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Antares Rocket Explodes On Launch
sneakyimp writes: The Antares rocket operated by Orbital Sciences Corporation exploded on launch due to a "catastrophic anomaly" after a flawless countdown. No injuries are reported and all personnel are accounted for. According to the audio stream hosted by local news affiliate WTVR's website, the Cygnus spacecraft contained classified crypto technology and efforts are being made to cordon off the wreckage area. Additionally, interviews of personnel and witness reports are to be limited to appropriate government agencies so that an accident report can be generated. This accident is likely to have a detrimental effect on the stock price of Orbital Sciences Corp, traded on the NYSE. The Antares rocket's engines are based on old soviet designs from the '60s. While this is sure to be a blow to NASA due to the cost, it may well boost the fortunes of SpaceX, a chief competitor of Orbital Sciences. Both companies were recently awarded resupply contracts by NASA.
Ya think? They're charging 1.9B for 8 launches, versus SpaceX's 1.6B for 12. Loss of vehicle on a production launch is going to rain hell on someone.
Honestly at that height I don't think it would have mattered that much. Either the buildings of the launch facility were going to have debris rained down upon them from above, or were going to have their walls in the vicinity of the ground explosion absorb the debris.
There have been reports of vehicles damaged, but I think those are erroneous, confusing the destruction of the launch vehicle with possible damage to ground vehicles. There shouldn't have been anything not inside-and-under-cover given the destructive power of the launch anyway.
The ground explosion did take out two of the four towers around the pad, but I'm amazed that the worklights on the remaining two towers stayed functional. They were on through the end of NASA TV coverage a moment ago.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
intact
Not quite. There appears to have been a failure/explosion in the vicinity of the engines. Either a combustion chamber or turbopump failure from the looks of it. From that point on, the whole thing just 'sat back down' (tanks intact).
Good video of it on 4chan /pol/ and here.
Have gnu, will travel.
And it's not the first time they've blown up rockets rather than shooting them into space.
I'm on a chair.
Given the cost of the payloads, even a 5% failure rate is unacceptable.
Which is why you buy launch insurance in the first place. I don't know how NASA wrote into the launch contract about massive failures like this, but anybody who sends stuff up on rockets is well aware that they explode. It is the nature of the business. Those companies who haven't had a massive failure like this one are just plain lucky... and all of them know it too.
Certainly a launch provider tries to do things that don't purposely cause a launch failure (the launch of the Challenger not withstanding), but anybody who claims 100% success rate and doesn't sweat the next launch is flat out lying.
Otherwise a 5% failure rate for less than 20 launches simply means bad luck instead of incompetence. If anything, earlier launches are more likely to have problems because there are far more unknowns too. All launchers eventually have failures, and many of those failures are just as spectacular as this one.
You mean like this?
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com...
Two of their engines have blown caught fire, or blown up on the test harness. This adds a third explosion. They have successfully launched 3 times. Thus 3 time engines have blown up and 3 successful launches. Depending on how you look at this you will get different percentages.
4 engines have been destroyed, 6 have operated to their objective. You could also look at it as there are 3 disasters and 3 successes. You could also look at it that there have been 3 successful launches and 1 failed launch.
The way I look at it is that Orbital has cost NASA probably a few billion dollars in failures, and thousands of man hours. Two of those failures have been this year. I would call that pretty abysmal.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
And it's not the first time they've blown up rockets rather than shooting them into space.
To be fair, the mechanics of the two things can be very similar.
sic transit gloria mundi
The summery isn't quite correct. The engines aren't based on an engine from the 60s. These -are- the engines built by the soviets in the 1970s. These things are 40 years old.
The RD-180s used by the Atlas-V are built new, despite their relationship to the abandoned Energia/Buran. The NK-33s that are used by the Antares sat for decades in a Russian warehouse.
This might sound strange, but there is very little science in rockets. Its mostly engineering, QA, process management and such. Also, accounting.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Contrary to popular bullshit propaganda, the popular U.S. rocket launches are all done by businesses, not NASA. NASA provides program management, mission design for their own payloads, and so on, but they were never in rocket-making business, ever. Both Apollo and Space Shuttle were managed by NASA, but designed and built by subcontractors. Launched too. NASA has more input into design of their science payloads, but even then it's design only, not manufacturing. That's done by subcontractors still.
The only difference between the "commercial" launches and those prior to that is the amount of NASA management involvement. From the business standpoint, nothing much has changed between the "noncommercial" and "commercial" launches.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Higher quality here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The loss of Apollo 1 almost killed the entire project. 1) It set the development back so far they almost didn't make the deadline and 2) there was a LOT of "why are we doing this expensive thing anyway, and now we're KILLING people?" Read Eugene Krantz's book and it's there in other sources; lots of NASA people thought they'd be looking for jobs.
