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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.
Hey, at least they got the hard part right.
I have friends that worked on this rocket. Some were there for the launch. Orbital is going to have serious problems because of this.
I'm on a chair.
The ISS crew will get their pizza for free now.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
The office coffee machine is next.
no indications of terrorism linked to the destruction of the rocket.
You mean, it wasn't a good idea to reuse those 40-year-old Russian engines even when two of them have been shown as defective before this launch?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Is it just me or is Orbital Sciences' track record extremely poor? Something like half their rockets fail and they give nothing but excuses. Their Taurus rocket had a 33% failure rate http://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-...
It may be time to look into how they manage their company.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Yep. There's no such thing as a free launch.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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.
I mean it's not like it's rocket science...
This is hard stuff and there will be set backs. I want as many competitors to succeed as possible. I hope they keep trying and have more success.
As much as I think Elon Musk is cool guy right now, I don't want his companies to have a monopoly on commercial space flight, solar power and electric cars 20 years from now.
Soviet designs from the 60s, but Russian rockets are our only ride now. Aren't those also based on Soviet designs, possibly also from the 60s? If it's not a design flaw, maybe there's something about the Soviet/Russian construction process that's missing. It's probably like having somebody's cookie recipe. You swear you followed it; but your kitchen is different. There are timings and processes that the person who gave you the recipe isn't even aware of; because they're subconscious. If they find a cause, I bet it boils down to something like, "well of course we case harden those gears after we fit them, it was just the way things were done and nobody ever thought about it".
What I want to know is if there's any truth to the rumors that Musk was seen leaving the area with an empty Stinger launch on one shoulder and a shit-eating grin on his face...
Dear Slashdot,
I fail to see how the 13-year-old story about game design, "A 'Vow of Chastity' For Game Designers", is a related story, as indicated in the panel below the story between the "previous story" and "next story" links. Seriously, WTF? Less than worthless.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I thought Orbital Science actually had a rather poor record in recent years, this may just be the final nail in their coffin.
No, it went boom, THEN fell down.
NASA has had its careless streak too. See Challenger and the investigation that followed. But realistically, this is what happens whenever you do things in one-see, two-sies instead of in bulk. If the Air Force only had one fighter plane and only flew it once every few months, you can bet there would be a lot of failures for a long time before everyone settled into a voodoo flight ops mentality and nothing new was tolerated at all because the cost of failure was so high.
Video of the Orbital Sciences Explosion at Wallops from a Cessna flying at 3000ft. Note that the video is pretty noisy so you'll want to turn your sound down.
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.
I hate to point out that NASA was never in rocket-making business. Everything launched was made by subcontractors. NASA only provides various payloads, and in the past provided program oversight. Everything that NASA launched that you might recall was in fact done by the private sector. Including all elements of Apollo.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
There is generally a launch monitoring bunker within a few hundred feet of the pad. This bunker is populated by scientists and engineers during the launch so that they can abort the launch immediately if a problem develops. At least at NASA, these people drive their own personal cars to the bunker. The bunker is hardened to survive rocket debris impacting the building but the parking lot is just that, an open lot. NASA has burned up LOTS of cars with exploding rockets. I saw pictures of about 20 some odd cars burned right to their frames after they were doused in burning rocket fuel from a rocket that exploded. I have no idea who bought them new cars but I know I would have been expecting someone else to pick up the tab if it had been my car.
That dog died 40 years ago somewhere in Siberia.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Payload, plus collateral damage, plus market capitalization loss, plus reputation damage, plus value of future lost contracts, etc. $1B might actually be on the low side.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p..."> Antares will launch less than 20 times in its lifetime. In fact, probably less than another 5. NASA is not likely going to use them to provide goods for the ISS since they are expensive for what they bring.
OSC is a company that really has NO control of its systems. Basically, it farms out most everything, so it must depend on all others. Even now, the Antares uses old Russian engines, and counted on Russia to do the quality control.
Until OSC controls all aspects of its systems, similar to how SpaceX works, they will NEVER be able to do a launch system reliably.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You know that's kind of old school. There is this new technology called "digital communications" which means that they can read the instruments from miles away, removing the need for the bunker since the mid 1960's or so. There were no bunkers for the Saturn V (I believe the first Saturn I flights still had them) or the Shuttle - everything was monitored from ~ 3 miles away. At the Cape the Range Safety Officer looks at computer screens at the Range Operations Control Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (probably 10 or 15 miles from the NASA launch sites on Merritt Island), and I am pretty sure similar practices are followed at Wallops.
