221–230 of 347 posts
My only pessimistic thought in all this is that companies like Space X simply do not have the funds necessary to keep absorbing catastrophic loss and will just give up.
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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…
Not sure SpaceX rockets count as cutting edge technology. They are based on rather mature technology developed by NASA. 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.
They're using cutting edge stuff here and there, e.g. friction stir welding, which is a good match for the long seams in boosters, but mostly its organizational, and clean slate, not starting with a military rocket which is developed for and under different constraints. Or explicitly (Apollo) or implicitly (Space Shuttle and beyond) as a public works project, where cost is secondary to employing a lot of people.
My only question is, is the real time telemetry at a high enough resolution that the exact cause of the explosion can be ferreted out? I'm guessing yes. This is another very important learning experience. One of countless thousands on the way to reliable space launch and recovery. My only pessimistic thought in all this is that companies like Space X simply do not have the funds necessary to keep absorbing catastroph…
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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…
1. Something went wrong.
2. The onboard automation tried to compensate and kept going in the hope that it wasn't a fatal problem.
3. As soon as it realised it was a fatal problem and the vehicle was lost, it triggered range safety (aka the self destruct system).
If the vehicle had started to topple and broken up due to being pushed sideways through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, then I would expect to see much bigger pieces and a slower breakup. As it is it turns from a single vehicle that's obviously in trouble to a cloud of shrapnel very, very quickly. This suggests deliberate destruction (which is the right thing to do).
Although it does seem to take a long time before this happens, and you can see a piece fall off about six or seven seconds before the engines stop. This strikes me as being a lot. Maybe it's not as automated as I thought.
I hope the postmortem is made public once it's done. It'd be fascinating reading.
Edit: I hear a rumour that the bit which fell off was, in fact, the Dragon capsule being ejected. I wonder if it made it down all right? Probably not or we'd have heard about it by now...
Edit edit: According to the press briefing they had Dragon telemetry for 'some period' after the event. So chances are it worked fine until it hit the water. I bet they have boats out looking right now in the hope it survived.
I'm very saddened at this event, it makes me worry about how future launches will go. Will their customers agree for them to add landing legs to their future missions? Will their manned flights be delayed? How about their certification to launch for the USAF. Also I'm not sure but, did I see the Dragon spacecraft eject?
2) The legs have nothing to do with it, based on what we know (and it's very unlikely, too). Manned flight certification could be impacted, e.g. assessment period will be extended, but insignificantly (assuming they find a cause and the next launches go well). USAF certification will probably not be impacted since they reached the minimum amount of successful flights (assuming there are no other rules like "no launch failure in last X flights").
3) No, the rocket was probably terminated, i.e. explosives fired to break up the malfunctioning rocket. So you probably saw the debris.
My thoughts go out to the SpaceX team. Must be devastating to see your hard work blow up :-(
It's part of the job. I was working on a mission scheduled to be launched on Columbia when it blew up. Loss of life aside, that our vehicle blew up wasn't the end of the world. We just used another (which required some adjustment- orbiters weren't all the same).
Yep... just saw... hate the silence on the stream Update: Looks like the explosion was triggered by Range Control in response to non nominal flight
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From the PR (and early test) angle: Is it possible to add the escape mechanism the cargo version? Perhaps this has no economical sense, but after the explosion it's better to write: "The main rocket suffered a RUD, the mission is canceled, but Buster would have survived."
The Launch Abort System (LAS) is heavy, and since it requires Dragon V2, which includes more systems only required for human missions, the overall system mass is even higher than "just" the LAS. Heavy is extremely expensive, ergo it does not make sense economically to equip the cargo version with the LAS. Simply said, the chance of failure multiplied with the cost of the cargo is less than the extra cost an LAS on ev…
Also, I thought the whole point of the Dragon v2 launch escape system was it uses the engines and fuel already in Dragon for orbital manoeuvring and landing; even the unmanned version is going to be using that. So it shouldn't be that heavy.
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Definitely not an expert but to me it looked like initial, unexpected explosion/break-up then a second which could have been in response to the first.
The lack of fragmentation from the first event suggests event #2 would have been range control. 23:44 23:52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m38s
Crazy how little actual conflagration there is. I would have expected a big fireball when that much RP-1 and LOX explodes. I mean the entire second stage's fuel exploded. Edit: Here's a Titan 1, which was fueled with RP-1 and LOX exploding on the pad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzigaTSPZY