Here's good video of the test/failure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ#t=1m10s
Anomaly at 1:10 in that clip, as a SpaceX fan its hard to watch.
You can just say explosion, we're not at the Cape.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
311–320 of 560 posts
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't they just relaunch in a few months? Not sure what the rebuild timeline is.
It takes years to build a satellite, the bus, and every component is purposely built each component and the satellite itself goes through months of testing and even if they could build one within 6 months all of the contracts would expire by then which will require Spacecom to open the bids again. All of the contracts were based on AMOS-6 being operational by a given date, AMOS-6 has been "under construction" for pro…
Why does every satellite have to be custom made like this? Without knowing anything about it, it seems as though most communications satellites do pretty much the same thing?
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#313Looks like they had a payload go with it. Sad. > "SpaceX confirm Amos-6 was aboard the Falcon 9 and was lost in the explosion." https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/77135388623807283...
This disaster may have bigger implications for Spacecom. They were in the middle of being acquired by Beijing Xinwei and the successful launch of Amos 6 was supposed to be a factor in closing the deal[1]. I have no idea what blowing up on the pad means for the merger. 1. http://www.satellitetoday.com/technology/2016/08/24/spacecom...
Stock is down about 10%. Makes me wonder if high-speed traders seek realtime video feeds of such launches. Is the "official" feed delayed?
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very often. Air Force range safety guidelines require a million dollar flight termination system and most of that cost is testing and quality control. I don't have an authoritative list of all flight terminations but it happens at least once every few years whenever a rocket fails to follow the set flight path.
I also have to suspect things like isolated, dedicated and redundant comm links with the flight termination system are part of these guidelines. Perhaps even a "dead man's switch" that terminates the flight if this separate communication system loses signal at some point. (Even if this means a costly false positive or two~)
For the Space Shuttle, the flight termination system had two huge 10KW transmitters to send the signal. That would get through despite damaged receiving antennas, noise, or jamming.
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#315From the live thread at reddit:
>Elon Musk has stated that because the rocket didn't intentionally ignite for launch, the loss of payload is not covered by launch insurance.
Very sad. I wonder how this will affect future launches from SpaceX.
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#316I'm glad no humans were hurt or lost. I'm not shedding many tears for Facebook's payload, as I think internet.org is fundamentally misguided.
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's quite a lens, assuming the sound is correctly synchronized with the image.
You can get cheap consumer cameras now with pretty absurd zooms. The $600 Nikon P900 [1] has an 83x optical zoom lens, giving it the 35mm-equivalent focal length of 24-2000mm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SC_2yD6wKk . [1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1127274-REG/nikon_264...
How good is the photo quality? Is it close to entry-level DSLRs'?
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could they not have mocked the payload?
Mocking a six ton payload is actually fairly expensive, to get the cg, vibration etc. right. A lot more difficult than payload = mock(satellite); NASA did it for the Hubble but so the ground crew could practice operations and not drop the billion dollar space observatory, not to try and save some money if something blew up during testing.
Surely still much cheaper than a two hundred million dollar satellite?
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#319Was the launch rocket supposed to be one of their recovered/recycled rockets?
Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral
#320From the live thread at reddit: >Elon Musk has stated that because the rocket didn't intentionally ignite for launch, the loss of payload is not covered by launch insurance. Very sad. I wonder how this will affect future launches from SpaceX.
Wow! So who picks up the bill in this case? I'm sure it was in the contract somewhere.