SpaceX's Falcon Launches... Sort Of

JHarrison writes "Spaceflight Now is running a story on the SpaceX Falcon 1 launch yesterday. Those of you watching the stream will have no doubt noticed the telemetry failure at 04:50, and turns out that was more than them turning the webcast off.. "A year after its maiden flight met a disastrous end, the SpaceX booster lifted off at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 GMT Wednesday) from a remote launch pad on Omelek Island, part of a U.S. Army base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Controllers lost contact with the Falcon during the burn of the second stage that would have placed the rocket into orbit around Earth. "We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly," Elon Musk, founder and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said in a post-launch call with reporters. Live video from cameras mounted aboard the rocket's second stage showed increasing oscillations about five minutes after liftoff, just before the public webcast was cut off. The rolling prevented the necessary speed to achieve a safe orbit, instead sending the stage on a suborbital trajectory back into the atmosphere.""

That's how it works

[dreamchaser (49529)]

More is learned from failures than successes in most engineering endeavors. Hopefully they'll continue to refine their systems and will enjoy more success next time around.

Re:

[fbjon (692006)]

They will. In fact, Elon stated that all the difficult problems were surpassed, another test launch probably won't be needed, and the next launch will have actual payload.

Re:That's how it works

[khallow (566160)]

Or it means that he's out of money for more test launches. He has demonstrated two difficult aspects, liftoff and stage seperation. So I'm optimistic. But as I recall, he's said in the past that he'll evaluate the program after the first three launches. So far, he's had one utter failure and one that lost control in the second stage. He still needs to put something in orbit.

Re:

[fbjon (692006)]

I did see a rumour somewhere that he was considering pulling the funding. As I see it, however, they did reach the finish line, just didn't get to cross it. But that's what test flights are for, right?

Re:That's how it works

[Keebler71 (520908)]

Did anyone else watching the video notice the apparent contact between the 2nd stage nozzle and the interstage? I wonder if a TVC actuator was damaged leading to the nutation...

Re:

[Billosaur (927319)]

This is not trial and error; they didn't simply go to a junkyard, wled a bunch of pieces of interesting stuff together to make what they thought was a rocket, and then fired it off hoping it would work. They started from first principles, used known technologies and augmented them, then attempted to launch the thing, and will use the telemetry to improve the design. Trial-and-error was more what Robert Goddard was doing in the New Mexico desert.

Re:

[The Dobber (576407)]

"Failure is not an option"

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

Re:

[fotbr (855184)]

And Ford had been building cars for the better part of a century and they still produced the Pinto.

The Pinto actually was a pioneering effort, sorta

[elrous0 (869638)]

In all fairness, Detroit had mostly produced giant land barges in the past. The Pinto was an early effort at actually producing a car that didn't snort gas faster that Nicole Ritchie with a paper bag. When they were cutting the car down, it just never occurred to them that the bracing between the bumper and the fuel tank wasn't just there to support fins.

Re:Insightful...?

[ePhil_One (634771)]

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

And yet we've lost two Space shuttles in recent memory. Space is not easy, rockets are enormously powerful devices that require light weight and experience a vast array of environments. Here a relatively minor thing went wrong, too much rotation, and the whole thing is now gone. Knowing how to do something and actually doing it are radically different things...

Re:

[ePhil_One (634771)]

I remember the argument I read in the 80's regarding using the Shuttle vs Large Soviet-type rockets to launch the components for the space station, that went something like this: If the goal is to get chunks of this thing into orbit, why build the most complicated machine known to man, with myriads of potential points of failure, when you can use something big and stupid to man-handle stuff into LEO?

1. National Politics. The Shuttle was ours, we had fallen behind on behemoth launchers, and if I recall, ef

Re:

[dreamchaser (49529)]

NASA has had plenty of failures too, and I am not one who would start screaming that the sky is falling when they have another.

This is real life, and the reason one has test flights. Of course understanding real life involves leaving mom's basement, something a lot of the armchair would be rocket scientists here are hesitant to do. I'm not referring to you in particular, just a large portion of the slashbot crowd.

pfft

[djupedal (584558)]

I roll-control anomaly in your general direction!

