Of course it wasn't a consideration. Humans burn in liquid oxygen, and if you happened to light up near that stuff, everyone around you would take action.
Sure, we can have viable abort procedures for every second of the mission, but they all depend on time to get away and distance from an energetic event. And you might not get that. It is likely they would have protected from the Falcon 9 second stage helium tank issue. It's not yet at all clear there would have been the time to get away from today's event.
You'd risk almost certain death for someone's private business?
You think 10% is certain death? Throughout history people have taken much larger risks than that.
The Europeans who traveled to America were provided a ride, at first, because various European nations wished to have military power, additional trade, etc. The people had their own reasons for going and if they didn't immediately ignore the purposes of their erstwhile hosts, certainly it happened later. The nations didn't quite get what they expected.
If launching a rocket with a satellite into LEO is "bleeding edge of the physically impossible" then how difficult is it to go to Mars? We have been launching rockets for 80 years. Is going to Mars easier?
That's actually easy to answer. The very largest problem that we have to cope with is getting out of Earth's gravity well. Consider the size of the Saturn V vs. the size of the Lunar Module ascent stage. Both lifted a crew and some hardware to orbit on the same mission, but their sizes were radically different, for the most part because of the difference in gravity of the two bodies. So, the biggest challenge we face is lifting things. We have, as a species, mastered lifting things with the economic abandon of a war, and are working on lifting things more economically.
Once in orbit, you have the problems of keeping a crew alive and transporting them, but these are smaller in magnitude than just getting them into Earth orbit in the first place. Getting down to Mars is a challenge because of the need to use supersonic retropropulsion rather than atmospheric braking, but SpaceX has done well in making that work with first stage recovery.
I am old enough to have heard all of the same talk about people going to the moon. People will go, it's only a matter of time. The naysayers aren't relevant, they are evolution's castoffs.
Besides the static fires on the pad, every SpaceX rocket is fired for full mission duration at their test site in McGregor, Texas. The whole point is that their life should be more like airplanes than the rockets you're thinking of.
The shuttle had a large number of sensors for its time. If you look back at how they diagnosed the two space shuttle disasters vs. how they diagnosed the Falcon 9 second stage failure, there's a big difference in the data they had available.
Once you start a big hot fire on the top of a tank of LOX and a tank of Kerosene, the rest is going to go. It does indeed matter where it started, because they're going to fly lots more of them and they want to fix the problem. Yes they're going to have to rebuild the gantry, but that's par for the course.
All of this is engineering skating on the bleeding edge of the physically possible. Brain surgery kills one person at a time and is physically simple in comparison.
If you add up all of the Progress and Molinya missions, which use the Soyuz boosters, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11, you get more than 4. And there are no shortage of other Russian rockets that blew up.
Most of the SpaceX test fires happen without the payload integrated. And then they take the rocket down and integrate the payload before launch. IMO this was unusual.
Although a cigarette butt would be really dangerous there, all of the co-workers you have at NASA would know that, and freak out if you lit up anywhere near that area. Human bodies burn quite readily in the presence of liquid oxygen.
Actually, a cigarette in an area with liquid oxygen would be quite dangerous. All of the things in the immediate area have to be designed to be non-sparking. Thus we have expensive non-sparking flashlights, tools specially made of non-sparking metals, non-sparking walkie talkies, etcetera ad infinitum.
So, the next time someone wonders why NASA buys $10,000 tool boxes, you'll know why: the tools are specially short-run machined to be non-sparking.
The quote is definitely wrong. The SES mission was to be the first to use a re-used first stage, and it was just announced a few days ago and is months from launch. The AMOS mission was on the pad.
Astronaut rating, unfortunately, has historically been something like "we will only lose one crew in 90". Rockets blow up (although we don't yet know that this started with the Falcon rather than pad infrastructure or AMOS) and astronauts know that better than anyone else. Early reports are that this started at the top of the rocket, not the part that was firing, and it will take some time to determine what actually happened.
The reason they say the "pad" is that there are three main things that could have failed and they don't know which. The AMOS satellite, the Falcon 9, and the pad infrastructure which fuels the Falcon 9.
There are two crucial differences betweeen 1960's rockets and the Falcon 9:
1. The Falcon has thousands of on-board sensors and a high-bandwidth digital data stream of their data during the entire flight. So, it is possible to see a lot more go wrong while you can still do something about it. Thus, testing the rocket at full fire before launch makes sense. The Space Shuttle didn't have this sort of sensor coverage.
