SpaceX – Launch Vehicle Failure
About 3 minutes in the vehicle appeared to explode. At the time it was ~15km downrange, going 1km/s and around 35km up in the atmosphere.
UPDATE: Contingency press conference scheduled for 12:30pm EST- NASA TV said they wouldn't have much to update before then. Can anyone here with a little more knowledge answer the following please? Who pays for the expense of these types of failures? Does SpaceX have some sort of 3rd party insurance from a private insurer or are they insured by NASA or another branch of the US gov? How much is the equipment that got destroyed worth? If this happens multiple times in a short space of time as it seems to have recently does the cost of insurance go up for every launch? Does their analysis of data have any impact of the cost of insuring future launches? Both SpaceX and Orbital ATK carry insurance policies on their ISS resupply launches to protect against this sort of thing, although the policies are not absolutely comprehensive (Orbital's policy had a bothersome gap related to damages caused to the launch facility, owned by a third party). I do not know what the SpaceX vehicle's cost is, but I do know that the Antares rocket that Orbital ATK lost last year was itself valued at ~$200 million USD. According to the One True Reliable Source of All Knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Resupply_Services), SpaceX got $1.6 billion for 12 resupply missions, so that's about $133 million for the Falcon 9, the Dragon, and all the work involved in shooting them into space. I have no clue what their profit margin would be on that, but that at least gives us an upper limit. There is a lot of money thrown around in commercial space, but it is not a particularly high-margin business. http://spacenews.com/39492orbital-eyes-broader-antares-busin... This cites Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK) CEO David Thompson as saying that the profit margin on CRS was about 5.5% and they hoped to reach 6% with CRS-3. So with a 5.5% margin the $1.6 billion contract would be expected to yield $88 million in profit? Given what I'm assuming are large R&D expenditures on top of launch-related costs, I wonder whether the business is sustainable. I used to work for Orbital as a NASA contractor. I never dealt with the business end of things, but the margins were small and very stable so long as there was work to be done (i.e. a giant (sub)contract on some huge NASA project). It wasn't exactly a pressure cooker of a work environment. The government stuff was a very different atmosphere than the commercial side. I too am a former Orbital employee. I worked on the sounding rocket program. It was very much a pressure cooker because of the incessant pressure to work more overtime and do more missions in less time. I always heard that other parts of the company were far more laid back. Wish I had worked in one of those parts. Yeah, I worked there for 6 years, mostly at Goddard on the HST project. It was very relaxed - to the point of boredom at times (that's why I left, despite the insanely cool work). The guys in Virginia (where I worked about a year or so, but still on NASA stuff) told a different story about the Orbcomm and other commercial rocket businesses. I have no idea what it's like today though. 5.5% profit, if reliably realized, is sustainable. It's comparable to a conservative investment return. That said, most businesses strive for more than that. Yea where I live I get 7% (over inflation) on treasury bonds (it's kinda insane here, but 5.5% does seem like a low value). I assume all missions are fully insured to prevent bankruptcy with such low margins? If it is so I would imagine simply improving the reliability track of the vehicle to lower insurance would have a very large effect on profitability. If they could eventually tank the insurance partially/completely in house (given a low chance of failure) that would be even better. "We're not losing money AND we get to shoot things into space" sounds like a winning business model to me. The R&D is baked into the contract itself. Those costs don't include the cost of the payload itself, which is mainly handled by NASA or any third party wishing to run an experiment in space (but even then, NASA will subsidize). Every failed launch must be very painful. There doesn't seem to be much margin for error at those figures. Launch failures are absolutely AGONIZING. I was only an engineer on the sounding rocket program for a little under two years. Fortunately the two rockets I assisted with were successful, but there were payload failures while I was there that had to be investigated. The long days and nights some of my coworkers put in to investigate anomalies took a harsh toll on them. A month or so after I left, the program had a complete launch vehicle failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL9HEYuOWDU#t33m25s). The stress of investigating that caused four of the telemetry/power engineers working on that mission to quit within the several months following. It shouldn't be. I mean, things go wrong. It's the one universal truth of any engineering process. Finding out why the thing that went wrong went wrong, and making sure that it doesn't go wrong in the future is just part of the job. I work on an on-call rotation --- it's not as exciting as rocket science, which is both unfortunate and fortunate --- and yes, things go wrong; and one of the biggest rules of our process for when things do go wrong is 'Is it the end of your shift? Then hand off and go home. NO THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.' If the process itself is unable to cope smoothly with something going wrong, then the process has gone wrong. (And someone should find out why it went wrong, and make sure that it doesn't go wrong in the future.) > it's not as exciting as rocket science One of the takeaways I had from my time working with rockets was that rocket science isn't even rocket science, most of the time. But, I am very biased because my experience was overwhelmingly negative. I agree with you on all the rest. Indeed; I have an uncle who was on one of the 3 NASA Space Shuttle safety teams when the Challenger failed, although fortunately not the one who's remit included the SRBs. It triggered a stress related disability that seems to be a partly genetic thing, the same thing happened to me much more slowly a couple of decades later. I don't know a whole lot more than you, but private insurance is definitely a thing for launches, and I would imagine SpaceX has a policy that covers this. The FAA has an interesting document about the space insurance market here: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as... The rockets are pre-paid. The purchaser gets insurance for the payload to cover their loss. I watched the launch live this morning. It reminded me of one of the best interviews ever. Elon Musk after SpaceX's first three launches all exploded:
