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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

#81

Post by shepard »

gus_massa wrote: post #69
throwaway5752 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to slight your friend, but his was an unmanned launch to resupply the ISS, it's relatively common, comparatively easy, and successful (1 other failure in just under 80 missions). No disrespect intended, but this is a disruption for the ISS, a loss (hopefully insured) for Planetary Resources, a real setback for Orbital... there's no point in sugar coating anything, it sucks. There's just no point in dwelling on it…

The failure rate in manned space missions is approximately 1/50 ("failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies"). (For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 failures.) The unmanned missions have a higher failure rate, IIRC ~10%, but that number probably includes prototype and old models. So a 2/80 failures is not so bad. It sucks when it explodes, but going to space is difficult.

That 1/50 failure rate is debatable, and depends on your definition.

For example, Soviet/Russian manned flight, "Soyuz", had 131 flights (123 Soyuz + 2 Voskhod + 6 Vostok) [1][2] and 2 accidents, resulted in death of 4 astronauts (1 + 3).[3]

However, both of these accidents occurred before 1972, and both were highly experimental flights. Komarov's was the VERY FIRST flight of Soyuz, and before Soyuz 11 accident, they were descending without space suits, as the space inside the cabin was so tiny.

So you can also say that there were 2 accidents in the first 10 Soyuz flights - they were still finalizing the technology - and no accidents in the remaining 113.

In addition, both of these accidents occurred during the landing, so there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_mi... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_manned_space_mis...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#82

Post by dalke »

trothamel wrote: post #66
callesgg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think Antares can command itself to destruct. The destruct has to be commanded by the range. There isn't any point to issuing the destruct command unless the impact point is dangerously far from the flight path, and that wasn't the case here.

I think it's reasonable to assume that Antares can command itself to destruct given that other rockets have that ability, and have so destructed.

Ariane 5 (the infamous flight 501) self-destructed.

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html

"The launcher started to disintegrate at about H0 + 39 seconds because of high aerodynamic loads due to an angle of attack of more than 20 degrees that led to separation of the boosters from the main stage, in turn triggering the self-destruct system of the launcher"

A SpaceX rocket self-destructed:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188593-spacex-rocket-self...

"In a statement, SpaceX says the rocket detected an anomaly and automatically initiated its self-destruct sequence."

The Titan IVA-20 explosion was also due to a self-destruct, and not the range officer:

http://fas.org/spp/military/program/launch/titan_iv-20_sum.h...

"At this point, the northern-most Solid Rocket Motor (SRM #1) separated from the core booster, initiating the Inadvertent Separation Destruct System. At 45.529 seconds, approximately 3 seconds after the automatic destruct sequence, Mission Flight Control Officers sent command destruct signals to the vehicle."

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#83

Post by Crito »

shepard wrote: post #81
gus_massa wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failure rate in manned space missions is approximately 1/50 ("failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies"). (For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 failures.) The unmanned missions have a higher failure rate, IIRC ~10%, but that number probably includes prototype and old models. So a 2/80 failures is not so bad. It sucks when it explodes, but going to space is difficult.

That 1/50 failure rate is debatable, and depends on your definition. For example, Soviet/Russian manned flight, "Soyuz", had 131 flights (123 Soyuz + 2 Voskhod + 6 Vostok) [1][2] and 2 accidents, resulted in death of 4 astronauts (1 + 3).[3] However, both of these accidents occurred before 1972, and both were highly experimental flights. Komarov's was the VERY FIRST flight of Soyuz, and before Soyuz 11 accident, they…

> "there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights."

Soyuz T-10-1 burned on the launch pad, although the launch escape system saved the lives of the cosmonauts on board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No._16L

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#84

Post by dsjoerg »

hyperbovine wrote: post #79
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 b…

The word "failure" is used to mean two distinct things: 1) bad outcome, 2) made the wrong choices given the available information at the time.

They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#85

Post by toufka »

vermontdevil wrote: post #76

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.

Or different in the other way - where had they launched with the boat there and it still had exploded. Then ORB/NASA would have to deal with a lot more than simply economic consequences.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#86

Post by GrinningFool »

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…

"If you're failing, you're doing something right."

I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.

Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time.

Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#88

Post by kiba »

hyperbovine wrote: post #79
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 b…

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.

There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#90

Post by mixmax »

baq wrote: post #39
ericcumbee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rockets don't explode they experience "Anomalies"

the technical term seems to be 'rapid unscheduled disassembly'

actually the correct technical term to use here would be CATO - Catastrophe At Take Off
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