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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

#101

Post by shepard »

Crito wrote: post #83
shepard wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There was another unsuccessful launch, when second stage rocket hasn't properly separated from the third. Everyone survived, but they have experienced pretty high acceleration and landed just 21 minutes after the launch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-T_No.39

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#102

Post by 3rd3 »

djyaz1200 wrote: post #42
biscotti wrote: post #15

More discussion on spacex reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2km5vq/ot_orbitals_a...

Reddit thread is interesting. Pulled this off there... wow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl12dXYcUTo

This has nothing to do with the current event, right? Linking to it is pure sensationalism.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#103

Post by golgappi »

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. Wrong. This only goes on to emphasize the stigma associated with failures. This sentence is a cover up for the fact that someone did something wrong, or at the very least, things did not go as planned. Failures are bad and heartbreaking, and we should accept it in its entirety.

| Don't fret the failures. Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#104

Post by differentView »

dsjoerg wrote: post #84
hyperbovine wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk

That is not the same as what blhack wrote, "If you're failing, you're doing something right."

you: zero failures = doing something wrong

blhack: any failure = doing something right

blhack's statement is clearly ridiculous.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#106

Post by uptown »

Truly unfortunate that it failed. Here's Elon Musk's comment about the Antares rock two years ago:

Musk: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.

http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#107

Post by InclinedPlane »

[deleted] wrote: post #99
bennettfeely wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video seems a little better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo

[deleted]

Almost certainly. The solid fuel would be bonded to the casing of the stage, so little fragments of burning fuel and casing would likely result in generation of thrust, which could causing spiraling fragments.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#108

Post by WalterBright »

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…

Since this is an unmanned operation, the calculation is fairly straightforward, balancing:

1. the cost of failure 2. the probability of failure 3. the cost of reducing the probability of failure

If these can be accurately calculated, then a certain failure rate can be quite acceptable. Of course, it's still worthwhile to determine the cause of any failures, and hence the cost of eliminating that cause and a reevaluation of points 1..3.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#109

Post by kijin »

MichaelAO wrote: post #50
ars wrote: post #25

Anyone know what the cargo was? Anything unique or expensive? Or just regular supplies?

According to Motherboard: - A pea growing experiment from students in Houston - A human health study investigating blood flow to and from the brain in space - 19 student projects from New Jersey - A reentry breakup recorder - A meteor dust analyser - 1,360 pounds of food - Spacewalk equipment - Flight crew equipment - Fight procedures books - Computers - Classified "Crypto equipment" Source: https://twitter.com/mothe…

The students from Houston and New Jersey must have been so disappointed. I really hope that they get another chance to send their projects to space before they graduate, and that some of them will eventually take up a career in rocket science despite this minor setback.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#110

Post by TerraHertz »

In the videos you can see the quality of the rocket flame changes suddenly about half a second before the obvious explosion in the engine area. The jet becomes more orange and less convergent. At 1:03 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo

So, as a general comment, something bad happened with the gear that pumps fuel into the engines in the right proportion. Maybe involving a major leak of fuel into the structures around the engine. Leaked fuel explodes. Complete loss of thrust, rocket falls back to earth.

I wonder if the Russians would consider it a good or a bad thing for them, if the West decides to stop using those Russian-built engines? Specifically, who benefits if there's a series of failures of AJ-26 engines? Considering the current imposition of economic sanctions against Russia, based on quite untrue accusations related to Ukraine and MH17. The Russians are feeling considerably put out over that, and rightly so.

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