http://archive.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa I read that in high school, and it's part of the reason I became an engineer. "Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." --Teddy Roosevelt "Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work." I got goose bumps reading Elon's response at the end of the article. The thing I like most about the startup I work for: if anything goes wrong, everyone just objectively addresses what happened, where we are now, and what to do to move forward - an obsessive focus on the next step to success. "Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?" "Because it's there. Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man's desire to conquer the universe." - George Mallory That's a great reason to be the first to climb Everest, but it seems lacking to be the 4,000th. "Why do I climb the mountain? Because I'm in love" - William Shatner Why do people run marathons? It's a personal challenge. Hundreds of thousands of people do non-record breaking runs which are pain, suffering and followed by elation at success. That he was the first was a big part of it, but the reality is remove the words "never been climbed" and the sentence still works. Climbing everest, running a marathon, [insert challenging sports thing here] - each person strives within their own measure and tries to exceed their own expectations. For me it's the honest follow up about patience that says most. Looks like Southwest Research Institute's meteor shower camera will have been lost again. They're not having much luck :( > The device aboard [today's launch] was actually a backup of the original meteor camera that blew up along with Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket in 2014. Neat to hear about SwRI still doing space work. My grandfather was the director of engineering for many years, and I learned to program in BASIC on a 286 that he brought home when he retired. I get the impression looking back that he worked on so many projects he didn't have time to tell us about many. From Elon just now via Twitter: "There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause. That's all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis." Yeah, it is too bad there wasn't some way to deploy the parachute system manually. It would be nice if the cargo could be saved. I think Gerstenmaier was saying that may be a distant possibility. While they might be able to recover the items, re-qualifying something that's been dunked in seawater after being dropped from 35km+ is probably a non-trivial task. That's assuming it wasn't exposed to explosion debris. I wonder if "overpressure event" is a significant information, or is it just an euphemism for "explosion"? Usually they call those RUD, or "rapid unplanned disassembly." ;) I imagine this was literally an overpressure event, where perhaps something occurred with the 2nd stage tank mixers. (The explosion occurred close to MECO.) >Data suggests counterintuitive cause. What does this sentence mean? I'm guessing if there was an overpressure event, that one would normally think that it was due to unanticipated heat, or a valve opening incorrectly (too early/late, far/little), etc. but that data from a measurement system on e.g. thermal or flow indicate the opposite, such as temperature doing down instead of up. I wonder what the specs are for the systems they're using for telemetry... must be a gazillion channels at a high rate... It means that the cause was surprising, not one that your intuition would think of. It's sort of like "Prepare for unforeseen consequences." >> "That's all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis." You're supposed to do the fault tree analysis before you build the rocket Elon. The safety critical systems on your car have these done. Or perhaps they never did one for over pressure because it seems implausible for the pressure to increase. > You're supposed to do the fault tree analysis before you build the rocket Elon. How can you do a fault tree analysis before things go wrong? Maybe fault tree analysis means something different to you. According to Wikipedia, it is "a top down, deductive failure analysis in which an undesired state of a system is analyzed using Boolean logic to combine a series of lower-level events." There needs to be an undesirable (and presumably unforeseen) state to be analysed before you do the fault tree analysis. >> How can you do a fault tree analysis before things go wrong? Formal fault tree analysis has been used byt the nuclear power industry for decades. You may consult the "Fault Tree Handbook" also known as NUREG-0492 which can be found here: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/s... It has been adopted in parts of the auto industry for at least a decade (I was directly exposed to this). You start with a preliminary hazard analysis based on what could go wrong and work backward through the system to identify things connected to the component in question that would lead to the undesired outcome. You'll build a large binary circuit where the inputs are events or problems and the output is a failure. The tools can do an analysis to determine what combinations can lead to that failure. If the simplified boolean expression contains any single terms, you have a single point of failure that will lead to the undesired outcome. You then redesign the system so that no single point failures lead to disaster. THIS ANALYSIS HAS TO BE DONE BEFORE YOU BUILD IT TO BE ANY GOOD. I always liked this way better than the more common "faulure modes and effects analysis" or FMEA, which makes you try to determine system-wide consequences of component failures - often down to individual resistors. These do find problems at design time, but IMHO it's too much work. With a fault tree you get to treat larger assemblies as a component. I'm no Risk expert, but going from memory, you hypothesize potential failures based on experience and knowledge of the module. Then you use the FTA to understand what faults may result in the failures under examination. FTA can be used either pre- or post- event. > FTA can be used either pre- or post- event. Fair point. OP's objection to a post-event FTA still makes no sense, though. Generally you do a Root Cause Analysis post-event, not a Fault Tree Analysis. Fault Trees are typically used to determine the probability of a bad thing (fault) occurring. This probability is used to populate a Risk Matrix (Probability vs Consequence). The Risk Matrix is used to decide whether the risk is low enough vs the consequence within a design. It the risk is too high, then more redundancy or layers of protection are likely to be needed. Root Cause Analysis builds a tree of possible causes that will look much like the Fault Tree diagram but may include more human factors (was the part inspected before use, was the equipment maintained etc). There is a lot of overlap of techniques within the Risk Engineering discipline. Fault Trees can be mapped to Reliability Block Diagrams (AND gates are equivalent to Parallel pathways, OR gates are equivalent to Series pathways for example). The mention of Fault Tree Analysis being required post event seems a bit odd. It may just have been a confusion of terms in the heat of the moment. Video of explosion, from 23:40.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m40s This one is blocked in Germany, here is another one that works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793679 I always wondered why? YouTube cannot assure that no GEMA-licensed content is played during the live streams. To avoid a battle with GEMA here, they decided to ban it. It appears they have cameras on the outside and inside the rocket... I'd like to see what video they captured of the explosion. Proxflow can unblock that in Chrome. And a different angle from NASA TV: http://www.floridatoday.com/videos/tech/science/space/spacex... It can be seen frame by frame that explosion fumes started at the top of the rocket. 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. Aye, it's a good thing no one 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. Did you know that the shuttle was mostly intact after the disintegration [1]? "The crew cabin, made of reinforced aluminum, was a particularly robust section of the shuttle. During vehicle breakup, it detached in one piece and slowly tumbled into a ballistic arc. NASA estimated the load factor at separation to be between 12 and 20 g; within two seconds it had already dropped to below 4 g and within ten seconds the cabin was in free fall. The forces involved at this stage were likely insufficient to cause major injury." So, in a way there was a pod... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas... > Did you know that the shuttle was mostly intact The shuttle wasn't intact, just the crew cabin, or the very front part. 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 be as safe as current planes, but today it's a dangerous task. 