Not only that, but it killed three of my favorite childhood heroes, Grissom, Chaffee, and White. Horribly killed.
You can insure against loss of payload on launch.
I would expect that Orbital Sciences is liable for damage to the payload and had insured themselves, but I have no direct knowledge. Even if they are covered for direct costs, it is still bad for them.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I received a tour of the restricted launch site areas due to my company have a contract with NASA at cape Canaveral. This was just after 9/11 when everything was shut down for security reasons (I have a photo of myself standing in front of the Apollo 1 launch pad memorial). The photos I saw were less than a year old. I can't say more but the launch was a failed classified launch and that may very well be the reason the bunkers were still used.
I don't know why they use them, I don't know why they need to be so close but I do know what I saw. A bunker heavily damaged (and all the surrounding vegetation was burned to the roots) where the damage was very recent. He also showed us photo's of the burned out cars, minivans and pickups taken by our "tour guide" who worked for our company and was giving us a tour of the cape. I may have pictures of the launch bunkers somewhere, but there was one next to every cluster of pads that I remember seeing. I can't recall if our guide ever said why they used the bunkers, 15 years ago is more than my memory can handle for such mundane details.
There is one thing I'll never forget about the cape though, which was how well preserved the wetlands are because NASA is using so little of the ground. There were alligators sunning themselves on nearly every road we went down.
In the news conference they said that the rocket lost upward momentum at 12 seconds and the Range Safety Officer pressed the destruct button at 20 seconds
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
This is largely Orbital's *schtick*: they are basically in the business of repurposing old, obsolete hardware, and using them for launch vehicles. Antares is the follow-on to Taurus, and Pegasus and Minotaur are repurposed Peacekeeper stages. They're cheap. But they're really not in competition with SpaceX, because Orbital launches mainly smaller payloads.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You know, it's that same old regurgitated bullshit. And it smells like it.
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer.
Let me underscore that part for you
_anything_ that West has to offer.
They have closed circuit rocket engine technology. By definition, that is going to be at least about 15% more efficient than any open circuit that is the only technology west has in orbital lifting rocket engines. Thanks for private corporation known as Lockheed Martin, that didn't believe that closed circuit was possible to do until Russians literally put a working engine in their lab and test fired it for them in 2000s. Because it was too inefficient to research the technology in more detail. Russians had to blow up something like 30 rockets to get it right. Tolerance limits on closed circuit are apparently far more tight, and that's not just the engine but all the relevant systems.
Private sector is really good at developing off existing base level development to practical development, but it's utterly terrible at actual base level development that is needed for practical development, but doesn't result in practical applications on its own. That's why much if not most if that kind of development is done in universities and government labs. And rocket engines are in desperate need of base research right now because of long term lack of funding. This has nothing to do with "inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, corrupt contractors" or anything of a sorts. It has everything to do with the fact that they were given no funding to develop baseline research for better rocket engine technology.
Private corporations will have to blow up their share of rockets to get it right. They're banking on better simulation software in existence, but that can't simulate everything due to sheer amount of unknowns or uncertainties when it comes to rocket science. That's why rocket science is HARD, even by modern standards.
They're not Russian, they're Soviet and actually built in the Ukraine, in Dnepropetrovsk.
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer.
Define "better".
They have closed circuit rocket engine technology. By definition, that is going to be at least about 15% more efficient than any open circuit that is the only technology west has in orbital lifting rocket engines.
Bullshit. SSME uses the same cycle. With LH2/LOX, no less. But why do you care about the technology? I don't think it matters HOW the launch is accomplished as long as the costs are as low as possible. Whatever works and is cheap and sustainable is better than fancy stuff that's expensive. Whether fancy stuff is desirable is dependent on what it brings and what it costs. Unless you can make it work cheaply enough, it's not worth it.
Thanks for private corporation known as Lockheed Martin, that didn't believe that closed circuit was possible to do until Russians literally put a working engine in their lab and test fired it for them in 2000s.
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! As I said, the Space Shuttle had been using this for two decades by then. And The Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator by Rocketdyne was even more advanced, and is basically what SpaceX is working on now.
Ezekiel 23:20
No, the physical units are mothballed engines from the 1960s. And there's a limited supply of them. It's even worse than the RD-180 situation - not only do the engines come from a questionable supplier, but the manufacturing line doesn't exist anymore (the Russians are apparently considering re-launching production, but so far I'm not aware of them doing anything along those lines; they still have dozens of the old engines to use). It's no better than the preserved F-1 engines in this respect. I have no idea what Orbital Sciences plan to do about that.
Ezekiel 23:20
There were 13 launches of Falcon 9, a total of 130 engines, and one of them failed, but that still seems like a pretty good success rate. The redundancy of the engines in the first stage definitely comes in handy.
Ezekiel 23:20
This happened just half a year ago.
Ezekiel 23:20