash, the craft still had fuel and oxidant tanks on board that hadn't yet blown up. You don't move the fire crews in until the hazardous materials are accounted for. The crews were quite obviously sitting in their fire rig at a safe distance, waiting for the signal from the range safety officer to tell them that the rest of the fuel was gone. That explosion at the 6:20 mark was the signal they were waiting for. At 8:00 the camera zooms in as they examine the wreckage for any potential surprises. At about 8:17 you could hear the diesel motor of one of the trucks as it approached the pad. At 8:40 you can hear the report from "10-1" (I assume that was the range safety officer) at gate 7 that he had advised the fire crew that there were four pressurized tanks, they believed two were gone, but there were potentially still two tanks with pressure, and that the fire crews had proceeded downrange anyway.
The crews handled the situation exactly as they should have. They expected this sort of thing.
John
It wouldn't have taken quite so long if they had arrived from UP-WIND and knew how to AIM those foam-cannons they have strapped to their trucks. Seriously, it was like watching a 3 year old trying to hit the toilet bowl from the hallway!
Rocket fuel generally sits very close to it's oxidizer on the craft, no point in trying to put it out early. There were probably fifty people on the island where that happened, all of whom were wearing safety goggles and behind a barrier of some sort at a safe distance. It's not like dousing the fire ten minutes earlier would have somehow avoided the forest fires in Colorado.
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But that's one yummy helping of spectacular engineering fail. And this coming from a guy who saw his rocket execute an un-prescribed loop-da-loop right out of the launcher, so I know the bitter taste of test failure on tape first hand. Not the same amount of money was involved in my case, though. Looks like this control system was determined to diverge as soon the legs stopped making contact. Tether saved us from a few failures in my day, but based on the history looks like they had done enough tethered testing and were ready to go free. Feel sorry for the team who had to get data the hard way. Hope you had telemetry, because there's nothing left to diagnose or debug.
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