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. I always find this opinion infuriating. It's a liquid fueled rocket, we've had those for 50 years, so it's not cutting edge! It's like saying a modern Formula-1 car isn't cutting edge because we had the Lotus 77 40 years ago that looked a hell of a lot like it. You have no idea what parts of it are or are not cutting edge. I guarantee you many of the parts and pieces in the rocket required pushing boundaries. All the little bits of material science, modern computational analysis, and advanced manufacturing techniques are cutting edge. Eh, developed by/for the Air Force, e.g. the mid-50s Jupiter used RP-1/LOX. For that matter, Mercury and Gemini used Army and Air Force rockets for boosters, it wasn't until Apollo that they used purpose built civilian rockets. The gas-generator design of the rocket engines goes back at least to the mid-50s in the USSR, not sure when it was first used in the US, but various Saturn rockets developed for Apollo used that design. 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. I had my 3 kids watching along with me. Afterwards we had a healthy talk on how to approach failure. Yup, my two kids here watched with me. Afterwards we talked about how difficult it is to do some things in life, and how we should keep trying even when things don't go our way. Play Kerbal Space Program with them, nothing will teach them about failure to launch more than that :) Likewise, I got my wife and daughters up to watch this. I don't totally regret it, but I feel I let them down a little. Costs and catastrophic failures:[1] * United Launch Alliance (Boeing and Lockheed Martin): 0 "outright failures" and 83 successful launches, ~$110 million/launch * SpaceX: 1 failure and 18 successful launches, $60 million/launch If you are looking for someone to launch your assets into orbit, who do you choose? [1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-destroyed... Average cost for successful launch: * United Launch Alliance: $110 million * SpaceX: $63.5 million ($60 million * 18 total / 17 successful) So SpaceX saves you $46.5 million per successful launch. If we assume that 1/18 SpaceX launches fail, then in the long run SpaceX wins as long as your typical payload cost is less than $46.5 * 18 = $837 million. If we assume that the cost to replace the payload for a failed launch is less than the original payload (R&D costs are amortized, so it's likely that building a second payload is much cheaper than designing and building the first payload), then the break-even payload cost can be even higher. Does this formula apply to manned spacecraft? What's the payload value of an astronaut? (Not trying to be snarky here, just thinking that the 1/18 vs 0/83 comparison seems moot when you have humans on board) For manned space flight, so far 18 people have died out of 430 that went to space. (14 Americans in two shuttle accidents, and 4 Russians in two separate incidents) That's only slightly lower than 1/18. The shuttle had a 40% vehicular failure rate (2 out of 5) and a 1.5% flight failure rate. That's better than 1/18, but not by that much. Clearly, manned vehicles demand a higher level of reliability than cargo carriers. However spaceflight even after decades of experience is still pretty risky. From a life safety perspective, non-manned, robotic missions are preferable. But our drive as a species to explore and populate new territories means that we'll need vehicles safe enough to travel in, and/or people who want to do it regardless of the risk. 1/18 is still probably decent odds compared to the ones facing people 300 years ago, who set out in wooden sailing ships to explore the unknown. With manned spacecraft, you have to factor in the chance that the crew would survive a failed launch. Specifically, in the press conference following this latest failure, it was stated that the planned crew escape system would have been capable of saving the crew. To my non-expert eyes looking at the event, there seemed to be a fair amount of time between there being an obvious problem, and complete disintigration. At some point, yes, there is a monetary value to human life. During the early days of space flight, it was something like $1 million per astronaut. These days, it's up to something more like $50 million per astronaut (inflation would put it as more like $7 million). I don't have my original source on this, but here's a good article discussing that and the concept of "mission success": http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona... One additional variable would be the cost to replace any assets lost on the 1 unsuccessful launch, although I'm not sure who ultimately picks up the tab for that. Yeah, my back of the napkin analysis is probably missing a bunch of important stuff. I just wanted to highlight the fact that simply looking at the failure rates is not enough -- you have to consider the amortized cost of getting your stuff into space successfully. Maybe tolerating a few failures saves money in the long run. (Of course this all assumes a replaceable payload. I am sure the analysis would be quite different for carrying people into space.) ULA's record with its current generation of Atlas 5 and Delta 4 boosters is 83 successful launches and no outright failures. This is an impressive reliability record, no doubt about it. However, it is fair to note that this is the "current generation" Atlas and Delta. The first Atlas was used during the Mercury program, so they've had more than 50 years of design refinement to get to that point. > it is fair to note that this is the "current generation" Atlas and Delta. The first Atlas was used during the Mercury program, so they've had more than 50 years of design refinement to get to that point. This perspective surprises me. From my perspective, I wonder why it matters to me how long SpaceX has had to design their rocket? Wouldn't I prefer the one with 50 years of refinements? Someone else posted a similar comment. It implies a 'my team is better than yours' competition, rather than a competition over which rocket functions better. My point was that Atlas/Delta have had a lot of time to get their bugs found and fixed, while the F9 has had 20 launches overall. It seems reasonable to me to expect that the reliability of F9 will rise with time as more bugs are found and fixed. So if you wanted to launch something today, you would reasonably consider this record to be a reflection of current risk. But I don't think it makes sense to extrapolate and say this will remain constant in the future. But then again, I am partial. The SpaceX design should be dramatically suprior to the aging Atlas and Delta designs because they are designed to be cheaper to build in the first place and they will be game changing if they manage to land the first stage and immediately turn it around for multiple launches. Atlas and Delta are certainly good platforms for high reliability but they are expensive and they aren't making much effort to bring the costs down. Bringing the costs down would require design revisions that might undo that 50 years of design stability. If SpaceX or someone else comes up with a reliable design at a dramatically lower price point ULA wont be able to sell their launchers unless its to a money is no object customer like the U.S. military. Recovery and rapid turnaround of the first stage could make space access cheap enough many things would become possible and affordable that are not currently, due to high launch costs, like expeditions to Mars or large space structures. ULA is already dead in the water. The only reason why they're around is because of the monopoly they have with US military launches. With the sheer amount of money backing ULA, there's no way they can be considered dead in the water. Their launch vessels are incredibly reliable, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. They're not just viable competitors, they're the current market leader. SpaceX is the peppy young upstart here (and still, failures like this are stepping stones to future reliability, if they're spending