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SpaceX Pressure Hammers Stuck Valves; Dragon's ISS Mission Back On Track
SpaceX's Dragon launch to the ISS earlier today went off smoothly, but the mission encountered trouble shortly after: three sets (of four) of the craft's maneuvering thrusters didn't work. CNET quotes SpaceX founder Elon Musk: "It looks like there was potentially some blockage in the oxidizer pressurization (system). It looks like we've been able to free that blockage, or maybe a stuck valve. We've been able to free that up by cycling the valves, essentially pressure hammering the valves, to get that to loosen. It looks like that's been effective.
All the oxidizer tanks are now holding the target pressure on all four (thruster) pods. I'm optimistic we'll be able to bring all four of them up and then we'll work closely with NASA to figure out what the next step is for rendezvousing with space station," and follows up with the good news that
"Shortly after the briefing concluded, engineers reported all four sets of thrusters were back on line and that testing was underway to verify the health of the system." Barring further problems, Dragon could reach the ISS as soon as Sunday.
wonder if boeing will offer to help.
I'm sure Musk is aware of this but really, it just seems to make sense to find the best cryo valve guy in the world and give him one and only one full time job: Make sure the damn things work!
Seastead this.
Please Please Please don't have a commercial spaceflight disaster this soon. I want to GTFO(ff) of this planet before I die. That sure as hell won't happen as long as we have nothing but NASA crippled by the same useless monkeys in charge who can't even balance the budget.
Shit, even bugs can balance a budget (ie, ants storing food for the winter). Our leaders can't pull off a feat mere bugs can do.
Go Elon! Make those valves your bitch, dude!
Hal locked them out
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Nope. If he's going to make commercial space a reality, I'm all for hearing more from him.
Personally, no. SpaceX and Tesla are both high in the running for "coolest company" in my book. The fact that the same guy is behind them both makes me think it's not just luck. (It would be so tempting to troll Apple at this point, but I think I'll just stop here).
Oh come on, that's not really fair—I'm pretty sure the whole PayPal mess happened after Musk sold his portion of the company. Also, the guy uses plain English a lot more than technical jargon.
I don't know the details of this system, but pressurisation valves probably open once and... that's it. Typically you want the thruster tanks unpressurised until orbit and pressurised from there until the end of the mission.
The good news is that, because they'll get the Dragon back, they should be able to dismantle the thrusters on Earth and find out why they didn't work properly.
German technical staff, scientists and engineers worked hard on problems like this in the 1950-60's for their masters in Russia and the USA. :) :)
Dreaming of clean papers without the war history or just papers home, they solved it all
Now we can buy it all back at market prices from US commercial space interests at todays prices
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'd say down-voted due to armchair quarterbacking regarding the level of risk involved in continuing the mission and the excessively snide conclusion. I'm sure SpaceX engineers are far more knowledgeable of the risk factors than any of us meat blobs sitting in our chairs at home reading slashdot are. And as far as pressure hammer is concerned, I would guess (and call it what it is, nothing more than a guess), that they actually had some level of control of the amount of pressure they drove into the system, vs. a random water hammer in a set of pipes that occurs in a home or building.
SpaceX staff are rediscovering why we use clean rooms, thermal vacuum chambers, and a full understanding of the launch and space environment. Launch to orbit is unforgiving, and you need to make sure things are right before you try, or you get a higher failure rate.
They should had realigned the dilithium crystals, that would had been an easier fix.
That would be 2014 according to their launch manifest:
http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
And, no, I am not sick of him. I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists. Therefore I want his near-term projects to succeed:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/SFP/Report
I'd say down voted because people here haven't a clue about how NASA deals with things concerning the ISS. If you believe they have given any sort of green light on docking then you are greatly mistaken. $20B+ dollars, 10+ years making, and no room for error they will take no chances over a little more than half a ton of cargo. I've been in meetings and seen them pontificate of completely benign things for a week. They take nothing more seriously than the safe being of the ISS. I'm not saying they won't give it a go, but I would be shocked if they have already given SpaceX the go ahead. Not saying they aren't planning, but I will say there are a lot of people who have some decisions to make and they wo't be done lightly.