The whole "commercial" launch thing is a misnomer. It's business as usual, except that this time NASA does less micromanagement, and there are some new faces at the table. That's all.
And the contracts won't be cost-plus, meaning the contractors don't have a blank check and projects will actually have to stay on budget. There may be legitimate arguments why this is a bad idea for a national space program (personally, I disagree), but it does represent a rather large change from the way launches were done in the past.
Actually, it went boom, fell down, and we got a second boom for no added charge.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
OSC does NOT have a strong program. The fact is, that Antonio has continued to give up all of the design and construction to others. OSC owns less of this rocket, than ULA owns of their atlas first stage.
Go look at Pegasus and the various Minotaurs/Taurus launch systems and you will see that they do NOT have a great track record.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Having worked for their GN&C team, it's usually due to cost cutting. OSC has been on the lower cost side to support all those NASA science and non-DOD missions--which are done on shoestring budgets.
OSC has been able to prove resuse/integration vs ground up designs can be as effective, it's just they are losing sight that QC is more important than monte carlo simulations (which sells in that business). Likely due to gov't pressure to keep the same processes in the face of SpaceX's clean sheet approach.
From the video, sure looks like a mechanical failure, not fuel pump, not control software, not ops error. Definitely a black eye for a good team of folks and a lot of questions.
And I think the launch pad area might need a fresh coat of paint or something...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You're going to love this:
https://twitter.com/hormiga/st...
Another great victory for the private sector. Rocket science is hard. It's not like we've been launching rockets for half a century or anything.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Elon Musk called it two years ago in this interview.
Musk: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
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.
Hmm, now who would want to see Orbital fail? Would anyone stand to benefit from that? Any companies that they are competing with for contracts or investment? Hmm...
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Pretty sure NASA has blown more on Constellation, Orion and SLS, launchers to no where that never launch, than SpaceX has spent on successful development of 2 new rockets and Dragon1, and will probably spend on Falcon Heavy, Dragon 2 and their reusable program.
NASA's problem is not insufficient funding. Its inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, corrupt contractors, and the inability to build or do much of anything in the vacinity of its manned space program. JPL and a few others places are doing fine but they are an exception to the rule.
Some people at Orbital probably do need to be sacked for trying to use 40+ year old Russian engines, the engines are actually that old not just the design. Some people at NASA probably should be sacked for buying in to a contractor proposing such a flawed concept.
@de_machina
I did some work at years ago at Wallops Flight Facility. Whenever a untested or otherwise dubious rocket was scheduled to launch there would be a "will it clear the sea wall" pool. I'm sure there was heavy action on this one.
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.
The design is great, no problem with using it today, why screw with what works.
OTOH, the engines themselves are 40 years old. That is a different story. They were made and have just been sitting in storage. 40 years is a long time for things to go wrong bad. Apparently they were not sufficiently re-conditioned before use.
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer.
It seems to me that in order to be better, they have to deliver their payload, and not explode. When they blow up, their effectiveness falls off to zero real quick.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, western engines don't blow up on launch half as well as these do!
NASA's problem is not insufficient funding. Its inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, corrupt contractors, and the inability to build or do much of anything in the vacinity of its manned space program.
And the Congress/Senate. They've both been requiring them to do stuff that protects existing pork projects AND constantly cutting their funding.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Not quite single use. From what I remember even though the engines were originally meant for a non-reusable rocket, they were manufactured to withstand up to 15 firings. Kusnetsov overengineered them for prospective future use. Thus Aerojet would be able to test-fire each engine several times before passing them to Orbital Sciences.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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
I'm only repeating what a couple of different experts interviewed on the subject said. I did a little research, it seems that explosive failures are usually not connected to the engines but rather the fuel supply or storage system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer... Russians had to blow up something like 30 rockets to get it right.
Make that 31.
No, it went boom, THEN fell down.
So, we built a second one. That one went boom, fell down, then sank into the swamp.
But the third stage stayed up. And that's what you'll have lad, the strongest launch platform in these isles.
Do you know WHY they use 40+ year old Russian engines? Because they are better than anything West has to offer.
It seems to me that in order to be better, they have to deliver their payload, and not explode. When they blow up, their effectiveness falls off to zero real quick.
From what I understand, the rocket was veering off course, so they activated a self-destruct mechanism.