the time learning from their mistakes like they should be). At least it was unmanned. ULA wins very little commercial business. So yes, they're the market leader for US government launches of extremely expensive satellites. The rest of the market, commercial and US government launches of less expensive stuff, is where SpaceX is way ahead of ULA. Looking at SpaceX's and Orbital Science's recent performances, ULA seems to be in good shape. Also what does "no outright failures" mean? I assume they mean "failure to accomplish mission", as opposed to "things didn't work correctly but the outcome was still successful." There is some wiggle room, payload achieved orbit, but not nessisarily the desired orbit. SpaceX still looks better than its direct competition, Orbital ATK: Antares CRS-3 turbopump failure, vehicle FTS was activated and launch vehicle impacted very close to the launch pad. $200 million vehicle lost, approximately $30 million in damage to launch facility. Loss of the $424 million Glory satellite due to payload fairing separation failure. *Loss of the $273 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite due to payload fairing separation failure. And I don't think the comparison between ULA and SpaceX is necessarily a fair one. ULA is the beneficiary of inheriting solid engineering teams and practices from very mature programs run by large defense corporations. SpaceX is comparatively very young (I feel this makes their overall record even more impressive). > I don't think the comparison between ULA and SpaceX is necessarily a fair one. ULA is the beneficiary of inheriting solid engineering teams and practices from very mature programs run by large defense corporations. SpaceX is comparatively very young ... Another commenter said something similar. If I am awarding merit badges, then I agree it's unfair. Otherwise, if I'm looking for someone to launch my satellite, the comparison is perfectly fair (not that 'fair' has anything to do with it). > if I'm looking for someone to launch my satellite
If you're looking for someone to launch a satellite, then you have good ideas about how much you have to spend, your willingness to accept risk, and the services you desire. Depending on how you feel about these and other factors, your decision might not be as straightforward as you are portraying here. You're focusing on launching a satellite today. Those commenters are looking at satellite launches across the next decade, as ULA reliability doesn't change and SpaceX reliability grows (in theory). >If you are looking for someone to launch your assets into orbit, who do you choose? It heavily depends on the cost of the asset. If a satellite costs close to 1bn, it worth to use $110/launch but more reliable rocket. True. Also don't forget the opportunity cost of the time lost: 1) building a replacement and waiting for a spare slot in which to launch it, 2) engineering, manufacturing, and other resources which could have been used for (and likely were planned for) something else, but now are used for the replacement, and 3) the project the asset was used for, and its output (revenue, research results, etc.), now put on hold. Many organizations don't have the spare time and capacity to afford all of that; they or their project may simply be done. Keep in mind that several copies of a satellite will be built during production. Some are mockups of a few subsystems (e.g. structure), some are used for tests (e.g. thermal, electrical, interference), often there's also a "flight spare" which is an exact copy of the satellite in case something goes wrong with the flight hardware (e.g. broken during testing, launch failure). E.g. Curiosity has such a spare (I'm not sure if it's the same as the flight hardware or close enough) which will be sent in a future mission (I think 2017, though I don't have any sources at hand) with (some) different experiments on board. And if I recall, some of the SpaceX launches are pricier (though not that level) for the more sensitive payloads--as in there is a Secret-Spy-Satellite optional charge package. The extra charge is due to the paperwork requirement for these launches... which were imposed after a series of launch failures by LM and Boeing rockets carrying very expensive US Government satellites. And the paperwork is (in part) because the US Government doesn't purchase insurance on their launches. For some context, that's roughly the cost of a single instrument for the Hubble (~$100M). There's no free lunch in the space business... But do realize that the replacement cost of an instrument is much lower than the original creation cost; most of the cost of these things is designing and tooling, and not part of the unit cost of the actual article. There're much more expensive satellites. See, for example, http://www.space.com/11606-rocket-launches-missile-defense-s... >If you are looking for someone to launch your assets into orbit, who do you choose? The first thing you do is be very glad that you have a choice. Then you can start price shopping. If there is only one domestic option, then you either pay what the sole-source wants, or you pursue international options if those are available to you, many times they will not be. Is there insurance for the payloads? I know very little about rocketry and launching satellites, but with the costs so high, I would imagine that there is some form of risk mitigation, but I've never heard of such a thing. edit: If I had read down further, I would have seen a discussion about this very question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793697 Yes, that is if you can afford it. The Zvezda service module for the ISS was launched without insurance or a backup because of financial problems. Embarrassingly they even had to turn to Pizza Hut for help: What about the ULA rocket that blew up on the pad a few months ago? Do you mean the Orbital Sciences rocket, last October? Orbital Sciences is a different company than ULA. However, it's very possible that I don't know about the incident you're referring to; I'd be interested because it changes the picture dramatically. 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). Interesting - what were the differences between the orbiters that you had to account for? The cargo bays are laid out a little differently - If I recall correctly, it was mostly due to different styles of airlock between different orbiters. And since the loading on the cargo is highly dependent on where it sits in the bay, you can't just move stuff around willy nilly. There are probably other minor differences (I want to say there were some electrical interface issues), but that was the part that impacted my work. Let me guess, your mission went up on Atlantis instead? Being the newest in the fleet I'd expect it to have a different layout from Columbia. Also from your other comments in the thread, sounds like you worked on a Hubble servicing mission, which only Atlantis did after the Columbia accident. Well, it is rocket science, and even though SpaceX has a higher reliability target, accidents do happen 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 a safe landing. There is almost no question that had there been people aboard this particular launch, and they were using the newer Dragon that has that capability, no loss of life would have occurred. Unless (of course) there were OTHER malfunctions, too. Never know. Space is indeed hard. From watching the video, it looks like the engine is running until breakup, which is very sudden. This suggests to me, based on no evidence whatsoever, that: 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. The large object seen leaving the cloud before the final breakup has a distinctly Dragon-looking shape (https://youtu.be/2K030HRTutU?t=2m36s), so it appears to have survived whatever happened basically intact. (This isn't super-surprising, Dragon is a pretty compact structure with a pressure hull, compared to a long and skinny rocket.) Gwynne stated in the press conference that, to her