Nah, even if the mission fails, Musk will show graphs and logs explaining that the valves never actually malfunctioned... ...
(Just Kidding, I am actually on Tesla's side on the test drive debacle)
No sig for the moment.
He is not Job's figure, he is not making expensive toys, he is actually someone struggling to improve mankind. One of the few and against all odds.
because an iPod or iPad are just so similar to a fucking rocket docking with an orbiting space station. gawd can your parent monitor your internet activity just a little?
Wow! You too?
Here's what I know:
0. Falcon 1: Failure. (Never flew; launch aborted & it imploded later on when a tank was drained)
1. Falcon 1: Failure. (First stage engine failure)
2. Falcon 1: Failure. (Second stage oscillation & engine failure)
3. Falcon 1: Failure. (Stage seperation issues)
4. Falcon 1: Success. (Deployed RatSat)
5. Falcon 1: Success. (Deployed RazakSat)
6. Falcon 9: Success. (Deployed dummy payload)
7. Falcon 9: Success. (COTS 1; Deployed & recovered Dragon)
8. Falcon 9: Success. (COTS 2; Dragon to ISS and back)
9. Falcon 9: Partial Failure. (CRS-1; Failed to deploy secondary payload)
10. Falcon 9: Too early to say. (CRS-2; Falcon 9 performed flawlessly, but Dragon is having issues.)
So yes, SpaceX has had some problems, but the failure rate only approaches 7/12 if you count every little mishap as a "catastrophic failure". The only total failures were with the Falcon 1, when the company was still figuring things out. Yes, CRS-1 had an engine failure and couldn't deploy its secondary payload, but the Dragon itself still got to the ISS in good shape. And as for the current flight, it could still go several ways:
Success (if the Dragon arrives Sunday and it's declared successful despite the hiccups and schedule delay)
Partial Failure (if the Dragon arrives late and it's consequently not considered a full success)
Failure (if the Dragon dies and doesn't survive re-entry or, heaven forbid, collides with the ISS)
Abort (if the Dragon re-enters and splashes down intact)
Okay I've gone on yakking way too long, I know.
tl;dr – SpaceX has had some issues in the past, most of which got ironed out with the Falcon 1. F9/Dragon has had some hiccups, but so far every primary mission has been successful—and the current one hasn't failed yet.
While we are speculating - I wonder if they used robust heavy duty stuff and maybe 'pressure hammering' doesn't put the valves under any more stress than they were designed to handle.
I'll bite.
Making awesome things takes a lot of cooperation. To a certain extent, that cooperation can be bought. Cooperation can be bought more cheaply and more easily, however, if the person being bought is already in favor of the project, and once they're involved, they're far more likely to be passionate about the project's ultimate success, rather than viewing it as yet another boring job in a long career.
Leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk don't just do the "executive" part of the "Chief Executive Officer" role. They act as figureheads leading an army of supporters who believe in the project and are devoted to it. That fanatical love for the goal is seen as crazy by outsiders, but it leads to a quality product in the end - albeit after some major trials and tribulations. A bit of vision, a bit of business, and a bit of distorted reality are the secret ingredients to leadership.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You're just pointing out make believe negative shit to posture.
Can't any mods report that fscker to his provider? When I worked for an ISP I *loved* taking care of those...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
It's not accurate to say that the Dragon will be automatically docking with the ISS, since the Dragon doesn't support automated docking yet. Rather, it very slowly approaches the station, holds steady at about 10m, and then the crew (or mission control in Houston) spends hours operating a robotic arm to grab it and bring it in.
As others have pointed out, NASA has the final say over whether the Dragon can even come within a kilometer of the ISS.
The initial approach during the COTS-2 demo was 0.24 meters/second according to this link and this link, and the final approach from 30m is even slower.
I'd imagine that the ISS could manage to avoid an object traveling towards it from 30m at roughly the speed of a tortoise, considering that most other dangerous objects in space are traveling much faster.