Re:

[C0rinthian (770164)]

Press R twice to do a Roll-Control Anomaly!

What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[Shivetya (243324)]

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward and the way people act Rutan is the second coming.

Look, they are doing a great job. Second flight at they reached 200 miles! Thats beyond the ISS.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward and the way people act Rutan is the second coming.

I, for one, welcome our new suborbital rocket plane-making overlord.

No, but seriously, Rutan has more hype. He's flamboyant, knows how to work the press, and well, SpaceShipOne just looks cool. If actual results were all that mattered, nobody would be talking about Vista; hence Rutan and Scaled Composites get all the hype, while SpaceX has actually produced the better result.

Re:What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[jezor (51922)]

Different result, not "better result." Rutan's Spaceship One is good for one valuable task (human suborbital flights); SpaceX's rockets for a totally different one (cargo lifting orbital flights). Both were formerly the sole province of the governments, so both add to the possibility of private exploration of space. {Prof. Jonathan}

Re:

[ausoleil (322752)]

Considering that the Rutan/Scaled Composites and the SpaceX efforts had two completely different sets of objectives, and that Scaled met their objectives completely, that is, winning the X Prize, while the SpaceX second attempt failed in its own mission, what exactly is the point here?

To be sure, Rutan and company had setbacks in their early efforts. They engineered around them and ultimately met their goal and took home not only the prize but also the investments necessary for funding another generation o

Oh the irony.

[devnullkac (223246)]

Comment:

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward...

Sig:

Winners compare their achievments to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others

Re:

[wjsteele (255130)]

The Space Station varies it's orbit depending on a lot of factors. It's in a continously decaying orbit (intented) which will always make it return to Earth at some point. It's orbit is occasionally boosted by the Space Shuttle or by the various Russian cargo ships. For example, right now, NASA is letting the orbit decay to around 205 miles so that the Shuttle can bring up the largest (and heaviest) component without having to push it all the way. With ISS in a lower orbit, less fuel is needed to get th

Why shutdown at that point?

[nietsch (112711)]

There was something unexpected happening, so they shut down the engine and it plunged back into the atmosphere. What I don't get is why let some potential problem (ok maybe it didn't much of a chance) ruin the whole flight? You are up high/fast enough anyway so why not take every chance you got and just ride it untill it breaks. Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?

Re:

[Scutter (18425)]

Stop it *while they still have control* you mean. A rocket tumbling out of control back to earth is a danger.

Re:

[nietsch (112711)]

If you only shut down the engine during unexpected roll events, you basically have a rocket tumbling out of control. They did. What was your point again?

Re:

[voice_of_all_reason (926702)]

There was something unexpected happening, so they shut down the engine and it plunged back into the atmosphere.

While that makes sense now, I would hope this protocol will change by the time they get around to human passengers.

Re:

[pipatron (966506)]

For safety. If it goes out of control near the ground, you don't want it to just accelerate into any inhabited areas. 200 miles up in the atmosphere, it probably doesn't matter that much.

Re:

[nietsch (112711)]

It was five minutes into the firing of the second stage. You'd think it would be a bit highere than close to the ground...

Re:

[hmbcarol (937668)]

They never said they intentionally shut the engine down. The shutdown was an unavoidable side effect of a strong roll. Their quote was "If you have a significant roll, what could happen is that the propellants can centrifuge out."

If the spacecraft is spinning, all the fuel is pushed to the outside walls of the tank and away from the fuel outlet at the center of the tank bottom. This leaves the fuel pumps with nothing to pump. Engine shut down. Rocket fall, go boom.

Re:

[fotbr (855184)]

Doesn't take very long at all. There's friction between liquid molecules as well.

Re:

[Ihlosi (895663)]

Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?

Yes, they don't want to have a large piece of space junk loose in a random orbit. This isn't the first space race - putting something into a random orbit doesn't win prizes, but might smash things that are already up there on purpose.

Re:

[glitchvern (468940)]

Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?