knowledge, the range safety system had not been activated. Can Dragon abort and separate at Max Q? If I recall correctly the Space Shuttle had several flight periods at which it wouldn't have been able to separate from the boosters and / or tank. Yes. Later this year they're doing an in-flight abort test not-quite-at-max-Q, but close enough. Source: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/01/spacex-ready-crewed-d... It's worth noting that that's Dragon V2. To my knowledge, Dragon V2 can abort throughout the launch. Well, that was an unexpected and uncontrolled structural disintegration. e: On the upside, happy birthday Elon, I hope you enjoyed your really awesome fireworks! "Confirmed we have had a non-nominal flight" "Lock the doors" Maybe people didn't realize you were referencing the Columbia Shuttle disaster. That has to be the most awkward sign-off of the webcast ever. I almost felt like I heard that tension in the announcer's voice. The SpaceX "announcer" is John Insprucker. He is a senior engineer and Falcon 9 Product Director. Tension? Or upset-ness? Silence on the coms. Yeah, that was one expensive fireworks display. But I guess, happy birthday Elon. I am willing to bet that he's far from happy right now. According to gossip over at /r/spacex, he's screaming at the engineers. https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3beu7w/rspacex_crs7... 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 Damn, that sucks, but not nearly as much as if it was a random explosion. I believe in this scenario, astronauts would be able to do an emergency separation, getting far away from the lower stage before it was detonated. My biggest worry from this is that human flights will be delayed (justly or unjustly.) It appears from the video that the Dragon capsule came off intact. Crewed abort probably would've been just fine, which is indeed a relief. After all, that's the point of it. Do you have a source for that? It's really hard to differentiate between some guy on twitter and some guy that happens to work for SpaceX on twitter. I heard this on the NASA stream... but don't quote me on this Heard something similar on the stream just a few minutes ago. Something like: we are trying to correlate the timelines of data from Falcon to the timing of the Range Safety Officer ...(turning on?)... the flight termination system. Edit: Falcon Launch Control on "We are trying to correlate timelines and compare data with what they were able to see with down range cameras and put together what happened. We stopped receiving data at 2 min 19 sec from the vehicle. It is still not clear exactly what happened and why... At this point we don't have additional information we can provide on NASA Television until the contingency Press Conference, no earlier than 12:30? ET." You're quoting yourself here, what do you mean? If you're not supposed to say this then simply don't or do it with a throwaway. "Don't quote me" means something like, I am not a reliable source and I could be wrong. Ah, I see. The English Language never ceases to surprise :) Yeah, that one is not very obvious. Think of it like a warning: "Don't quote me on this, because if you do, you might find yourself repeating incorrect information." A literal command of "don't quote me because I'm telling you something I shouldn't" would be something like, "Off the record, this is what happened." And yeah, that would be silly to say on the internet. I would say that the literal aspect is the same no matter how you interpret it. It's just that jacquesm guessed the wrong reason for not quoting. It's still a command. Yeah- not much to say but the silence is sad. It looked like it was going well too... 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 They said in the press conference that it wasn't a commanded event. Press conference said that range safety didn't command the FTS (flight termination system) and there is no data (yet) that FTS enabled, but that's doesn't mean the on-board FTS didn't activate itself. It certainly looked like a controlled explosion... Comment from Reddit that may be useful. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/3bejxp/spacex_crs7_h... They said at the press conference that this wasn't the case. 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 from the '60s -- I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."). Which is an even more ironic quote if you knew that Musk tried to buy exactly those same rockets from Russia and was declined[0]. Hopefully Musk is learning some humility. [0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3082067/Russi... Interesting, I didn't know that. I was intrigued enough that I had to look up the original quote[0] as I had my doubts. I was able to easily find it though, is from a 10/12/2012 interview with Wired. Perhaps he's gained some humility since then; I'm still very inspired by him regardless... "Bind your tongue or your tongue will have you bound" Engines don't appear to have been the problem. "They don't build them like they used to." It exploded :(. Link to that part of the livestream: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” The challenge will be convincing people like the ULA backers from this hearing: http://youtu.be/IWVZYKGTenE that this is not a sign of spacex being less reliable because it is significantly less cost. My hope is spacex can bounce back. I would rather see SpaceX fail a thousand times unmanned than once with astronauts aboard: this is all part of progress forward. Was just watching the rocket from my backyard and it looked like it exploded... wow, can't believe that. I saw two big puffs of smoke and initially thought it was the boosters releasing. On the video it looked to me like a tank ruptured somewhere in the top half of the rocket, probably the second stage, and set free all the fuel. The rocket kept its course for some time until it suddenly disintegrated. I was impressed with how long the first stage kept going with all that happening up above. maybe the rupture was the initial bit of smoke (it looked the larger of the two from my view). There are no solid rocket boosters on Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy will have boosters, perhaps that's the confusion, unless 'booster' meant 'first stage'. Nobody said solid. It did looks like it was close to the point of stage separation. But we'll see soon what the SpaceX's engineering analysis is. Yes it was close to meco. Did you hear anything? Elon: "There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/615185076813459456 Elon Musk's 44th birthday today. Crazy way to celebrate that, right: Launching a rocket into space and getting to re-use the rocket. * possibly getting to re-use the rocket. Good luck to everyone involved however; very exciting. Not reusing that one :( Damn now I feel bad for saying that. Yeah, we all knew the return and landing part is new and uncertain, but I thought they would at least get to try. Indeed. I was looking forward to the landing. I never thought it wouldn't make it to start with. A sad day but you can always learn things from failures so not a complete waste of effort. It's absolutely ok to have failures during rocket development. See statistics of American and Russian rockets at the dawn of space race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... I wish the best SpaceX and hope they will make space flight affordable for many commercial and consumer applications. This is the natural consequence of testing being so expensive that you _have_ to test in production. Gods, it feels good to see the future finally arrive. It's been a long time coming. Growing up in the 80s, I became quite bitter about the pace of technological change. Sure, personal computers were nifty, but the heroic age of spaceflight was really what the future should've been about. That age had ended with Apollo 17, three years before I was born. Everything since then looked like a shambolic shuffle into a new dark age. One insane coincidence in the late 80s gave me some remarkable perspective on this. I was taking the train down the coast of California, around the horn of Vandenberg Airforce Base. The train was the only place from which civilians could see the Vandenberg Launch Complex, including the SLC-6 Shuttle launch site[1]. Nasa had spent over $4 Billion preparing it for shuttle launches which would never come. The Challenger disaster had ended all hopes for that; the complex had been mothballed and was already starting to rust. Seeing this made my 13-year-old-self angry. I started ranting to the poor gentleman sitting next to me about how my grandmother hand grown up with horses and buggies yet got to see men walking on the moon; my generation, on the other hand, had seen nothing but decline. As I ranted, the gentleman slumped in his seat. At the end of my rant, he gave a long sigh and said "tell me about it." Then he introduced himself. He was Deke Slayton, a Mercury and Apollo astronaut[2]. He'd retired from NASA in 1982, frustrated with its bureaucracy, and tried to start a private space-launch company. It hadn't gone well.