That's not to say that the thrusters couldn't misfire at just the wrong moment, but considering the care taken in the approach, it's not like they're just aiming it in the direction of the ISS and hoping for the best. It'd have to be a failure that didn't manifest at all until close to the last second, which would be extraordinarily bad luck.
Yes, CRS-1 had an engine failure and couldn't deploy its secondary payload, but the Dragon itself still got to the ISS in good shape.
Even that is a bit of an exagerration: they could have deployed the secondary payload in approximately the correct orbit, but NASA wouldn't let them because there was a tiny risk of colliding with ISS if they did so.
I think a lot of people would count the first Falcon 9 launch as a failure: the uncontrolled roll was pretty serious.
But for a commercial launch company, IMO the only failure that matters is failure to complete a paying customer's mission. And by that measure, SpaceX is 4 for 5 (counting NASA and Orbcomm as separate customers), with #6 in progress and looking promising.
SpaceX has a pattern of having problems in test flights, and successfully completing paid missions. That's not failure: that's good project management.
Doing something at 100x less cost is a big deal. Sure it took political influence to be the NASA's first commercial sale. In the end he even saved taxpayers money, so what's not to like?
Driving coast-to-coast without using gas is a chicken-and-egg problem. I'm glad to see someone taking-on the stranglehold of world's largest cartel, with some success.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Frequently, but not always. It's not unheard of to open and close the source pressure valves, because you don't want to count on the regulators not leaking for any significant length of time. If you leave the source pressure connecting, any regulator leak will likely overpressure the tank. We don't usually do that but it's not uncommon. I would much rather take my chances on valves sticking closed than on regulator leaks.
Sorry, but the only one spilling lies here is you my friend. The car range was far superior to 200 KM as long as you actually charge it. Musk was 100% right on this case and the NY reporter was a biased asshole, as you are, my friend.
Slashdot is brimming with ULA and NASA partisans who will trash talk and outright lie about SpaceX at every opportunity. Given the utter failure of the SLS program to produce any hardware at all, and given the utter failure of the (illegal monopoly) ULA to compete with a price an order of magnitude lower than theirs, it's not surprising.
You are hearing the whines of failure trying to make themselves feel better. They will be forever bitter about SpaceX when they lose their jobs due to SpaceX successes.
Oh how rich, so computers are not toys? You can play with them? Have you heard about video games? The concept will blow your mind my ignorant friend. Apple input deficient computers are basically that, toys. That is what most people use them for and that is what they are actually designed to be, video games and web surfing devices.
Regarding Musk, you keep spilling lies and absurdities as if they were facts without absolutely no evidence and backed up only for your poisin and jealousy. Sorry to break the news for you, but the astroturfer here is you, and the troll to add insult to injury as well.
SpaceX has uploaded the CRS-2 launch video.
Be relentless!
Why put it in the ocean? Why not just put it through its paces at a safe distance from the ISS to see how it responds? If everything checks out, then go for docking at the ISS. You can always splash it if things look iffy.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Apple products are far from amazing. They are just copies of other technologies and full of flaws. There is nothing new, revolutionary or even really useful in them.
On the other hand, Musk products are at the vanguard of our technology and in important areas for mankind where there is dire need of investments. He could make a lot more money staying in less risky business, but he instead decided to take huge risks to the benefit of us all.
Sorry, but Steve Jobs doesn't even classify to be in the same sentence with Musk.
I'd say down voted because people here haven't a clue about how NASA deals with things concerning the ISS. If you believe they have given any sort of green light on docking then you are greatly mistaken. $20B+ dollars, 10+ years making, and no room for error they will take no chances over a little more than half a ton of cargo. I've been in meetings and seen them pontificate of completely benign things for a week. They take nothing more seriously than the safe being of the ISS. I'm not saying they won't give it a go, but I would be shocked if they have already given SpaceX the go ahead. Not saying they aren't planning, but I will say there are a lot of people who have some decisions to make and they wo't be done lightly.