The first stage is designed to be recovered and reused. The rolling motion caused the propellent to act like a centrifuge potentially damaging the engine. Considering it was the second stage which was not designed to be recovered damaging the engine is probably not a problem, but the control software was probably designed similarly to the first stage where not damaging the engine may be a higher priority than a successful flight if you

Videos are up

[savuporo (658486)]

For those of you who didnt catch the webcast:
YouTube : launch [youtube.com]
SpaceX official, high-res: http://www.spacex.com/video_gallery.php [spacex.com]

Five minutes of fame !

Cup half full

[toupsie (88295)]

Just change the description of the vehicle from a spaceship to a ballistic missile and its a successful launch.

Look on the bright side.

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

Maybe it landed on Chris Kattan.

Engine bump and second stage control

[decaym (12155)]

Did anyone else notice the bump the Kestrel engine took during stage separation? On the 40MB video [spacex.com] from SpaceX, it happend at 3:28 in or at T+00:02:52 on the screen clock. Maybe this is normal for the engine, but it was rather odd looking to me.

Also, there was a story [space.com] earlier that the 2nd launch was delayed "due to concerns over a thrust vector control pitch actuator on the Falcon 1 booster's second stage". I wonder if this came back to bite them?

Finally, I'm impressed as hell that they could experience an abort after engine start yet still cycle back and launch in just another hour! When the Shuttle once aborted after engine start it took them a month to change out the engines and try again.

Re:

[WolfWithoutAClause (162946)]

Did anyone else notice the bump the Kestrel engine took during stage separation? On the 40MB video from SpaceX, it happend at 3:28 in or at T+00:02:52 on the screen clock. Maybe this is normal for the engine, but it was rather odd looking to me. So far as is known, it didn't materially affect anything. The nozzle is made of Niobium which is quite malleable, and small dents only mildly modify the efficiency of the engine, and that's one of the known advantages of Niobium over other high temperature metals, a

Re:

[decaym (12155)]

I had read about the Niobium nozzle being able to take a dent. I'd be more concerned about the bump damaging the vectoring hardware for the engine. It was also really interesting to see the glow coming through the nozzle. I was really worried we'd see a burn through of the nozzle, but I guess the glow is just the normal behavior.

Some of the early comments by Elon talked about spin causing centrifuge effect on the fuel supply to the 2nd stage engine. In the video, although the nozzle is oscilating back

Re:

[decaym (12155)]

There is another point, which is right before the second separation events (from the nose; I don't know what it's called and can't get a timecode right now), there's a ring that comes off of the 2nd stage engine. Anyone know if this was normal?

In the transcript from a post flight interview it was said that these rings are titanium and applied to the edge of the nozzle with a bonding agent. The rings are there to protect the nozzle during the first part of the firing. Once the rings heat up the bonding

Incoming message from Slippy:

[dosle (794546)]

Do a barrel roll!

So then, ummmm....

[AugstWest (79042)]

Where did it land?

Babelfish of limited use here...

[jpellino (202698)]

"We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly"
=
"Rocket fall down go boom."

Actually I think I know what the problem was. As it is son-of-paypal-entrpreneurism, the actual button for turning on the roll control was tiny and at the bottom of a large screen offering to upgrade to super turbo rocket engine pumps and 3% off your next tank of LOX.

This is awesome.

[xx01dk (191137)]

Yep, nay-sayers be damned, but to think this isn't a big, government corporation undertaking this, wasting our tax dollars with endless beaurocracy. This is the product of back yard and garage tinkerers (albeit several generations removed). Who can't look at that webcast and imagine seeing that for real, in the 1st person, someday? It gave me chills when the curvature of the earth came into the frame. I've seen dozens of rocket launches and shuttle launches, but that was pretty unique. Reminds me of when I was in grade school back in the eighties, watching the shuttles go up.

Regardless of the success or failure of the launch, this is mightily impressive. My hat's off.

Re:Rocket Science?

[Aladrin (926209)]

Maybe they just need to keep like they are doing. The whole reason that these guys exist is that 'NASA or Lockeheed or somebody' aren't good enough at it. They are slow, extremely cautious, and amazingly expensive. Outsourcing to them would be the same as doing nothing and is definitely not going to get them where they want to be, business-wise.

