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A Failure For SpaceX: Falcon 9 Explodes During Ascension
MouseR writes with bad news about this morning's SpaceX launch: About 2:19 into its flight, Falcon 9 exploded along stage 2 and the Dragon capsule, before even the stage 1 separation. Telemetry and videos are inconclusive, without further analysis as to what went wrong. Everything was green lights. This is a catastrophe for SpaceX, which enjoyed, until now, a perfect launch record.
TechCrunch has coverage of the failure, which of course also means that today's planned stage one return attempt has failed before it could start; watch this space for more links.
Update: 06/28 15:06 GMT by T : See also stories
at NBC News,
The Washington Post, and the Associated Press (via ABC News). According to the Washington Post, what was a catastrophe for this morning's launch is only a setback for the ISS and its crew, rather than a disaster:
A NASA slide from an April presentation said that with current food levels, the space station would reach what NASA calls “reserve level” on July 24 and run out by Sept. 5, according to SpaceNews.
[NASA spokeswoman Stephanie] Schierholz said, however, that the supplies would last until the fall, although she could not provide a precise date. Even if something were to go wrong with the SpaceX flight, she said, there are eight more scheduled this year, including several this summer, “so there are plenty of ways to ensure the station continues to be well-supplied.”
Of note: One bit of cargo that was aboard the SpaceX craft was a Microsoft Hololens; hopefully another will make it onto one of the upcoming supply runs instead.
Elon Musk has posted a note on the company's Twitter channel: "Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown. Will provide more info as soon as we review the data."
Elon Musk has posted a note on the company's Twitter channel: "Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown. Will provide more info as soon as we review the data."
Here's a gif of the failure: http://imgur.com/SYwUIbI
Looks like:
1. Second stage comes apart in a cloud of oxygen and fuel.
2. Dragon spacecraft falls off / gets overtaken by first stage.
3. First stage is destroyed.
But damn, this was the first time I tried to watch it live, I hoped it would crash on landing.
I slept in and missed the launch, but here's a video of the CRS-7 launch and subsequent explosion.
Isn't funny that Musk's name isn't mentioned in the Summary or article? Every other time SpaceX is mentioned, his name is featured prominately.
I guess he and his publicist doesn't want to take credit for the failure.
Self promotion is the name of the game, just like Kim Kardashian.
SpaceX has been very forthcoming with their telemetry data and analysis, so hopefully we'll hear what happened soon.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Watched live. Started smoking, and then desintegrated.
No one was killed. Cargo and expensive property was lost, but that was it. It is inevitable that something would go wrong with a SpaceX launch in time--rockets are really finicky things and space is a most unforgiving environment. They will do the analysis, move on, and all will be right with the world.
Speaking of failures, let's look at that headline, shall we? "Ascent" is what an object makes when it goes from the ground to the heavens. "Ascension" is a point on the celestial equator.
Funny how when Russian rockets fail it is because of those "no good drunken Russians", but when a US rocket fails, its because rocket science is complex and challenging.
'It blowed up. It blowed up real good'
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
With large companies, the better the record the more the company believes the worst can not happen to them. Corners start getting cut for the sake of deadline or headlines, what have you. It's not new though, See examples: The Titanic, The Challenger, etc.
The good news is: the scheduled rocket landing attempt won't fail, this time. I promise!
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Too much vodka. Too little vodka. Eject! Eject! Eject!
Buy AMERICAN, People, not foreign junk!
See, *everyone* fails sometimes, even your hero Elon Musk.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The breakup certainly looks to initiate from the upper stage, rather than the firing fist stage if you step through the video frame-by-frame. Right at the same time the commentary is explicitly stating that the trajectory looks nominal. It must have been round and about Max Q - simple structural failure? RSO Intervention?
A mighty wind?
More like a methane-y gust
Aside from throwing a couple of names out there, what information do yo provide to make, much less back up any of your claims?
Or, is this some 'clever' scheme from Ted Cruz to push Pace-X into changing the x into a cross on all of their logos?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Good one Microsoft! You blew up the spaceship!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
better now then when crew is on board
Space travel is hard and the environment is unforgiving.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Dear Mr. Putin, please help our pathetic space program.
Pretty, pretty please ?!?
The only alternatives to SpaceX are NASA's AtlasV and the Russian offerings. That's well known.