Yeah, it's actually more like $100-200 billions depending on how you count, or about the cost of ten to twenty Large Hadron Colliders. And there are six people on board who would have to try to make an emergency escape if something went terribly wrong, so I would imagine everyone involved takes it rather seriously, including SpaceX. SpaceX would become pariahs in the space industry if their hardware did major damage to the ISS or if someone died.
he's trying to make a COMMERCIAL satellite launcher. i.e. he's trying to make money on a thing that has already been done. He's also failing, as he has a tendency to do, and Apple under Jobs did not.
How is he failing? SpaceX has a packed launch manifest, and has been profitable every year since 2007... Their current launch platform, the Falcon 9, has never suffered a critical failure that caused a loss of payload. The one time a payload was lost (the satellite in the previous launch) was not lost due to failure, but because NASA refused to let them do a second burn to get it into the correct orbit. There was no technical reason why the payload could not be deployed, NASA simply refused to let them do so.
Ironically, it was one of those customers (NASA) that prevented the deployment of the second customer's (Orbcomm) payload. CRS-1 was capable of deploying the payload, NASA refused to allow it.
Could you imaging the CEO of Northrop Grumman or Lockheed being able to talk about the engineering issues at this level of detail? Or even the head of NASA? This is why I bought TSLA stock.
The one that needs to grow up, is yourself. You are a piece of work who is only interested in FUD. So far, SpaceX is doing pretty good. And BTW, every existing space company, even those that are national, have much worse records from when they first start up. SpaceX has a wonderful track record considering that they launched their first flight just under 7 years ago. Now, it was a failure, but in 7 years, they have launched 10 times, of which 3 were considered failures, 1 a partial failure and the other 6 are successful (assuming that this current one finishes OK). ESA did Ariane 1 11x over 7 years, with 2 failures. Considering how much bigger the budget was for ESA, while SpaceX has 2 launch vehicles, 1 capsule, and 4 different engines, that is pretty good for SpaceX. In fact, I would say that is a great record for any company
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Pressure hammer, or water hammer as it is more commonly known, is not a simple pressure transient. It is far more complicated than that and can exceed design tolerances by orders of magnitude. It is a shock-wave traveling at the speed of sound. In power plants, water hammer has destroyed valves, ripped pipes apart, destroyed heat exchangers, etc. The water hammer than you have in your house is occurs at ambient temperatures and pressures, yet it is still able to destroy your piping. When it happens in your body, it rips apart arteries and veins. Consider what happens when it isn't an ambient condition and where there is an enormous pressure difference allowing for phase changes in the liquid. Feel free to do a search and find examples where inches of steel have been shredded by water hammer or where massive heat exchangers have imploded or exploded.
Sorry, but mentioning a spacecraft that has had a pressure hammer event is as big of a red light as mentioning a ship that has had a flooding event or a nuclear plant that has had a massive radiation release. It doesn't mean that everything is fucked, but is sure could be! Pressure hammer events almost ripped Apollo 13 apart on launch. It is NOT a joke. It is a BFD.
I believe it docks in a non-collision course - meaning the CanadArm reaches out and grabs it as it goes by. If the folks on the ISS aren't comfortable then they don't do anything except wave as the module goes past. Short of some sort of absurd fault which fires the thrusters off at the last minute there shouldn't be any major risk with this. People smarter than I did the engineering so I may be missing something.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
We've been hearing about stuck valves since the space program in the 1960's. Why hasn't anyone yet invented valves that don't stick?
a lot of cushy jobs and contracts are gonna be lost due to SpaceX's super low cost launches. I'm surprised there isn't a bigger effort to discredit them and spread FUD, a la Edison electrocuting elephants with AC power.
They take nothing more seriously than the safe being of the ISS.
NASA has a long history of obsessing over small risks while ignoring large ones. For example, the ISS is one small piece of high velocity space trash away from destruction. That didn't stop NASA from pouring a hundred billion or so dollars into the ISS. And if it does go boom, then they don't have any sort of replacement strategy in mind.
Another classic example is the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on the ground which was until recently a vital and unique role in preparing the Shuttle for launch. NASA had no plan for replacing the building should it be leveled by a large hurricane or an errant solid rocket motor.