[3] I wish I could say that our conversation gave me hope for the future, but it didn't. Later, my hopes were raised by the DC-X[4], then dashed by the subsequent (insanely corrupt) X-33 fiasco, and the failure of Beal Aerospace[5]. Raised again when I stood on the flight line at Mojave and watched SpaceShipOne take its first space shot[6], then dashed again when that program seemed to fly into molasses. Throughout, there was the sense that the future was possible, but by no means inevitable. There was no guarantee that it would arrive in my lifetime. But now here it is. This time it's real, this time it'll work, and nobody will have to get nailed to anything. I couldn't be happier! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Co... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deke_Slayton 3: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevefrancis/sets/721576293246... 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X Addendum: well, crap. The future is still hard. Your post was in my mind when I was watching the live stream. Your post was the first thing that I thought of when I realised what had happened. How are their posts that are 4 hours old when OP is only 3 hours old? How does that work? Pre-launch and post-explosion threads were merged. Ditto, it made the situation so much sadder. The key thing now is the reaction to a catastrophic failure. Can't let it grind everything to a halt. The company I used to work for (EER) bought his company to get the IP to his rocket (Conestoga) and tried to go into private space launches, but the single launch in 1995 was a failure. It ended up getting sold to L-3. So in a case like this, would it be possible to have the pad abort system kick in? It could potentially pull the cargo module away and make an attempt to parachute it back for recovery? I doubt it could overcome the speed of the rocket but it might have a chance to separate it from the debris cloud? Cargo dragon doesn't have a pad abort system. Dragon 2 would be able to escape just fine, though. Cargo dragon could _technically_ survive if didn't get blown up too much. > Cargo dragon could _technically_ survive if didn't get blown up too much. It appears to be intact after the explosion. You can see it detach and drift back in the video at about 2:35. https://twitter.com/nextlaunch/status/615191061636481024 Unfortunately, parachutes on the cargo version aren't armed during launch (would be bad if they accidentally deployed) so it'll have smashed into the ocean and broken up. Their COO mentioned in the press conference (just a few minutes ago) that they did receive telemetry from Dragon after the event. 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 every mission would mean. Although, given that rocket launch failure is a fact of life anyway, then putting the LAS on unmanned payloads means you get a much higher chance of testing it for real. Which means you have a much higher chance of knowing whether it'll work when you are in the Dragon it's attached to, which I reckon is a good thing. 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. Because of the LAS, Dravon v2 has to carry more fuel than v1. And it's not only the rocket motors that are heavy, but the supporting equipment and structure (peak loads are different for some parts of the structure). All of that leads to higher mass. The v2 is not just a v1 + LAS rocket motors, but in large parts a severly altered design. As for having a chance to test the systems: That's what the recent pad abort test (and subsequent in-flight tests) are for. Plus, the engines, being liquid engines, are each tested prior to installing them on the spacecraft. You'll need to do that anyway, and you are always hoping that you'll never need to use that system (does not fully apply to Dragon v2 since they intend to use the LAS system for landing the capsule with the rockets some time in the future). I still say it does not make sense to equip a cargo mission with LAS capability. (Disclosure: I'm an aerospace engineering student, M.S., so it's an educated guess rather than a theory on my part) Sidenote: Solid LAS systems, as used on most other capsule systems, cannot be tested like liquid systems. You'll need a comparative test with built-alike motors but cannot test the same system that will be installed in the spacecraft. It's never going to work well until we find a way to get to space without lighting our asses on fire. What are the implications of this for SpaceX in monetary terms? Can they just shrug this failure off? Failures are expected. This is not catastrophic, although it would have been nice if they had the opportunity to try a return to barge. I think (of course just an uneducated guess) things were going poorly from the beginning. It just looked slower than usual. Also, it looked like some of the engine exhaust was in places it should not have been several seconds before the "anomaly". I hope they get everything figured out and get back on track soon. Best wished. Do you think you might be having a hindsight bias? No, I really thought that. I also thought, all sorts of things so I am not claiming to have some sort of predictive powers. It could easily be camera angles and my expectation of seeing the thing zoom off the pad. Just saw this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24cZYMsdrq0) video. It looks like trouble started near the top of the rocket. Also, heard the Air Force Terminated the flight. Anyway, we will see. I noticed that too, seemed slow clearing the tower, I thought it was mo imagination, or the camera angle. I find all SpaceX launches to be "slow" compared to (some) other launches. But this is mostly due to the Falcon not having any solid rocket motors: These produce a massive amount of thrust (far higher than liquid engines) and thus a high accelerating force right from the beginning. You can see that in e.g. Shuttle launches or the recent Vega launch (all solid motor), compare them to other liquid-only rocket motor launches. Same here, but they said the liftoff was nominal so I'm guessing it's either imagination or camera angle. This stuff is really hard to judge from video. Hold on. So that's the second in a row ISS resupply mission that failed, isn't it? First was with the Progress in late April. How does this affect the ISS plans, does anyone now? This article says they have food and supplies through October. If I'm on ISS, maybe I start skipping lunch now. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-destroyed... 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? 1) They will assess the failure, maybe change some elements minimally, and launch again. It does not look like they'll go out of business anytime soon, and that would be the only reason not to try it again and again. 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. To quote xkcd: "You will not go to space today" SpaceX and NASA is continuing to evaluate.