What's less known is that a major component — the RD-180 engine — of AtlasV is supplied by Russia as well. Russia is threatening to stop delivering it, but the US ought to stop buying it in the first place — and cut off billions of dollars for Putin.
If the SpaceX fails, the US may be forced to appease Russia — such as by forgiving the armed invasion and recognizing the annexation of Crimea.
A Russian agent, who'd successfully sabotage SpaceX, would certainly be richly rewarded back at home.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
All those scientists trying to steal the Hawaiian natives' land should have been on board.
It seems strange that the second stage suddenly ruptured while the first was still firing. Could it have been hit with something during flight?
Comparing the replies for this explosion during ascension to the explosion of the Russian rocket during ascension. I bet the modded up posts will be VERY different!
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed
Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed
Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed
Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed
Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11
Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed
Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed
Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed
Delta - first launch failed
Delta II - first nineteen successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellite's operational lifespan (55th was first total failure)
Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed
Falcon 9 - nineteenth launch failed (Secondary payload on the 4th launch aborted as a precaution)
Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful
Long March 2 - first launch failed
Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures
N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly
Proton - third launch failed
Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed
Proton-M - eleventh launch failed
Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful
Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts)
Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure
Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities
Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed
Soyuz-FG - first nineteen launches successful (all 49 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS)
Space Shuttle - nineteenth launch a partial failure (ATO) (25th was first total failure)
Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed
Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed
Titan III - first and sixth launches failed
Titan IV - seventh launch failed
Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
It was a good run, but the game is over. Falcon 9 slots in to the rankings as fourth in the history of rocket development, with a success record exceeded only by Shuttle, Soyuz-FG, and Delta II.
Maybe Falcon 9 Heavy will have better luck.
Musk tweeted: There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause.
There is a listing and pics of the lost cargo here.
The Dragon SpX-7 mission was to deliver supplies to the International Space Station and return cargo to Earth. Dragon remains the only visiting vehicle of ISS that can return a significant mass of cargo to the ground, aside from the crewed Soyuz spacecraft that can ferry a few dozen Kilograms of return items back to Earth along with its three crew members. The SpX-7 mission will carry 1,952 Kilograms of cargo to the Space Station and return 675 Kilograms to Earth at the conclusion of its five-week mission.
Crew Supplies - 676kg
Systems Hardware - 461kg
Science Cargo - 529kg
Computer Resources - 35kg
EVA Equipment - 166kg
External Payloads - 526kg
Interesting to note that part of the science cargo was the Meteor study. The Meteor study, going by the full name of ‘Meteor Composition Determination,’ was to be the first of its kind to be deployed in space, solely focused on the analysis of meteors entering Earth’s atmosphere and pin-pointing their composition through their optical emissions when burning up in the atmosphere. The original Meteor hardware was expected to arrive aboard the International Space Station in October 2014 on the Cygnus Orb-3 resupply craft that unfortunately was lost in a launch failure of its Antares launch vehicle just seconds after lifting off. Coincidence or someone really does not want this study to go ahead.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Well, yeah, except the whole thing about having the production documents and rights to produce the engines. We don't produce them now because we found it much more politically affordable to buy them from the Russians than to design our own engines, and there is a significant tooling cost to building our own, but it's not that big a deal. Give it about 2 years of lead time to build the tooling and validate the construction process and we're good to go. (Gov't estimates are 1 year ... double is reasonable)
Fascinating video.
Elon's said it was a 'counter-intuitive' overpressure of the 2nd stage oxygen tank.
It was about Max-Q as others have said, before the 1st stage started shutting down engines for sep. & boost back to Of Course I Still Love You
Oxygen tank bursts. 2nd stage collapses - Dragon falls clear - left behind as 1st stage rapidly accelerates with loss of mass. Flies though the 2nd stage debris, but looses trajectory as it's too light. Range guys reach for the big red button... RED (Rapid Explosive Disassembly) from the safety systems.
This guy has to do everything big
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You should not speak ill of your next President.
Donald Trump? Woohoo!
The US government loaned a huge amount of money to Musk to start his car dealership. They keep paying him for 'green' cars that do not fulfill the payment requirements.
And Tesla paid back the loan in 2013, nine years early. You can still argue it was a poor choice for the US government to loan it to them in the first place, if you want, but to the best of my knowledge it's inaccurate to imply that they're still on the hook for that cash.