2. The Falcon engines can be fired many times, and some of them can re-light in flight. 1960's rockets could not do that.
The first stage which is meant to be reflown, F9-023, is waiting for launch later this year. This first stage was brand new, and given the reports that the rocket was still standing with the top bent after the explosion, it doesn't really look like the first stage exploded. The explosion could have been part of the Falcon, the AMOS satellite, or the pad facilities for fueling the rocket. We'll find out which eventually.
The AMOS-6 satellite belonged to Spacecom, an Israeli telecommunications company. Facebook was to lease a transponder on the satellite, which had many transponders and would have served a lot of other customers.
It's not yet known what exploded first. It could be AMOS itself, part of the Falcon 9, or something on the pad. It will probably take some time to isolate.
You are mistaken in thinking that dense fuel is something nobody else wanted to try. USSR did that in the 1970ies, they have even developed a special high density fuel (syntin) but stopped using it in the 1990ies due to high cost of it.
Sorry, I should have known that most readers would not be up to speed on what SpaceX has done, and I should have explained densification as they've done it. While the Soviets used a chemically denser hydrocarbon, SpaceX has made conventional LOX and kerosene denser by cooling them to a lower temperature than is necessary just to liquify them. LOX gets almost 10% more dense and kerosene about 2% more dense, and they have changed the size of the LOX and kerosene tanks relative to each other so that the ratio required for combustion remains the same. This is just through refrigeration, rather than the more expensive process of molecular synthesis employed by the Soviets.
Agreed. But besides the metallurgy, SpaceX accepted a bunch of challenges that nobody else wanted to do, to get as far as they have so far.
Nobody else thought fuel densification was worth it. It complicates the launch window because densified fuel has to be unloaded and cooled off if you don't launch in time, and SpaceX had a few technical hiccups to resolve when they started using it. But it gives them more fuel to work with.
We've been able to land rockets on their tail manually since the terrestrial LEM simulator (which almost killed Neil Armstrongr one day) and with computers since DC-X, but SpaceX was the first to try to recover a booster that way.
And the automated barge landing is something nobody ever tried before, but saves a ton of recovery fuel.
No doubt there are a lot of other additions to the list of firsts that were required to get a SpaceX booster recovered.
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Of course it wasn't a consideration. Humans burn in liquid oxygen, and if you happened to light up near that stuff, everyone around you would take action.
Yeah. Confirmed as before firing, near the second stage oxygen tank. Nothing to do with the first stage or its reuse potential at all.
Sure, we can have viable abort procedures for every second of the mission, but they all depend on time to get away and distance from an energetic event. And you might not get that. It is likely they would have protected from the Falcon 9 second stage helium tank issue. It's not yet at all clear there would have been the time to get away from today's event.
You think 10% is certain death? Throughout history people have taken much larger risks than that.
The Europeans who traveled to America were provided a ride, at first, because various European nations wished to have military power, additional trade, etc. The people had their own reasons for going and if they didn't immediately ignore the purposes of their erstwhile hosts, certainly it happened later. The nations didn't quite get what they expected.
That's actually easy to answer. The very largest problem that we have to cope with is getting out of Earth's gravity well. Consider the size of the Saturn V vs. the size of the Lunar Module ascent stage. Both lifted a crew and some hardware to orbit on the same mission, but their sizes were radically different, for the most part because of the difference in gravity of the two bodies. So, the biggest challenge we face is lifting things. We have, as a species, mastered lifting things with the economic abandon of a war, and are working on lifting things more economically.
Once in orbit, you have the problems of keeping a crew alive and transporting them, but these are smaller in magnitude than just getting them into Earth orbit in the first place. Getting down to Mars is a challenge because of the need to use supersonic retropropulsion rather than atmospheric braking, but SpaceX has done well in making that work with first stage recovery.
I am old enough to have heard all of the same talk about people going to the moon. People will go, it's only a matter of time. The naysayers aren't relevant, they are evolution's castoffs.
Besides the static fires on the pad, every SpaceX rocket is fired for full mission duration at their test site in McGregor, Texas. The whole point is that their life should be more like airplanes than the rockets you're thinking of.
The shuttle had a large number of sensors for its time. If you look back at how they diagnosed the two space shuttle disasters vs. how they diagnosed the Falcon 9 second stage failure, there's a big difference in the data they had available.
Geez. Do you think that anyone here doesn't know that?
