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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

#241

Post by [deleted] »

aragot wrote: post #208
gear54rus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wondering the same thing. In addition to incidents like this, every once in a while, a story pops up that describes how programming error was the cause of rocket crash that happened TWENTY years ago... How? Just how can people be sure that it was programming error? It's not like you can debug a burnt piece of a microcontroller, can you? Guess we've come a long way from a magnifying glass investigations :)

I entered an engineering school 5 years after Ariane V. Each single professor explained us why their subject was the reason for Ariane V to explode. The physics one went about how the imperial/metric discrepancy was the cause, the mechanics one went about how error margin management wad the cause, the CS one about integer overflow... Each of them made it clear that their course was the center of the world, but altoge…

[deleted]

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#242

Post by magicalist »

Crito wrote: post #97
kiba wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA." Feynman's Appendix F should be required reading for every sort of engineer: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger... It's a little bit long, and gets a bit technical at some points, but everyone should read it anyway.

Note however, that this example doesn't fit in at all with the contrarian view in this thread. Feynman's report was about accurately estimating the failure rate of the shuttle and about the bureaucratic culture that popped up to protect itself and ended up making that failure rate worse by not letting engineers do their jobs.

But if during the Challenger investigation an engineer or a manager had told Feynman "There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them", he would have regarded them as completely incompetent and part of the problem.

The very nature of the enterprise is risky, and so the goal was to manage the risk of failure to an acceptable limit. Cover-your-ass culture can be improved, engineers can be allowed to do their jobs, but you aren't going to eliminate risk. The fact that we can even try to put a number like "1 in 50" or "1 in 100" on estimated space flight failure rates is exactly what blhack is talking about. We could judge that too high a rate, but if we did, we wouldn't be going to space at all, at least not anytime soon. That's the tradeoff.

Note that the engineers and especially the astronauts were well aware of that risk, and you can find almost exactly that sentiment echoed by them in interviews after the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia accidents. Many astronauts were most worried that the American public couldn't stomach the idea that failure came with any ambition in spaceflight and so would shut the program down.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#243

Post by pbreit »

Gravityloss wrote: post #202
pbreit wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems so bizarre that we're using 40 year old, Russian-made engines. I'm sure there are plenty of smart folks who will say not too worry, but I wonder.

It is a fascinating case of uneven technological development. The Soviet Union went so far with staged combustion engines in the sixties that that level of technology has not yet been reached elsewhere. USA, Europe and Japan went with hydrogen staged combustion but that's quite different. The ULA/Blue Origin decision about new indigenous US first stage engine development gets a huge boost from this problem. It's just…

I'm sure the core rocket technology is sound but I've gotta think the sensors and computational capabilities are literally decades out of date. Which is really where SpaceX has a commanding advantage, for example, being able to abort a launch at T-0 and reschedule for later that day having identified and corrected an anomaly.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#244

Post by surge »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #125
uptown wrote: post #106

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…

And he was wrong. They had 4 successful launches since then. Plus it seems unprofessional to be bad mouthing a competitor like that in public.

It was also part of a larger conversation about how little rocket and aerospace technology has advanced since the 60's because they're afraid of trying anything new.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#245

Post by seanflyon »

travelhead wrote: post #153
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…

Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.

The "move fast and break things" mentality is not saying that its good to break things, it's saying that breaking things is the price of moving fast. Failure is bad, but so is being over-cautious. We all already know that failure is bad. No one like to fail so we don't need to keep saying that failure is bad. People often lose perspective and think that it's not worth taking a sensible risk, so we say things like "If you're failing, you're doing something right." to encourage them.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#246

Post by gohrt »

dfan wrote: post #89
mkriss wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it did cost millions to insurance company

If the insurance company is doing its job right, this was priced into its rates.

Then the failure wasn't free. This customer and all other customers paid for this failure. Other customers, who may have done more and more expensive work to avoid failure, are stuck paying for this failure. Insurance thus incentivizes a race to the bottom -- using other customers to finance ones own risk.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#247

Post by gohrt »

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…

http://www.cyclingforums.com/t/402918/another-quadriplegic-c...

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#248

Post by matthewwiese »

phkahler wrote: post #238
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

>> My entire physics lab watched this happen live. Now imagine how people felt back in '86 when the challenger exploded with 7 people on board including a teacher. Shuttle launches were common by then but a lot of people were watching live due to the teacher on board aspect. It brings a whole different set of emotions to the event. Nobody made a joke that day.

Of course they didn't. We all knew this flight was unmanned, so it was easy to laugh off such an event. Like other posters have said: 1) A shame for the scientists and engineers who worked many hours to put this together. 2) An unfortunate loss of tens of millions of dollars. BUT 3) We're human and make mistakes, just in the case of aerospace the smallest error is make or break. Aviation wouldn't have made progress to the point we're at now without learning lessons.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#249

Post by gohrt »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #124
snarkyturtle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when it costs billions of dollars from NASA.

I think it's important to realize that this is a NASA contractor, not NASA itself. Furthermore, Congress & the President have forced NASA into purchasing these transport contracts by killing off the Space Shuttle.

A $200Million loss is better than the best of all possible Space Shuttle's outcomes.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#250

Post by seanflyon »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #124
snarkyturtle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when it costs billions of dollars from NASA.

I think it's important to realize that this is a NASA contractor, not NASA itself. Furthermore, Congress & the President have forced NASA into purchasing these transport contracts by killing off the Space Shuttle.

The Space Shuttle which costs between $450 million [1] and $1.5 billion [2] per launch depending on who you ask and still blows up 1.5% of the time.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl... [2] http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/re...

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