Slashdot Mirror
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.
I slept in and missed the launch, but here's a video of the CRS-7 launch and subsequent explosion.
SpaceX has been very forthcoming with their telemetry data and analysis, so hopefully we'll hear what happened soon.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Well, it is a bit like Musk's version of capitalism: nationalize the risks, privatize the rewards. What's the surprise?
Those private space insurance premiums should be skyrocketing....
/. will be a lot more forgiving than if this were a NASA failure.
I'm guessing
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.
It still landed, just in more pieces than expected.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do we want a nation of Ayn Rands merely writing about technology, or do we want to actually implement the technology? If the latter, government spending is essential because the market is way too shortsighted and prefers to take risks on balance sheets, with derivative instruments, rather than push the envelope of technological development.
"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.
This guy has to do everything big
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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.
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.
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.
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
I was thinking on starting off a conspiracy theory about a shady group sabotaging the ISS resupply missions. Alas I don't really have the imagination to come up with a suitably ridiculous hypothesis.
According to this list they're going backwards:
* The first 51 missions were successful - Progress M
* The following 25 missions succeeded - Cygnus
* The next 4 missions were successful, followed by two successive failures (Progress M & Falcon 9)
On a serious note - the NASA press conference mentioned that the Progress M 3rd stage has been reverted to an older configuration, so the failures we're seeing are possibly due to multiple launch systems being continuously developed.
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
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.
The problem is: the rocket they had (Falcon 1) sucked hard. It was only *after they got money from NASA (a lot of money) that they built a half decent rocket.
"NASA" hasn't built a launch vehicle since the Saturn 1 in the early '60s. Everything since then has been built by private contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, North American, etc. And only the first eight Saturn I's were built by government personnel (von Braun's group in Hunstville). The last two were built by Chrysler -- it was a big deal to pass the assembly to them (I think it may have been only the first stage at that time). As far as schedules are concerned there is no schedule pressure now for anyone like there was for NASA with Apollo in the '60s.
Maybe I don't understand your point? What's being "rationalized" here? Or are you unwilling to participate in honest discussion here? I rather suspect you're just trolling.
You seem to be saying that it's unfair that /.er's don't hold SpaceX to the same standards of NASA? Of course not, that was never the goal, never the point, and no reasonable person ever expected that. SpaceX is cheap - a goal of 10% of NASA's launch costs. There will of course be trade-offs. That's as expected, and it's still a good thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
SpaceX is the ONLY significant player in commercial launch vehicles that ISN'T using decades-old technology. They developed their launch vehicle (including engines) from scratch on their own. Orbital Sciences is launching forty year old technology with no potential for doing it better or cheaper than it was done in the past. SpaceX is on a trajectory to cut LEO insertion costs by a factor of 10. Don't hate Musk because he is a better engineer than you will ever be - try to learn from his innovative approach, drive, and business acumen. One failure out of nineteen launches for a new, from-scratch rocket design is pretty impressive, IMO.