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India's Workhorse Rocket Fails For the First Time In Decades (theverge.com)
India's premier rocket, known as the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, failed to put a navigation satellite into orbit earlier this morning, after some unknown malfunction prevented the satellite from leaving the vehicle. The Verge reports: The rocket successfully took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in southeastern India at 9:30AM ET. About a little over 10 minutes into the flight, however, the rocket seemed to be in a lower altitude than it need to be. A host during the live broadcast of the launch noted that there was a "variation" in the rocket's performance. Later, an official with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) confirmed that the payload fairing -- the cone-like structure that surrounds the satellite on the top of the rocket -- failed to separate and expose the satellite to space. So the satellite was effectively trapped inside the fairing and could not be deployed into orbit. It seems possible that the rocket's low trajectory had to do with the fact that the fairing didn't separate, making the vehicle heavier than it was supposed to be.
It's an unexpected failure for a fairly reliable rocket. Over the last 24 years, the PSLV has flown 41 times and has only suffered two failures in its launch history -- the most recent mishap occurring during a mission in 1997. However, that mission was not a total loss as the satellite it carried was still able to make it to orbit. This was the first total failure of the rocket to happen since the PSLV's very first failure in 1993.
It's an unexpected failure for a fairly reliable rocket. Over the last 24 years, the PSLV has flown 41 times and has only suffered two failures in its launch history -- the most recent mishap occurring during a mission in 1997. However, that mission was not a total loss as the satellite it carried was still able to make it to orbit. This was the first total failure of the rocket to happen since the PSLV's very first failure in 1993.
it was IRNSS-1H that was lost and so Space based Navigation System and Disaster Management Support will be reduced
anyone know of a good IRNSS receiver ?
regards
John Jones
another failing satellite. Evidently some of the atomic clocks on the Indian equivalent to the U.S.'s GPS system are failing thus preventing their system from becoming functional. This will probably seriously further delay their system.
I believe that the system was limited (not for global use) to begin with, it was only meant to provide coverage for their part of the world (South Asia). Unfortunately this does not look good in comparison to the U.S., Russian, European and of course Chinese global systems. I have heard that the European system has also had problems, do they share the same vendor for their clocks? (I'm not sure but I heard the Indians outsourced their atomic clocks to a Swiss company?)
They are in sub Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (sub GTO)
https://i.stack.imgur.com/k7RDk.jpg
So it carries a lot of dead weight, doesn't quite achieve the level required and doesn't deploy properly?
Yup, sounds like my experience with Indian work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now it is 3 failures in 42 flights = 7% failure rate, or 1 in 14. Even the disastrous US Space Shuttles only had a 1.5% flight failure rate.
So these rockets are maybe not quite man rated, unless of course you have a large and redundant population to draw on...
Someone just forgot to do the needful. They'll reboot and try again.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
3 failures now; it was previously 2.
That said, a 7% failure rate is not unusual in the rocketry world.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
5% failure rate is fairly common. Average across all launchers was 5.8% an year or two back and is probably still around there (5-6%).
Paying customers start making noises when its more than 10% for a specific launcher (insurance fees tend to go up at that point). Proton for example has 414 flights and 47 failures and while the failure rate of the latest version is better (Proton-M - 100 launches, 9 failures, 1 partial failure), it is still so high that Russia is having trouble selling those launches.
US Government lives in a magic fantasy land where everything has to be 100% reliable - no matter the cost - which leads to funny launch prices (see: ULA), but their failure rate is very low (only partial failures - underperformance and such - since ULA was formed, which is very impressive)
In the grand scheme of things, 2/41 is normal. 3/42 after this failure is bit high, but the sample size is somewhat small.
The article doesn't mention why the fairing failed to detach (Maybe it's too early to tell there will be a lot of telemetry to analyse). I'm sure whatever happened it will end up in their regression test pack for future launches.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
so thisâ doesnt work?
#PleaseStopWithTheLameTwitterTagsCrapThankYou
#DeleteFacebook
This is what happens when you start using American components. Indian rockets were pretty reliable when India did most of its business with Russia who build rugged stuff. Now India is buying a lot of shit made by Boeing and it shows. Probably the Quality guy had Monday night football to watch and just signed off instead of doing his work
**Life is too short to be serious**
There's also an inherent bias in that everyone talks about failure rates immediately after a rocket fails - aka, the time at which its failure rate is worst.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
Has ISRO been doing that "women in spaceflight" superstition stuff too? I know Russia has, but I've never heard of anything from India about it. Russia even once blamed a technical mishap that could have killed the crew on the fact that there were two women aboard the craft. It appears to stem from the old naval superstition about women on ships being bad luck.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
Have you been to India? Or do you just gobble up whatever your biased western media tells you?
Everyone here automatically makes this lame argument/joke without knowing the reality. Do you have actual statistics about this? Can you cite a study?
Are you aware of the awareness campaigns and efforts taken by the current Indian government to combat this? Did you know of a case where there was a divorce awarded to a women because her husband's family didn't have a toilet at home (only an outside one)?
Change doesn't occur overnight. Especially when it involves that many amount of people. But it is happening slowly. In fact I would argue compared to the current political state of the US we are moving forward while the US is moving backward.
I think you're using out of date figures there, this year that number is down to around 250 million.
So it carries a lot of dead weight, doesn't quite achieve the level required and doesn't deploy properly?
Yup, sounds like my experience with Indian work.
Though I've have had bad experience with offshore teams from time to time, I wonder what kind of personal demons make people inject such jokes at every damned opportunity. It's not like we are swimming in a vast talent pool (the horrors I can tell regarding home-grown monkey code.)
True. But don't worry, it ain't that much better over here in Europe. The only stereotypes that are actually true are the bad ones.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is about the same failure rate the Feynman estimated for the space shuttle—and that one had human cargo.
____
Algorithms to Live By (2016) is far from a perfect book, but it's about 20 dB less dunderheaded that the paragraph quoted from OP. When the book is not busy hitting soft pitches of its own manufacture, it offers up a unique (or less commonly seen) distillation of some important topics.
I got the most value from the chapter on Bayes rule.
* multiplicative rule: use for power-law prior
* average rule: use for normal prior
* additive rule: use for Erlang prior
In the power-law prior, your expectation is to continue waiting roughly (to a constant factor) as long as you've already been waiting.
Read that as "maximally surprising every damn time".
Lower layer of neural network: "My God, it's full of stars!"
Just a few layers up: "Well, an infinite dimensional object of impossible precision blacker than black wasn't going to divulge a small surprise in chapter N-1, was it now?"
For the normal distribution, you expect the average, until the event is already overdue (past average) and then you predict RSN (real soon now).
For the Erlang distribution, you just keep predicting "just five more minutes, I'm sure my quick fix will work this time!"
Raging against this kind of OP idiocy: definitely a power-law, on a data set so vast, even the stars feel lonely.
You mean a *toy* rocket launch. Yes, that's possible. This is about orbital launch vehicles, though.
Ezekiel 23:20