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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

#171

Post by Rebelgecko »

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

Too bad your TA didn't work on that Russian rocket that crashed a year or two ago... IIRC the accelerometers were installed upside down so as soon as it took off it incorrectly thought it was pointed straight down. The rocket flipped around until it thought it was "up" and slammed into the ground.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#172

Post by cbd1984 »

lutorm wrote: post #117
GrinningFool wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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. I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means . If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have a…

This edges into politics, which means some people are pretty much incapable of believing it: If they believed it, they'd have to revise their political views, and that would lead to a lot of other changes in their lives.

To be specific, if the race isn't always to the swift, and if the best person can lose due to situations out of their control, maybe it isn't immoral to rely on a social support system for a while, which implies that perhaps we should fund such things.

And saying that is political suicide in some circles.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#173

Post by klodolph »

solistice wrote: post #123
GrinningFool wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

As I've understood it, it means that the scale of your ambitions is right. Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail. Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always…

I think the generalization is overbroad. Risk of failure should be weighed against the consequences of failure.

If I'm writing code for robots as a hobby and my robots behave exactly as I intended all of the time, then I'm probably not learning anything, and I should try to make the robots do more sophisticated tasks. The consequences of failure are minimal, so the optimum failure rate is high.

If I'm at work writing avionics code, the cost of failure is astronomical. It's nice to push boundaries and learn things, but it's better to avoid plane crashes. The consequences of failure are high, so the optimum failure rate is low.

I think the problem with rocket science is really the tyranny of physics. All the potential and kinetic energy you give to the rocket has to be stored in chemical form on the launchpad. You have to sit right on the edge of catastrophe or you are not going to make it into space at all. We've been doing this for half a century and the safety record is, quite plainly, not very good.

When we learn how to do spaceflight safely, we'll do that.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#174

Post by krisgenre »

GrinningFool wrote: post #86
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…

I once read this on the Internet a long time back - "The problem with most people is not that they fail trying to reach their goals, the problem is that they set their goals too low and succeed"

The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#175

Post by ramidarigaz »

avmich wrote: post #145
Lambdanaut wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing their rockets to "the punchline of a joke" is definitely bad mouthing, just factual badmouthing. Despite that, I don't blame him. Being factual is what's important.

And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years :) . It's not milk, they aren't that easily spoiled. Elon just used this time reference to make the decision look good - for somebody who doesn't know better. So factually he's right - but also misses the point. Here I should admit that Elon says more than he does - but he does quite a bit too…

It's not that they've been sitting in a hangar for decades so much as that we've gotten a lot better at building engines. Presumably modern designs have a lot lower catastrophic fault probability.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#176

Post by x4m »

readerrrr wrote: post #150
avmich wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think technically engines were manufactured in early '70s - like, in 1974? Definitely weren't stored in Siberia - Russia has quite sizable European part, no need to go to Siberia if you want to hide about 70 engines from nemesis Glushko's eye...

They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.

Samara is in european part of Russia. Siberia starts from Novosibirsk, it's about 2k miles to East from Samara.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#177

Post by zura »

WalterBright wrote: post #108
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 reevaluat…

Glad to hear it was unmanned!

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#178

Post by tanzam75 »

readerrrr wrote: post #150
avmich wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think technically engines were manufactured in early '70s - like, in 1974? Definitely weren't stored in Siberia - Russia has quite sizable European part, no need to go to Siberia if you want to hide about 70 engines from nemesis Glushko's eye...

They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.

> They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.

Samara is not in Siberia. It is in the Volga Federal District, which is west of the Urals and therefore in European Russia.

In fact, Samara is 1000 miles away from Siberia. Even for Russia, that's still quite a distance.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#179

Post by tanzam75 »

x4m wrote: post #176
readerrrr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.

Samara is in european part of Russia. Siberia starts from Novosibirsk, it's about 2k miles to East from Samara.

> Siberia starts from Novosibirsk, it's about 2k miles to East from Samara.

Omsk is in Siberia and it's only 1000 miles away from Samara.

Anyway, Los Angeles is not in Oregon, Moscow is not in Germany, and Samara is not in Siberia.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#180

Post by burkaman »

bd_at_rivenhill wrote: post #140

Makes me really wish SpaceX were public; would make for interesting trading tomorrow.

This was an Orbital Sciences rocket, not SpaceX, which is publically traded. Down 15.5% after hours so far: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AORB&ei=Gp5QVLiKLsm28...
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