You just stay right here where you are comfortable. Think of it as evolution in action.
Once you start a big hot fire on the top of a tank of LOX and a tank of Kerosene, the rest is going to go. It does indeed matter where it started, because they're going to fly lots more of them and they want to fix the problem. Yes they're going to have to rebuild the gantry, but that's par for the course.
To Mars? I'd go. To America on a leaking creaking raft of wood and blowing canvas? Lots of folks went.
All of this is engineering skating on the bleeding edge of the physically possible. Brain surgery kills one person at a time and is physically simple in comparison.
If you add up all of the Progress and Molinya missions, which use the Soyuz boosters, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11, you get more than 4. And there are no shortage of other Russian rockets that blew up.
Most of the SpaceX test fires happen without the payload integrated. And then they take the rocket down and integrate the payload before launch. IMO this was unusual.
Although a cigarette butt would be really dangerous there, all of the co-workers you have at NASA would know that, and freak out if you lit up anywhere near that area. Human bodies burn quite readily in the presence of liquid oxygen.
Actually, a cigarette in an area with liquid oxygen would be quite dangerous. All of the things in the immediate area have to be designed to be non-sparking. Thus we have expensive non-sparking flashlights, tools specially made of non-sparking metals, non-sparking walkie talkies, etcetera ad infinitum. So, the next time someone wonders why NASA buys $10,000 tool boxes, you'll know why: the tools are specially short-run machined to be non-sparking.
The quote is definitely wrong. The SES mission was to be the first to use a re-used first stage, and it was just announced a few days ago and is months from launch. The AMOS mission was on the pad.
Astronaut rating, unfortunately, has historically been something like "we will only lose one crew in 90". Rockets blow up (although we don't yet know that this started with the Falcon rather than pad infrastructure or AMOS) and astronauts know that better than anyone else. Early reports are that this started at the top of the rocket, not the part that was firing, and it will take some time to determine what actually happened.
The reason they say the "pad" is that there are three main things that could have failed and they don't know which. The AMOS satellite, the Falcon 9, and the pad infrastructure which fuels the Falcon 9.
There are two crucial differences betweeen 1960's rockets and the Falcon 9:
1. The Falcon has thousands of on-board sensors and a high-bandwidth digital data stream of their data during the entire flight. So, it is possible to see a lot more go wrong while you can still do something about it. Thus, testing the rocket at full fire before launch makes sense. The Space Shuttle didn't have this sort of sensor coverage.
2. The Falcon engines can be fired many times, and some of them can re-light in flight. 1960's rockets could not do that.
The first stage which is meant to be reflown, F9-023, is waiting for launch later this year. This first stage was brand new, and given the reports that the rocket was still standing with the top bent after the explosion, it doesn't really look like the first stage exploded. The explosion could have been part of the Falcon, the AMOS satellite, or the pad facilities for fueling the rocket. We'll find out which eventually.
The AMOS-6 satellite belonged to Spacecom, an Israeli telecommunications company. Facebook was to lease a transponder on the satellite, which had many transponders and would have served a lot of other customers.
It's not yet known what exploded first. It could be AMOS itself, part of the Falcon 9, or something on the pad. It will probably take some time to isolate.
Sorry, I should have known that most readers would not be up to speed on what SpaceX has done, and I should have explained densification as they've done it. While the Soviets used a chemically denser hydrocarbon, SpaceX has made conventional LOX and kerosene denser by cooling them to a lower temperature than is necessary just to liquify them. LOX gets almost 10% more dense and kerosene about 2% more dense, and they have changed the size of the LOX and kerosene tanks relative to each other so that the ratio required for combustion remains the same. This is just through refrigeration, rather than the more expensive process of molecular synthesis employed by the Soviets.
Agreed. But besides the metallurgy, SpaceX accepted a bunch of challenges that nobody else wanted to do, to get as far as they have so far.
Nobody else thought fuel densification was worth it. It complicates the launch window because densified fuel has to be unloaded and cooled off if you don't launch in time, and SpaceX had a few technical hiccups to resolve when they started using it. But it gives them more fuel to work with.
We've been able to land rockets on their tail manually since the terrestrial LEM simulator (which almost killed Neil Armstrongr one day) and with computers since DC-X, but SpaceX was the first to try to recover a booster that way.
And the automated barge landing is something nobody ever tried before, but saves a ton of recovery fuel.
No doubt there are a lot of other additions to the list of firsts that were required to get a SpaceX booster recovered.