201–210 of 347 posts
I feel bad for the SpaceX team. No sympathy for Musk considering all the mean spirited and unfair things he's said publicly about Orbital Sciences' rockets (inc. "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 fro…
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Space is certainly hard, even for those that people might assume are good at it (NASA, Roscosmos, etc.). This failure is a likely setback for man-rating the falcon in the future.
Doubt it. If anything this is a PERFECT illustration of how well SpaceX is preparing. They know things like this can happen. Notice there was an extended period (multiple seconds) of the rocket smoking before it exploded. Everyone, automated systems included, KNEW something was wrong at that point, before it exploded. At which point dragon would have used its abort system to blast away from the first stage, and made…
Well, that was an unexpected and uncontrolled structural disintegration. e: On the upside, happy birthday Elon, I hope you enjoyed your really awesome fireworks!
So, the advantage of a weekend launch is that I could show my kids (boys 7 & 4), right? Facepalm . In the last few minutes, over a dozen K-Nex rockets have lifted off and exploded shortly after takeoff. Sigh. Not the best introduction to the second Space Age for them.... ah well, we'll try again later. At least nobody was aboard.
On my 12th birthday, I watched the Challenger explosion happen right in front of my eyes. Me and the rest of the kids from Indian Harbour Beach watched the pieces of the shuttle slowly fall out of the sky. Some speculated that one of the pieces was an escape pod, but one of the kids whose dad worked on the shuttle said there wasn't an escape pod. We just couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible that with all that focused attention on getting those 7 astronauts safely into space that such a thing could happen.
It was not the best experience for a kid who loved space and science.
However, it didn't turn me off from it, far from it. I ended up going to college for Aeronautical Engineering, before switching to Physics. I ended up as a nuclear physicist and doing a nuclear fusion startup. I still live within sight of the VAB.
If you want your kids to be interested in science, its more important that they be exposed to rockets, science, etc. than that they see it always be successful. Just showing them that it's cool goes a long way. But its much easier if you don't have to mix in questions about life and death, especially at such young ages.
So, we have explosive rockets, the burning teslas, and soon the batteries - how will they fare?
So, the advantage of a weekend launch is that I could show my kids (boys 7 & 4), right? Facepalm . In the last few minutes, over a dozen K-Nex rockets have lifted off and exploded shortly after takeoff. Sigh. Not the best introduction to the second Space Age for them.... ah well, we'll try again later. At least nobody was aboard.
An important lesson for the kids is that cutting edge technology is hard. Rocket science is hard. Like a 10% chance of explosions in an unmanned flight and a 2% chance of explosion in a manned flight chance hard. (Protip: Only put the humans in the safer rockets, and be sure that they are going to so something useful up there, and anyway explain them that this is dangerous.) Probably in 20, 50 or 100 years this will…
This does highlight the difficulty of manufacturing a complex system in small quantities without the opportunity to do an end to end test before use.
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Russians can lift anything in matter of days if need be.
Didn't a Russian rocket with supplies to ISS explode not long ago? Edit: One exploded in May: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/05/soyuz-2-1a-third-stag... It seems like they are going to launch again with supplies to ISS in July
The Progress vehicle did actually enter an orbit (it reached space and was circling the Earth for a couple days), just the wrong one and after that it spun out of control and was no longer controllable from the ground. Since there is still some atmosphere and some drag in low Earth orbit it eventually was slowed down enough to burn up.
Basically, it failed because it couldn't be controlled anymore, no explosions involved. (Had it been launched to an higher orbit it may well have stayed up for a long, long time, no explosions or anything else interesting going on, just spinning round and round and being uncontrollable.)