Elon does not tolerate failure
They just hope Congress authorizes more funds for a re-do. It might even be that buying insurance is illegal: In the long run, you will spend more paying for insurance (or else insurance companies wouldn't make money). It's not like your house or car, where you likely don't have enough capital to just build/buy a new one if the one you've got burns to the ground, so you need insurance to cover the unlikely big loss.
But government (at the 100M scale of rocket launches) has infinite resources.
Historically, about 2-3% of launches fail.
Where's the Ariane Vega, or the Japanese H2 launchers or the PSLV in that list?
Vega - five launches, five successful.
H2 (A and B variants) - thirty-two launches, one failure.
PSLV - twenty-nine launches, one total failure (the first), one partial where the final stage underperformed but the payload satellite used its own propulsion system to get to the correct orbit.
That moves the Falcon 9 down the listings a bit, I think.
GI Joe strikes back against evil mastermind Elon Musk.
Who are you, Tokyo fucking Rose?
More like Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip
Video stream
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia...
if you're gonna have a launch failure with total loss of all stages, at least this seems to be one of the better outcomes. First stage is very expensive and complex, fixing a major flaw there could take a long time and lots of money. But it looks like the first stage was working fine all the way to the (fiery) end, and it was a ruptured tank on the 2nd stage that caused the failure. Much better than the first stage exploding soon after liftoff.
Remember before they changed their name a few years ago how they had "better" quality videos? Now you gotta go to bestgore or similar to see what use to be on Ogrish(sp)
I've had it with the stress from my job and living in hell, how much for a seat on that?
Musk has discovered the path to silicon-based spiritual enlightenment?
Perhaps OP meant ascent?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
"There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause." - Elon Musk. I seem to remember that happening before, I wonder when?
The US government loaned a huge amount of money to Musk to start his car dealership.
Tesla has dealerships now? Awesome! Oh wait...you're an idiot.
Fucking idiotic Americans...
Did this Dragon have SpaceX's new SuperDraco thrusters to allow emergency escape? It's disappointing that the rocket blew up, but it's really too bad they couldn't use this to demonstrate that their escape system works. That could have turned this from a big setback to a minor step forward in approving this thing to carry people.
SpaceX can survive without actually going into space: that said, IT HAD A ROCKET BEFORE IT SAW A JOT FROM NASA.
"Privately funded, it had a vehicle before it got money from NASA, and while NASA’s space station resupply funds are a tremendous boost, SpaceX would have existed without it." - Max Engel, March 2013
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Musk promised magic and special sauce, but he is not using dramatically superior technology. The failure rates of large, high-energy chemical rockets are simply unacceptable for manned flight. A radically cheaper and more reliable launch method is required. This would probably entail much smaller payloads boosted by magnetic rail and assembled into larger structures in orbit. Forget manned space flight. It never made any sense.
try again. SpaceX *had* a launch vehicle *before* they even approached NASA for contracts.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
This is rewriting history. In december 2008 SpaceX was at the end of its tether. Musk himself wrote that they had virtually no money left in the bank when they finally got the NASA contract in the nick of time. So it was rather a close thing:
In the meantime, at SpaceX, Musk and top executives had spent most of December in a state of fear, but on Dec. 23, 2008, SpaceX received a wonderful shock. The company won a $1.6 billion contract for 12 NASA resupply flights to the space station. Then the Tesla deal ended up closing successfully, on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day.
Balls of steel but also tremendous luck.
who is lockmart?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Balls of steel but also tremendous luck.
Which might be the reason that you don't see this kind of technological advances happening too often in commercial ventures
When can we end this stupid experiment of having multiple corporations try to recreate NASA's 50 years of launch experience and reliability?
If congress feels that they must cater to the private industry lobby, fine. Hold a small carrot out to encourage a competitive private space industry. But let's refund NASA to continue these mission critical activities and to actually develop a space shuttle successor.
Some activities do not work well on a corporate schedule or budget. Blackwater didn't do a satisfactory job in Iraq. No one is doing a satisfactory job with developing a private launch technology.
Please stop selling our national security out to private industry.
Wrong on all counts. The first signs of failure didn't occur until after max-q, and if you were sober when you saw the video it's very plain that it involved neither the first stage or the interstage.
Now who blamed that failure on a no good drunken Russian? Get back under your bridge, troll!
