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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

#161

Post by zaroth »

Right before the explosion you can hear launch control saying something like "Got engines at 108%".

I was curious about it, but from Reddit discussion, apparently this is totally normal; "Yes, the engines have been upgraded many times. To avoid having to recalibrate the software each time engines are upgraded, they are simply rated at over 100 percent thrust over the first engine's thrust."

Another interesting fact. The pad is NASA's. So you can imagine the crew that maintained it are pretty disappointed.... "Look at what you did to my pad!?!" The fireball was enormous. The view from the Cessna incredible.

That must have been just about a worst case scenario for the pad to sustain such a direct hit. Hopefully it was the strict safety protocols and not just dumb luck which kept everyone safe. That's another aspect of this event which can be studied and reported, so at least we maximize the take-aways. Track the entire response from T-6.

Apparently the rocket is designed to do that little lateral kick that you can see in the video and initially seems odd. 'Why is the rocket not going straight up' causes a little unease at first but apparently is nominal. If that's the case, then the time of the explosion may correspond to a point where they kick up engine output. It also may have been a heavier payload than usual requiring higher engine output? (Unconfirmed)

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#162

Post by Crito »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #133
MichaelAO wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - A reentry breakup recorder Right, there was to be a video recording of the Cygnus spacecraft as it reentered and broke up (it's designed to disintegrate). Kind of ironic now.

I wonder if it could have survived the explosion. I suppose it would not have been activated for launch though.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#163

Post by snowwrestler »

hueving wrote: post #147

How do they root cause something like this when so much of the evidence is blown to pieces?

Well, part of the investigation is to find as many of those pieces as possible and examine them. For instance in airplane crash investigations the NTSB will sometimes secure a huge hangar, draw out an outline of the aircraft, and place every single bit they find in its approximate location on the airframe. The plane reconstruction was a big part of figuring out how TWA 800 crashed.

Then there is all the video and film footage. I bet some of it was high speed (so the resulting film will be slow motion). Slo-mo film helps show the exact sequence of failures and was a big part of the Challenger investigation.

Finally, there will be a ton of data that was collected from the rocket in its brief flight.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#165

Post by engi_nerd »

dalke wrote: post #82
trothamel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Up until a few months ago, I was an engineer for OSC. We used the same Flight Termination Logic Unit (FTLU) as Antares. I can confirm that it can provide for automatic destruct should the engineers desire it. I have no knowledge of the specifics of its use in Antares (I did not work on the Antares program), but given the constraints of operating from Wallops, I would not be surprised if automatic destruct is enabled for all Antares launches.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#166

Post by engi_nerd »

anigbrowl wrote: post #7
jwise0 wrote: post #3

There aren't many blogs covering this right now, but there are no personnel injured (according to the launch loop) -- just "significant property damage and significant vehicle damage". Nobody has said much yet: https://twitter.com/OrbitalSciences/status/52722568241456742...

Well, that's good. Property damage is insurable - let's hope that's the only loss. Listening to the audio feed for a few minutes, I always find it a bit sad how people resort to 'officialese' bullshit when they're embarrassed or stressed, eg 'we're going to triage the data'?!

Having been an engineer in control room environments for both rocket launches and fighter jet flight operations -- it's not really "officialese bullshit". Aerospace has a definite jargon and there are preferred ways of saying things on comms to reduce ambiguities. "Triage the data" is actually a good way of describing what you do in an anomaly investigation. You figure out what the most likely thing that went wrong is, then the next most likely thing, etc. and look at data regarding those things in order.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#167

Post by louthy »

eitally wrote: post #119
blhack wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get up from my chair and go to the water cooler to fill up my water bottle. I bet I will succeed at it. How is this different to you than launching rockets? It's different to me because launching rockets is much more difficult. There are many more things that can cause you to fail catastrophically. To me , failure is to be expected when you're doing something that is difficult. That is the definition of…

But in this case, as well as several others (like surgery, for example), that's not at all true. We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason: those are fields in which mistakes are not acceptable and the cost of producing as well as the cost of insuring are incredible. There is really nothing comparable between a code jockey who weaves js frameworks and SaaS services tog…

> We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

My favourite of those.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#168

Post by dinwal »

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…

Failures are inevitable. I am sure the team has learnt more from it than it would if it had worked. When you have failed once you don't leave any stone unturned and in the process improve on tens of more things.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#169

Post by codeonfire »

ianstallings wrote: post #49
trothamel wrote: post #31

The first stage engines that exploded were AJ-26 engines. These are remanufactured NK-33 or NK-43 engines built in the Soviet Union in the late-60s or early-70s for the N-1 moon rocket, but never used. In May, an AJ-26 exploded on the test stand at Stennis space center in Mississippi, severely damaging the test stand.

These engines were talked about in the documentary *The Engines That Came In From The Cold" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM I watched it on netflix myself. Fascinating stuff.

The part at 42:00 makes it sound like the engine is/was considered sort of a gamble. I wonder what the current thought on this engine is.
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