Live coverage: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html T+15m NASA TV says flight was terminated by Air Force, but does not state reason http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3b27hk/rspacex_crs7_... The press conference is being broadcast live now (1 PM ET). http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ Just watched some of it. The SpaceX COO just said they're still analysing data s dont have anything to add to Elon's tweets yet. The rest of the conference is just reassuring everyone that the ISS is fine for the time being. "Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts" - winston chruchill Press conference just started, YouTube live stream here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyMOYHiatos Good that nobody was hurt. that reminds me that Elon Musk said that Antares rockets are junk, so now his own spacecrafts are exploding. Space tech has its problems. Maybe that will teach him to be a bit more humble. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/10/iss-bound-gear-... I think that article might be a bit disingenuous. Elon Musk didn't say that in response to the Antares explosion, he said it several years earlier, and the part that's quoted is pretty accurate to be fair. When a failure does happen, nobody goes around celebrating it, whether they're competitors or not, and honestly I believe that includes Elon Musk. I believe that on a human level, but even on a business level it's bad, because it reduces public faith in space transportation generally. Nobody likes to see this happen. :( He did express sympathy for Orbital's failure: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/527247155954610176 I agree - even if what he said had some merit - it's never a good idea to trash your competitors on technical matters when what you are doing is really hard. I won't jump so fast to shame him. There was reason why he said Antares was junk. From the initial report, the falcon self destructed due to non-nominal path. Which ain't same thing though same outcome. 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 catastrophic loss and will just give up. SpaceX at this point is pretty well-funded, still in a solid position to tap capital markets and has a healthy manifest of paying customer launches. There's probably some insurance in place to mitigate financial losses. And this is the benefit of bringing costs down, especially with the complete complete re-use SpaceX is targeting. Reminds me of that article about the Sony Aibo dogs ending their mechanical end of life. After 16 years, they are failing and they're no replacement parts. Point being, if Sony had kept going with that incredibly sophisticated robotics tech (for the time) they would be an industry leader right now at a time when robotics is about to explode. Did Sony run out of funds? No. They abandoned the project because of fear for stockholder repercussions. That's what I meant by that comment. Sometimes stockholder flash back is enough to abandon a really great idea. Meta: From many years of watching various rockets explode, I believe the correct euphemism is "catastrophic departure from controlled flight conditions" It has exploded! :( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m38s And the NasaTV stream is still going with updates: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ Bummer. Telemetry will be useful and of course. I doubt it will de-rail SpaceX. Several interesting questions came to mind though, especially given the successful test of the Dragon 2's thrusters, which is whether or not an inflight abort could have saved the cargo. I understand that isn't practical in the general case but in the specific case of a Dragon cargo capsule, I'm wondering if they can fly one with the super draco thrusters. And have that one do the in flight abort sequence at some point in the future. And given a rocket at mach 1+ what is the velocity of the explosion wavefront? In particular if you know that the back end of the rocket has just exploded, how many milliseconds do you have before the shockwave catches up to the front of the rocket? Could you perform a disconnect and burn of the super draco package to put the Dragon capsule far enough ahead of the shock wave to survive it? Bonus points if any of the debris lands on the barge! Thats a mighty tasteless thing to say. I am guessing you are on the "we should not be exploring space" camp? this was the failure of a cutting edge rocket that resulted in no loss of human life. How is it tasteless? I'm personally more saddened by the fact that the ISS is getting schedules pushed back than some billion-dollar company lost a rocket. I'm very much pro-space exploration, and I thought it was funny. It's just a tongue-in-cheek joking reference as if this was a huge game of lawn-darts. Lighten up, and stop 'guessing' about what 'camp' people are a part of as part of public discourse. It makes you look rude, presumptive, and (possibly worst of all) wrong. In what way is it tasteless? >The seventh cargo resupply mission of Dragon to the ISS, also carrying the first International Docking Adapter in the trunk of Dragon, for use in Commercial Crew missions. Are they looking to relight and land today? They usually do for geo or ISS missions. Yep, and Of Course I Still Love You is in position. https://igcdn-photos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/t51.28... What's usually the timeline and when could we expect the docking? Edit: Go it... Since you edited with the first stage landing info, the expected landing is roughly T+9 min. That name... it has Very Little Gravitas Indeed. Lift-off looked normal, seemed like things were going fine. Personally, I noticed a darker piece of material fly off the rocket, and then disintegration. Will be interesting to hear the reason/root cause. A complete coincidence, I was just watching these worst rocket malfunctions [1] then flicked over to HN and this was #1 story. Initial thoughts are that the main difference is now we have HD video and for some reason the controllers remain silent after the explosion... Why the silence? There used to be at least some reaction from the controllers. From an "oh no" to "obviously a major malfunction"... no sh*t Sherlock... > Initial thoughts are that the main difference is now we have HD video and for some reason the controllers remain silent after the explosion When something like this happens, all the conversations about what happened are being held on comm nets that aren't broadcast. Believe me, the controllers are talking to each other, gathering and sequestering data, etc. But they aren't doing it on the net that's broadcast to the public. It looked like the exhaust fumes changed patern and than everything desintegrated ... maybe it autodistructed ... it did not look like it changed direction or anything before the explosion Does anybody have a way to watch the video again? I'm curious to watch it again now that I know what happened. I haven't watched many launches before so I didn't know if what was happening was routine or not. Though, admittedly, it was weird that one second there was a rocket, then the next there was only debris... edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m38s Thanks xur17! Here's a second[0] video in case the first one goes down. Based on that, one can clearly see by stepping frame by frame at 3:20 disintergration of what i imagine must be second stage fueltanks. Difficult to say if it is oxygen or kerosene, but since its expanding so rapidly it would seem likely that its a oxygen tank. But nevertheless its just guessing from me and im no expert. Live broadcast here: http://livestream.com/spacex/events/4152712 Here if you prefer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw YouTube stream usually works better and is Chromecastable :) Excpet »Live Streaming is not available in your country due to rights issues«. Thanks, the livestream.com quality looks much better to me than Youtube's despite the latter offering 1080p. I was wondering what happened. This was my first time watching the live stream so I wasn't sure if