Let us be honest here and give credit where the credit is due
http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/emt...
The first version of Algebra was known as Rhetorical Algebra, where equations are written in full sentences. For example, the rhetorical form of x + 1 = 2 is "The thing plus one equals two" or possibly "The thing plus 1 equals 2". Rhetorical algebra was first developed by the ancient Babylonians
I know that the moslem apologists out there would do anything, even to the point of telling BOLD FACE LIES , to promote that satanist cult - but fortunately, math don't lie, and Rhetorical Algebra was invented many centuries before the parents of that profart of theirs started to copulate
As a bacon lover, I would say the "Great Genus Of Our Times" has got to be Porcus.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
As the other person noted, Musk promised something revolutionary. But he's using the same old primitive rockets that NASA has been using since the 50's. The only difference is it's a private company making mistakes with rockets instead of NASA and there are more launches than there would be if the government was the sole entity engaged in space travel.
As for the alternative methods of propulsion to get to orbit.
A railgun can launch cargo to a sufficient velocity so it can reach orbit without any assistance via rockets.
A single stage to orbit spaceplane called "Skylon" which uses a hybrid airbreathing engine/rocket combination to get into orbit is also a viable alternative.
Also the VentureStar which was to be a replacement for the space shuttle built by Lockheed Martin that was a single stage to orbit reusable spaceplane. It was canceled without a serious effort to bring it to fruition.
And Musk has talked about how his thinking revolves around first principles to solve problems, but in reality his work is just as conventional as everyone else's. That goes for his electric cars also. Which have been around since time of Edison.
Thanks to the glorious sabotage efforts and with the full cooperation of the USian congress, this impermanent upstart can get it's come uppins. Space is the domain of the big boys. Space X has not paid its dues. This is what happens. Now the USian congress can not feel guilty about giving it's launch business to Russia.
Islam offered NONE of those things to the world.
1. The concept of zero originated in India and was adopted by the Arabs, whose number system needed it; The Roman numeral system had no zero symbol because it did not need one, given that a zero symbol is not needed to represent any value other than zero itself. (Roman numerals do not use digits the same way and they considered the absence of a number to be "zero").
2. Many of the claims of engineering/science/math from the Arabs and Egyptians BEFORE they became Muslim are routinely ascribed to Islam as pro-Muslim propaganda, taking advantage of the poor history education of many people in the Western world.
3. What of value did the Muslim world actually DO with all the amzing and wonderful things they pretend to have discovered/invented??? (insert cricket sounds here). So much for the claims.
As in all societies, the Muslim world has had a few people who deviated from the accepted norms and some of them embraced and/or protected bits of knowledge that either pre-dated the conversion-by-sword of their societies or came from outside those societies (the Catholic monks did the same up in Europe during the dark ages). The overall Muslim society and culture are no more responsible for this than the overall society in Europe gets to claim credit for what a few monks did.
LOX becomes big bright white like that as it flashes past its boiling point returning to a vapor. You see the same with Challenger when the LOX tank fails. Kerosene looks different when aerosolized (the Kerosene is not super-cooled to become a liquid like Oxygen must be). It's not really an explosion until very late in the process. If you look carefully, you will note that the 1st stage is still flying fine as all the LOX is dumped and becomes a giant fluffy looking cloud THEN an explosion (complete with bright yellow flash) occurs probably as the Kerosene tank fails and its contents get ignited. That's the moment the 1st stage is destroyed.
It appears that the second stage ruptures its LOX tank, dumping the contents which flash to gaseous, then the Dragon capsule falls free as the upper stage structure crumples, then the upper stage Kerosene ignites and blows the stack apart.
Sadly, is seems the cargo Dragon (which appears to survive the failure) has no abort mode and therefore no commands to deploy its chutes if it suddenly finds itself plummeting Earthward and unattached to a launch vehicle when it is supposed to be ascending and accelerating. Had it been so configured, I believe the odds are pretty good that all of the payload from within the capsule (sadly not the IDA from the trunk) would have ended up bobbing safely in the ocean awaiting recovery and re-launch.
I am NOT a SpaceX fanboy who thinks Musk can do no wrong. He and his company are doing an admirable job in a very difficult high-energy flight regime and also in a bureaucratic and fossilized highly-regulated industry (so it's doubly difficult).