Re:

[aadvancedGIR (959466)]

Maybe Rocket science is like computer science. You can have your payload on orbit, still working or for cheap, choose at most 2.

Re:Rocket Science?

[Teancum (67324)]

You got the quote wrong, and I would say that this is a general engineering principle as well:

You can have your product done:

1. reliably
2. quickly
3. cheaply

Please choose only two of the above options!

In the case of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, they choose options 1 and 2. In the case of SpaceX, they have instead choosen options 1 and 3. This is where they are indeed doing something different than the more traditional companies. That Mr. Musk has deep pockets helps some, but he is trying to do it on the cheap and is willing to have some delays before he can have his dream. For government operations, they have to get results in four years or their budget will be cut (in the USA).

If SpaceX were run like a government agency, they would have had their funding cut already, or some congressional oversight committee that would have mucked up the process by demanding more "oversight" in the form of increased paperwork and bureaucratic Bu**s***. Lucky for them, they only have to answer to one person who nearly everybody in the company knows on a first name basis... and he knows them too.

Re:

[drooling-dog (189103)]

They are slow, extremely cautious, and amazingly expensive.

Just maybe... That's the formula for success in space flight?

Re:

[Billosaur (927319)]

How do you figure? They got their rocket off the ground and up 200 miles, and had some control problems that kept them from getting into orbit. That's pretty good, considering the myriad other ways this thing could have turned out. I think you're not giving them enough credit -- NASA was blowing up rockets pretty regularly in the early days of theie space efforts before they got the hang of it. These folks seem to be doing all right.

Re:

[savuporo (658486)]

No, its plain old engineering. There is hardly any science in building a two-stage liquid rocket in 2007. They arent doing something that isnt done before. What _is_ novel here is that for the first time, an orbital space launcher is built primarily with the profit motive in mind. No other company has really attempted that before ( or they have, but never gotten so close to pulling it off ). Thus also different design choices, different incentives and ultimately a price tag couple of times lower than your

Re:Rocket Science?

[Rei (128717)]

It's not really the fact that it's not from one of the bloated aerospace giants that makes this cheap (although I'm sure it doesn't hurt). It's also not true that they're not doing something that hasn't been done before. For example, I'm having trouble thinking of any rockets that use their particular mix of pressure and structural stabilization. For example, some Atlas stages use "balloon tanks" that will outright collapse under their weight if not kept pressurized. Most other rockets are structurally stable that, were it not for the lack of propellants, they could launch without being pressurized and remain intact. Pressurization is just added support. The Falcon concept is a hybrid of this: it has enough support that it can be transported and erected unpressurized... barely. This makes transport and handling costs cheaper and less error prone than for balloon tank-based rockets, but gives a higher payload fraction than rockets which have better structural support.

It's not without it's risks, of course. For example, it made the Falcon vulnerable to an accident a while back on Kwaj in which a reduction of pressure when draining a tank caused the tank to buckle. But in general, I think it makes for a nice design.

Falcon really is, for the most part, a "from scratch" rocket, so there's a lot of new ground covered. Not everything is from scratch, of course; I seem to recall, as an example, that their pintle injectors for the Merlin were pretty much borrowed as-is from Apollo. They're also not having to do much materials science, although they helping pioneering some fields (for example, friction-stir welding; a few older rockets have switched to using it as well, but it's still pretty new to rocketry).

Re:What was it carrying?

[decaym (12155)]

It was carrying a demo sat, which is just a simlulator for an actual sattelite. There was no paid cargo on this flight. They did have a couple of small test packages from NASA for relaying flight data through the NASA tracking network and testing in flight destruct commanding (not to an actual destruction package I believe). Nothing was going to be in permanent orbit and the Falcon 1 i snot intended to go to the space station.

Re:

[Glock27 (446276)]

I started writing a reasoned explication of the pointlessness and irrelevance of this whole story, but I made myself too angry with the uncritical "private space colonisation" fanboy mentality that says we'll all be living on Starship Enterprise in a century's time. To those people (probably everyone on this thread) I say this: turn off the damn Star Trek DVDs and get a life. Colonising space is an infantile fantasy.

Full of sophomoric cynicism today are you?

You sound a lot like the folks back when who s