that was normal or not. Edit: They just called it, they had an "anomaly." So what's going to happen to the astronauts aboard the ISS - this was a resupply mission. How much longer can they stay up there with their current supplies? They are stocked for months. As you can imagine, if your delivery mechanisms have a somewhat higher than usual risk of failure you don’t really go for just in time delivery. There are several ways of supplying the ISS, though the very reliable Russian Progress (which also did have a failure recently – not a good year for cargo shipments to the ISS) is certainly the workhorse in terms of cargo shipments. (Though there is also the Japanese HTV and the – also recently failed – Cygnus.) Any one or even couple failures of cargo vehicles in a row can’t do much to the supply situation. There are multiple redundancies built into the process. However, since really no one wants to abandon the ISS (just deserting it and coming back a couple months later is always risky with something as complex as the ISS that does require constant upkeep) that better be the case. There will probably be quite some rescheduling and changing of plans happening. (I know that after the last cargo failure three people actually got to stay up in space a couple days longer, for whatever complicated scheduling related changes in plans.) 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 Not every space flight failure is the result of an explosion. 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.) This might be just a coincidence. But I have a strange filling that secret services were involved in both cases. How hard is to sabotage Falcon 9 mission? There's a crew return vehicle docked to ISS - in case they have to evacuate. Yes - they have not seemed to have a good record of getting supplies lately. I believe until October. (IIRC from the pre-launch conference) did it just explode??? yes... I think so. Looks like it. Oh. Crap. Space really is hard. Seems like we do ok once we're in space, it's the going in between that's the hard part. Yeah, rocket science! BREAKING: "The range confirmed that the vehicle has broken up. @SpaceX is putting together their anomaly team." Where is this quote from? Just wondering... Why don't they use the new V2 Dragon with it's escape/abort system in all future resupply missions? At least they should be able to save the very expensive lab supply equipment, instruments, experiments, etc. Just fit it with the current V1 Dragon attach system for ISS docking. Awkwards silence on the livestream... RIP Falcon 9. Still happy birthday Elon, I guess ? Wait, is the banner on SpaceX's YouTube channel really the terraforming of Mars? Yup, looks like they edited this photo from Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MarsTransitionV.jpg It clearly is. Damn, that's cool! I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk had already started thinking seriously about that phase of the colonization project. When you walk into their office and go back towards the area where Elon's cubicle is, the same photo of the terraforming transition is blown up on the wall: https://www.flickr.com/photos/44124348109@N01/9848295393 Their company mugs also have a heat sensitive image of Mars that terraforms itself: http://shop.spacex.com/accessories-81/occupy-mars-heat-sensi... Elon is ::definitely:: already thinking about the colonization phase of the project and has taken steps to highlight it to the company and the public. "Non nominal flight" What does it mean? How did nominal come to mean “within acceptable tolerances”? https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184876/how-did-n... So, it's another way of saying something is 'out of tolerance'. Rapid unplanned disassembly. Gone, baby Gone. Too bad... :( I remember as a kid playing buzz aldrin's race into space I was fascinated by the exploding rockets. Now that I better realize the cost, no more fascinated. Trial and error has its costs First time i watch SpaceX launch. Rocket explodes. Disappointed. Man that sucks... At least it wasn't a manned flight yet. Happy birthday Elon! We know you'll do it eventually. India's ISRO sent a mars mission for around $70 million. That was including the payload i think. How is $60 million cheap for just a launch vehicle? As the ship exploded, the words on the screen were something to the tune of "At this point, the ship is under the highest aerodynamic pressure". From the timeline, and from remembering past launches, I'm pretty sure it was well past Max-Q. I think Max-Q occured about a minute before. You can review the stream, it passed supersonic way before (you see the shock cone on the two sides), then max-q, then a minute later the explosion same feeling here. anyway, you could see the cap going off before rocket was self destructed. dunno if was part of the sequence. the engine exhaust plume expansion reminded of that time they lost a nozzle due to high pressure, but again hard to tell if it was cause or effect from the armchair Indeed it was around main engine cutoff. This launch, the feed from SpaceX had all of those events marked in a timeline - a new feature. From the large number of people speculating about the timing of these events, it would seem that you were all watching some other livestream? Perhaps the NASA one? Might want to check out the SpaceX stream next time. Edit: the SpaceX website doesn't appear to have a recording of their live stream available. I sat here watching it go up and thought "please don't blow up. please don't blow up." I should have stayed in bed. Sorry all. Its OK. We know it wasn't intentionally. Even in bed you're not safe, see "Heavens Lathe" by Ursula LeGuin. RIP Jebediah Kerman. Elon Musk Tweeted:
There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause. gif of explosion: http://imgur.com/SYwUIbI AFAIK only three launch vehicles have better count of starts before the first big acident: Space Shuttle, Soyuz and Delta II. Hate to see it also. It think things were going bad right from the beginning though (a completely uneducated guess). Isn't 180 seconds just the burn time of first stage? So it's when 2nd stage should fire? You have to cut the "%22" off the end of that URL for it to work. 404 otherwise. This was due to HN including a quote as part of the URL. I feel very sad. This is second in a row. The guys up there are short on supplies... Why don't they eject the cargo as they've tested for crew? I don't know for sure, but I suspect the (not very extensively tested) launch abort system wouldn't have actually been installed of this flight. SpaceX's launch abort system is integral to the Dragon 2 capsule. It's not a bolt-on and couldn't be reasonably retrofitted to Dragon 1. Poor Microsoft HoloLens I love watching as many launches as I can it's great! A valiant effort! Keep up the good work. Everyone is rooting for your success. So honey, how was the launch today? We had a blast! so sad Holy shit. did it just blow up? End of the live broadcast it blowd up 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 It was 45km in the sky when it exploded. Not much oxygen up there to react with, and most of the fuel would've scattered quickly too due to the forces involved. There were pretty close to Main Engine Cutoff so there would have been relatively little fuel left. It was fueled for a landing, which means 30% extra in the first stage. Tank exploded but I don't think it ignited. The rapid breakup you see is due to the air pressure forces at that speed most likely. SpaceX - making the world's most expensive bottle rockets
Bit of positive news to take from this sad day. Received telemetry from Dragon after the event - Gwynne (From Conference).
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3b27hk/rspacex_crs7... Post-Launch Booster Recovery
Okay, that's the routine stuff dealt with. I know we're all here
to see what happens to the first stage! Following stage separation
approximately 3 minutes into the launch, the first stage
will manoeuvre and orient itself to conduct a post-mission
landing test attempt on an autonomous drone ship named
"Of Course I Still Love You".