The simple fact, however, is that the Russians have had a huge string of recent failures across multiple vehicles and suppliers, whereas this is the first loss-of-vehicle failure for the SpaceX Falcon 9. That's why a Russian failure (or the Orbital failure originating in a Russian engine) yields the "no good drunken Russians" (to use your phrase) responses while this one isolated SpaceX failure does not. You will note that the most recent failures from India and China similarly did not produce responses of "no good drunken Indians or Chinese". To be even more fair, you ought to admit that most people do not even immediately assume the Russians are drunk - the presumption is generally more that their program is cash-starved, threatened by political and financial corruption, and under strain in areas like retention of skilled workers and recruitment of new young workers.
SpaceX is NOT living off the government in the "subsidized" sense (i.e. getting a pile of cash because they have political connections)
SpaceX is getting cash from the government in exchange for work performed (just like the gas station that sells gas to be pumped into a government car, or the soldier who collects a pay check, or the paper mill that delivers a massive roll of blank paper to the treasury department). Even the commercial cargo/crew development contracts SpaceX won were openly competed and the government gave FAR more of the cash to Boeing who has yet to design build and fly ANYTHING to the ISS (Reminder: Although Boeing likes to pretend otherwise, Douglas designed and built Mercury and Gemini, North American and Grumman did Apollo, and North American Rockwell did Shuttle - Boeing has no experience in designing and building vehicles for manned spaceflight or space station cargo flights).
The willfully-dishonest internet propaganda that attempts to confuse the general public into not knowing the difference between [1] SpaceX getting a multi-billion dollar contract for 12 cargo deliveries to the station and [2] ULA getting a billion dollars per year for "assured access to space" (in addition to any charge for an actual flight) seems to be aimed at shielding our remaining big three defense-contract-dependent mega-corps (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrop-Grumman) from any scrutiny. THEY seem to have made getting huge contracts, then under-performing and late-delivering (and then getting new contracts and cash infusions to fix their screw-ups rather than fixing at their own expense as everybody else who signs contracts seems to have to do) into an art form.
The initial flights of Musk-funded Falcon I failed (as did almost all the early flights of the big aerospace firms while THEY were sucking cash from the government nipple) but then Musk successfully got the Falcon I to orbit a payload - WHILE STILL NOT ON A GOVERNMENT SUBSIDY.
The success of the Falcon I was what got NASA to give SpaceX a contract. It's either dishonest or idiotic to claim the Falcon I "sucked hard". The NASA contract was for a large amount of cargo to the ISS, which was something the Falcon I was not designed to do and not capable of doing. The Falcon I design overcame its development problems to become a successful rocket, but was then not needed for market reasons. It was not abandoned because it was "bad" but rather because SpaceX is not run by morons - SpaceX shifted its efforts and money to what the customer wanted.
I suspect all the internet whining about Musk taking government money for SpaceX is by trolls from the big aerospace firms who are shocked to find a new upstart has overcome all the regulatory hurdles they paid government officials to erect. Remember all those hurdles SpaceX had to jump to get approved to haul USAF payloads on his "new launch vehicle"? The "big boys" never had to pass those tests. Each time they built a new launch vehicle (like the current Atlas V which has nothing in common with the original Atlas other than burning LOX and RP-1) they were grandfathered-in. You can be sure the hurdles will be lowered before the big firms have to slip a new launch vehicle though into production in the 21st century world that has SpaceX in it (where the public might notice the different regulatory treatment of a "new launch vehicle" from SpaceX versus from ULA). Those regulatory hurdles were never supposed to let a new entrant into the market, and were never meant to apply to the old vendors. The crony capitalists are in a dither, with ULA lashing-out at congress threatening to cancel the Delta if they cannot keep using Russian engines on Atlas (in effect using American national security for blackmail).
LockMart is a portmanteau of Lockheed-Martin, you'know the aerospace giant.
This is a catastrophe for SpaceX, which enjoyed, until now, a perfect launch record.
Everyone has a perfect record before the first failure.
Only an idiot thinks there won't be a failure.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The real cause of failure? Russian sabotage! Possibly by a deep mole Russian within SpaceX.
What a surprise - a mindless libertarian bible-basher revealing gross ignorance in detail of the domain of discourse.
Lockheed-Martin, numbnuts. An afternoon in the industry would have made you familiar with the abbreviation.
ive never seen it written that way before is all. its always just lockheed in anything i ever see
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same