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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."
Leave it to LiveLeak for actual video:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i...
The fuck are you talking about? This launch was undoubtedly, like all launches: insured. Also how the fuck do you figure they nationalize any risk? Development of the Falcon 9 has been solely on spacex, with nasa simply buying rocket launches at what is a competitive price.
Troll elsewhere
It is a NASA failure. NASA paid $278 million to develop the rocket and then NASA paid $1.6 billion more for 12 launches that should have happened since 2nd quarter 2008: the first launch was delayed more than two years to December 2010, the first two launches were just test launches, the contract said "delivery of a minimum of 20 metric tons of upmass cargo to the space station" while the actual cargo delivered is half that after 8 launches (9 with the failed one), the fabled objective of reusable stuff is still far away.
NASA spent a lot of money to gain nothing, beside the fact that they can blame SpaceX in case of failure, but that was probably the plan all along. It fails? Its SpaceX fault. It works? We managed it well.
"The only alternatives to SpaceX are NASA's AtlasV and the Russian offerings. That's well known."
Well, apart from Arianespace (the Ariane V medium-lift and Vega small-capacity launcher), the Japanese H2-B launchers (one will fly a cargo resupply mission to the ISS in August), the low-cost Indian PSLVs, the Chinese Long March series of man-rated launchers etc. etc. That's well-known.
Saying that this launch failure has certainly put a crimp in SpaceX's plans to nuzzle up to the DoD/NSA funding teat.
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.
From Musk: There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counter intuitive cause. More info after a thorough fault tree analysis. (I left my froot-loops in the stage 2 oxygen tank -- sorry about that Elon.)
Ian Ameline
Wait, SpaceX is doing all this without those huge, multi-year injections of cash from the US government?
Probably they should publicise that more. Because you know, the actual records show them taking a colossal amount of money, straight from the US government, to do this. Without that money, SpaceX wouldn't exist or would still be doing cheap sub-orbital experiments.
Dragon tore clear, but was tumbling far too much to be able to deploy parachutes.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
or inventing trigonometry?
Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi introduced Europe to algebra, the base ten numbering system and the concept of "zero".
Thabit ibn Qurra: first Ptolemaic Reformer and founder of statics.
Ibn Al-Haytham: tenth Century pioneer of complex optical systems.
Ibn Zuhr: gave us food groups. In the TWELFTH Century.
Writing Muslims off as corner-shop camel jockeys is just... passé, to put it extremely politely.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
the Arabs had algebra in the bag five HUNDRED years BEFORE Descartes.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Yeah, pretty much. SpaceX doesn't get a Federal budget, being as it's a privately owned, publicly traded company initially financed by Musk himself.
Wanna try again? Double or nothing? MAYBE some citable sources, this time?
"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."
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
NASA video of the launch failure :
and SpaceX video(with telemetry)
More information about what projects were lost
Test pollination stimulation for food crops in low gravity
Test new type of plastic developed to block radiation from the Sun
The Meteor investigation takes high-resolution video and images of the atmosphere and uses a software program to search for bright spots
Test a theory that fuel sprays change from partial to group combustion as flames spread across a cloud of droplets
The Telomeres investigation collects crew member blood samples to determine how telomeres and telomerase are affected by space travel
Veg-03- cultivates a type of cabbage, which is harvested in orbit with samples returned to Earth for testing analyzing the performance of Solar Liquid Power
Microsoft-holo lens for Project Sidekick
Test explosives in microgravity
8 dove satellites for planet labs
A spacesuit on its 19 flight and IDA docking module
Those private space insurance premiums should be skyrocketing....
I'm guessing /. will be a lot more forgiving than if this were a NASA failure.
The higher failure rate of SpaceX is expected. Setting aside Musk's marketing machine, it's understood that the medium-term goal here is to offer a higher-risk alternative (LEO prices below):
1. Western launch, traditional way: $4000-8000/pound (larger launches cheaper/pound). Low failure rate.
2. Non-western launch: $2000-3000/pound. Slightly higher failure rate.
3. SpaceX goal: $500-1000/pound. Slightly higher failure rate.
Long-term, SpaceX could achieve the same low failure rates through process refinement, but it's silly to expect that in the next decade.
Look, if your choices are $5000/pound with a 1% failure chance, or $1000/pound with a 5% failure rate, which do you pick? The rational answer depends entirely on the price to replace the payload, as two launches with a 5% failure rate have a very low chance both will fail. If your payload is "fuel" or "supplies" or something else cheaper than $5000/pound to replace, the added risk is completely the way to go.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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
Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.
Bruce Perens.
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.