And there's the huge risks they took with each Apollo mission as well as the crazy estimates of risk (the profoundly unrealistic 1 in 100,000 chance of loss of crew according to Feynman) for the Shuttle prior to the first Shuttle accident (Challenger).
A final classic example was the Constellation program. They chose ATK's solid rocket motor as first stage for the Ares I while ignoring the higher risk of that motor, but while simultaneously claiming that the motor was somehow safer. Then later on, when the resulting vehicle turned out to have performance issues, they cut back on the spacecraft design (including vital systems redundancy) that was to be the core of Constellation missions in space.
One consequence is higher risks of loss of mission and/or crew. My take is that they increased significantly the risk of the riskiest parts of the mission (the stuff that's being done in space) in order to protect a political choice, all rationalized on the basis of improving launch safety (where launch is already one of the safer parts of the mission once you start no matter what vehicle choice you make of the choices they had).
My view is that if they had any sort of rational risk management process in place, a lot of things would be done differently.
NASA was still operating it and flying the missions, though. SpaceX has its own mission control centre and its own astronauts.
Astronauts? Space-x astronauts? You are a little premature.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well, it is not like launching a capsule is rocket science. Making an iPod though...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
With the difference, that these national space companies you are talking about had their first flights not just under 7 years ago, but more like just under 60 years ago. With far less advanced materials and chemistry, far more primitive automation and without knowledge of how the things actually are up there.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And you miss out the important part, the stopped him because the burn could hit the ISS killing their astronauts.
You choose to mislead people as to the cause of that fault. The fault was SpaceX's. NASA correctly stopped that nutter from risking the ISS. Now you can claim it would have been successful;, if only he'd been allowed to do it, but the mission had already gone off plan, and was already in trouble, which is why he needed the extra burn.
if that's an AI bot, then we just hit the singularity. that was the best mycleanpc/timecube troll i've ever seen.
my hat is doffed.
i don't dispute apple products being more accessible (they are, for the most part), but i tell you what, having to hold a freaking key down if you want to right click is the enemy of accessibility. i know the mighty mouse or whatever the hell it's called has a right-click, but this is something that took them far too long to address.
disclaimer - my wife has CP (the legal kind) on her right side, so holding down a key with one hand when you can only properly move one hand is a bit of an accessibility issue.
Wow, a Vogon E. E. Cummings! How's that bypass coming along?
Free Martian Whores!
I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists.
It's going to take a lot more than seeds. Double Mars' mass, figure out a way to give it a magnetosphere, figure out a way to get more of an atmosphere and it'll be ready for seeds. It will probably happen, but not in your lifetime.
Oh, and seeds don't come from factories. They come from grain elevators.
Free Martian Whores!
Not sure if this will work for your wife, but a single-handed right-click is easy from theIr touchpad: "... you can right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area on the trackpad." http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/features/ http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/
True that the first man-made object in space was launched on 3 October 1942 with the launching of the A-4, but that was a baby step that Space-X has far surpassed. Orbital launch capabilities didn't happen until 4 October 1957 when Sputnik freaked America out. I was five years old then, and remember how worried all the grownups were. Odd you never read about that, at least I've not seen anything in print mentioning it.
So really, I'd say fifty years rather than seventy, and wouldn't call that "commercial" space exploration anyway.
Free Martian Whores!
disclaimer - my wife has CP (the legal kind) on her right side, so holding down a key with one hand when you can only properly move one hand is a bit of an accessibility issue.
Your wife? Looks like you have the same disability, considering your inability to use the shift key. I knew a fellow like that online about 15 years ago. Ironic that it seems that no caps might be a problem for someone with a serious visual impairment.
Free Martian Whores!
Please do not feed the trolls, we're trying to get the fat bastards to lose some weight. Poor things are all diabetic. Are you trying to kill the poor barely sentient things?
Free Martian Whores!
Selling questionable software at the dotcom boom and spinning a lot of flashy tech and buzzwords - when are this guy's 15 mins of fame over?
If he pulls off even half of what he's trying to pull off? Julius Caeser probably has more to worry about in that regard.
