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Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

nasa.gov

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Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#71

Post by obviouslygreen »

[deleted] wrote: post #60
blhack wrote: post #9

I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on. Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick. It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating. To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated…

[deleted]

You can continuously fail while acting irrationally/irresponsibly. You can also fail despite having done everything right.

Platitudes like this don't help anything, they just detract from actual discussion of reality, which is vastly more complex.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#74

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #56
matthewwiese wrote: post #6

My entire physics lab watched this happen live. It started going up and everyone was cheering. Seconds later just caught fire, and fell to the ground and exploded. "That's what happens when you set 'a' to negative." a good lesson from my TA

What's 'a'?

[deleted]

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#75

Post by Crito »

lutorm wrote: post #70
Crito wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA's CRS contract with Orbital is for 8 flights for $1.9 Billion. Today's flight was supposed to be number 3 of 8. It remains to be seen if they will be able to complete the rest of their contract. The cause of the accident will need to be investigated, changes to future vehicles may be necessary, and right now it appears as though they damaged their launch pad severely.

The CRS contract includes development costs, though. The marginal cost of one mission isn't anywhere near 1.9B/8.

Sort of. COTS was supposed to be the development costs, CRS was supposed to be the launches. Orbital got $288 Million for development of Antares/Cygnus from COTS.

From wikipedia:

> "COTS is related but separate from the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program.[3] COTS relates to the development of the vehicles, CRS to the actual deliveries. COTS involves a number of Space Act Agreements, with NASA providing milestone-based payments. COTS does not involve binding contracts. CRS on the other hand does involve legally binding contracts, which means the suppliers would be liable if they failed to perform. Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) is a related program, aimed specifically at developing crew rotation services. It is similar to COTS-D. All three programs are managed by NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO)."

Personally, I am worried about Orbital's ability to complete the remaining flights for CRS. This is a very unfortunate setback for them.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#76

Post by vermontdevil »

Wonder if the boat didn't stray into the restricted area yesterday, things would have been different?

I know we might never know but I did wonder if the draining and refueling the fuel caused an anomaly somewhere and lead to this?

Such a big loss for us.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#77

Post by rodrigocoelho »

SuperChihuahua wrote: post #2

Video of the explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHMmMgdcOSU ...and I believe this is the water-tower you can see in the video: https://www.google.se/maps/place/NASA+Wallops+Flight+Facilit...

There's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPHkDc-CwoQ

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#79

Post by hyperbovine »

blhack wrote: post #9

I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on. Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick. It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating. To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated…

> To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.

This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#80

Post by _kst_ »

callesgg wrote: post #61
SuperChihuahua wrote: post #2

Video of the explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHMmMgdcOSU ...and I believe this is the water-tower you can see in the video: https://www.google.se/maps/place/NASA+Wallops+Flight+Facilit...

I expected it to self desturct. Why would it not do that? Was it to close to the ground?

There wouldn't have been much point in a self destruct. The rocket launched, then it looked like there was an explosion in or near the boosters (which apparently caused a loss of thrust), then it fell back onto the pad and exploded. Blowing it up at a higher altitude just would have spread the debris a little farther.
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