Three Falcon 9 launches, three Dragons delivered to station, two (so far) recovered intact. I'd say they're doing pretty good. Despite the engine failure on the CRS-1, and despite the four thruster pods failing, Dragon still made it to orbit, and is on track for a docking. Saturn lost engines during the ascent a couple times, and as I recall, Apollo wasn't exactly seamless either- one explosion, misconfiguration of landing computers, toxic gases pumped into the cabin... The fact that Falcon 9 and Dragon can experience these failures and recover from them says a lot about the system.
Sent from my CR-48
The "failure to reach target orbit" was because NASA wouldn't let them try. The satellite was along a path that could intersect ISS, and NASA required a 99% confidence. Because of the engine problem, there was only a 95% confidence, so they had to let it fall. It was known ahead of time that this could be a problem, and the satellite was only there as an opportunistic hitchhiker.
Also, how many failures were since the first Falcon 9 launch? F1 had problems, but so far every F9 has reached orbit. The aborted launch isn't a "failure", it's a success. The spacecraft successfully detected that there was a mechanical problem and that it should not launch, rather than becoming a toasty fireball. (Tell that to the last crew of Challenger and Columbia. Oh wait, you can't.) There has been no loss of cargo other than one secondary mission satellite that wasn't allowed to try to reach its intended orbit because of a 5% chance of getting near (probably as in 1km or so) ISS.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"'Commercial space' has been with us for 70 years."
Calling those endeavors "commercial" is kind of a misnomer. Next to all of them quote one cost during the initial rounds of selection, and then completely ignore those quotes after their design is chosen often exceeding their original price estimate by 2 or more TIMES. And they can legally do it because they all require "cost +" contracts that say they get what it cost them to build + a profit margin. The "Ares I" program is a pretty good example, costs were originally estimated to be around $28 Billion. Costs quickly rose to $40 billion after the project was chosen and even before an real hardware had been built, undoubtedly those costs would have risen even further if the project had not been scrapped. From what I understand COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) and its associated programs seek to end this scheme for LEO launches, setting an "in stone" price for launch services. NASA pays in installments as the program meets its contracted goals & if the company doesn't meet its obligations they get no further payments and NASA can go after them for breach of contract and recoup some of the payment(s) if they really need to. Unlike previous programs in these the companies are encouraged to keep costs low, so their profit margin is as high as possible, BUT ALSO complete the contract requirements, or they don't get paid at all.
What is your point (if you have any)? Basically the reporter ignored all common sense and expected the car to compensate for his lack of brains, as you probably do.
Did you miss the story? It's about problems with SpaceX thrusters, Falcon is approaching a MANNED space station with dodgy thrusters. There are real consequences here. It's not a conspiracy against Elon here, his companies have problems, he doesn't address those problems, he attacks the messenger. NASA should be launching not SpaceX.
There are more cases of dangerous problems with spacecraft in NASA's history (and even recent history) than cases where it all went smoothly. It happens when you are pushing technology to its limit. Sending people to space is as hard as rocket science mainly because it is rocket science.
That said apparently their redundant systems worked as designed and they were able to fix the failure on the fly which means the mission is at this time a success. So I see absolutely no problem here. The scenario was way better than many other missions from NASA and so were the results.
Are they toys when a computer is calculating SpaceX trajectory? No? Word games.
I truly hope they are not using iPads to do that. On the other hand that would explain a lot of failures.
Maybe unsuitable for you, but hardly unsuitable per se. Sure it is not a design fit for long distance travelling cars, but most car do not travel hundreds of miles at once yet. Cars stay stopped most of the time. It is just a matter of charge points availability and desired autonomy.
Point taken, I was thinking the same thing. However, it is possible for hydrazine to "freeze" at aerospace temperatures, correct? We justified a shoot down USA-193 on the basis of its massive load of hydrazine, I recall some mention of some of it possibly being frozen.
They are nasty chemicals, just keeping that system under control is difficult.
This was not a pressure hammer "event". It was a controlled, deliberate measure to try to free stuck/blocked valves.
Is it possible that they damaged something in the process? Yes, there can always be unforeseen problems; part of the history of space flight is being able to deal with unforeseen problems with the limited tools at your disposal. But let's not jump to conclusions or be alarmist. Leave the analysis to the engineers with the actual design schematics and simulator software to say whether something is or is not safe before they do it.
It's a little early for the doom and gloom here. It looks like they got the valves open and the thrusters working. There's no reason to believe the mission can't be completed at this time.
Yes, it would be better if the valves didn't stick in the first place, and I'm sure they'll look at the problem again, but as problems go in spaceflight, this is just one of a VERY long list of things that have gone wrong that could have been mission ending but turned out OK that have been seen by government and private operations over the years.
Not premature at all. SpaceX has hired plenty of astronauts and will need them for its test flights of the manned Dragon tests in the next few years. In the meantime, they help with human factors engineering of the manned Dragon.
How is he failing? SpaceX has a packed launch manifest, and has been profitable every year since 2007... Their current launch platform, the Falcon 9, has never suffered a critical failure that caused a loss of payload. The one time a payload was lost (the satellite in the previous launch) was not lost due to failure, but because NASA refused to let them do a second burn to get it into the correct orbit. There was no technical reason why the payload could not be deployed, NASA simply refused to let them do so.
This isn't quite true. The technical reason for why the 2nd burn wasn't permitted was that there was a remote chance (less than 5%, but still greater than 0.1% or whatever NASA insisted in their hazard avoidance guidelines) that with the burn on the secondary payload it could have hit the ISS and caused catastrophic damage. Had the 1st stage been able to complete the full flight profile without problems (there were problems), it would have been able to perform that burn within the guidelines NASA had set out to begin with.
I'll agree with you on the point that SpaceX could have in theory still delivered the Orbcomm payload, but the reason for it not happening was a pretty good one. SpaceX basically was pushing the hard margins of operation with that payload, and stuff happened that required a bit more of a safety margin for everybody involved. NASA was perhaps a bit paranoid as well, which didn't help.
I'll stipulate to all that, but I still would argue that it doesn't make sense to claim that SpaceX is failing when they've been profitable since 2007 and seem to have no trouble getting work queued up quite far into the future.
Would you rather hear from Carmack who's been spinning his wheels on a hobby for 13 years with not much to show for his efforts. Musk on the other hand has single-handedly rocked the commercial space industry and proven that there is a better and cheaper way to get to space.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
where are mod points when I need them.
space exploration has been private since day one, with defense contrators use space travel to test the capabilities of ICBMs.
what you mean by the 'privitization of space', is only that someone other than a defense contractor, with political backers, is selling NASA something other than a repurposed missle meant for atomic war.
We now have high tech start ups selling the government rockets for purely science reasons, making better designs, and doing it far cheaper.
Clearly they deliberately only charged up 25% of the valves prior to launch.
Thats true, HOWEVER, tech like this are a serious of one offs, except the original work. For example, the original work was done by Robert Goddard, which his work was picked up by Von Braun, duplicated, and Goddard's ideas formed the core of NAZI rocketry. Then Von Braun brought his knowledge back to America and helped push our space system. Now, we have SpaceX using NASA's, and others work initially, as one off. After all, the merlin 1A was truly a small derivative from NASA's work. Now, SpaceX is doing their own innovations. However, there is little doubt that SpaceX's record remains a fairly solid one and getting better. What is happening now, is that SpaceX is learning how to put launchers and capsules through a decent QA program so that everything is reproducible constantly.
I would hazard a bet that the next flight this fall will be fairly smooth. In addition, they have multiple sats to launch this year. Other than possibly the release, I think that those will go incident free. The reason is that SpaceX has a history of not repeating the same mistake. And the idea that SpaceX will be launching 1/month for the next year, and then moving up to 1.5-2/month is pretty impressive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And yet, NASA has had 40 years and has not built a new launcher since 1981. The reason is that CONgress/president always get in the way. NOW, with multiple companies handling launch, CONgress will have little reason to tell NASA to build new launchers esp. if Private Space brings it way below what NASA can do.
Oh, you are NOT a messenger. You are just a troll.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.