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SpaceX Launch Fails To Reach Space
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Aug 03, 2008 08:05 AM
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.
azuredrake and many other readers have written to tell us:
"The New York Times reports that the third SpaceX launch has failed following the second-stage ignition of the Falcon 1 rocket. The SpaceX launch had three satellites on board, all of which were presumably destroyed in the incident. This marks the third failed launch for SpaceX — twice they failed to reach orbit, and once the Falcon 1 rocket was lost five minutes after launch. While the company vows to carry on, this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry."
Reader Nano2Sol points out a video of the launch from a camera on Falcon 1, and notes a small oscillation just prior to the footage being cut off. Spaceflight Now ran a mission update blog leading up to the failure, and they also have more coverage on the loss of the rocket.
Related Stories
[+]
Scotty's Final Mission 221 comments
Jane Q. Public writes "According to Ars Technica, the ashes of James Doohan, who played "Scotty" in the original 'Star Trek' series and several movies, were aboard the SpaceX III launch and were lost when the launch vehicle failed." Which totally wouldn't have happened if Scotty was the engineer.
Update: 08/05 00:09 GMT by KD : BoingBoing has a tribute to Doohan from his son.
Update: 08/05 00:09 GMT by KD : BoingBoing has a tribute to Doohan from his son.
[+]
SpaceX's Fourth Launch Attempt RSN 71 comments
jcgam69 writes "SpaceX's Falcon 1 is on the pad in the South Pacific Kwajalein Atoll ready for its fourth launch attempt, according to a blog post over the weekend from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The countdown is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 23, between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. PDT, though the launch window will extend through Thursday if need be."
[+]
On Fourth Launch Attempt, SpaceX Falcon 1 Reaches Orbit 518 comments
xp65 writes with the just-announced success of Elon Musk's SpaceX's long efforts to reach orbit with a privately-developed launching craft: "T+0:08:21 Falcon 1 reached orbital velocity, 5200 m/s Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) — Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!"
dbullard adds "This was a completely new vehicle — it's not using any previously developed hardware. All developed from scratch. No government supplied hardware, Russian engines, or old ICBM motors. My hat's off to the employees of Space X — all 550 of them. (Note — no 'cast of thousands,' just 550).
They've got video of the entire launch."
[+]
SpaceX Successfully Tests Nine-Engine Cluster 182 comments
the_other_chewey writes "At their test facility in Texas, SpaceX, the privately funded space-flight company, have successfully tested their nine-engine cluster which is planned to provide the heavy lifting capability for their Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy rockets.
The firing lasted three minutes (a full 'mission duty cycle,' i.e. a simulated launch) under full power, delivering 3.8MN (or 855,000 lbs.) of thrust. SpaceX have made a video of the test available. The Waco Tribune has a short report about it, with comments by locals."
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One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Insightful)
...and a whole industry is pronounced dead. Can you be more dramatic?
Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you could consider them to be the most successful in their industry.
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you can clue me in as to what the specific need is for this rocket to begin with. I guess NASA doesn't have a suitable one
You guess wrong. NASA has plenty of "suitability" with the Delta rocket. This program is an attempt to get the job done cheaper.
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Informative)
"While the company vows to carry on, this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry."
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*yawn*
If Fiat fails, will we call into question the entire automobile industry? There are many companies working on private space flight. Elon Musk's company is only one of them. And given that Musk seems to be VERY well capitalized, I don't see them taking their ball and going home any time soon. Burt Rutan had a pretty spectacular explosion in their engine development process last year that resulted in a few fatalities, but I don't expect them to roll over and play dead either. I'm sure there will be even more failures peppering the process as time goes on...just like in every other industry.
Too bad about the lost satellites.
Cheers,
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
given that Musk seems to be VERY well capitalized, I don't see them taking their ball and going home any time soon.
Elon musk had previously said that they would pack it in if they had three launch failures. He now says that "I consider DemoFlight 2 to be enough of a success, given that it provides us the data to go operational, to put my "three strikes" rule to bed. I'm in this to make SpaceX the world's leading launch provider and then some."
So while they aren't giving up, it isn't inconceivable that they would.
Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Informative)
So while they aren't giving up, it isn't inconceivable that they would.
Felt the need to point out that at least Elon disagrees. Check out the end of his latest message from their website, emphasis mine.
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:4, Funny)
No, you fix it again, Tony.
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone given any thought to the fact that it really isn't easy to do this?
Lots of us. The comment section on Slashdot is not entirely representative of the world at large.
In almost every story about the privatization of space flight here, I find myself defending NASA despite their (few) accidents and supposed lax culture when it comes to safety. The fact remains, their success rate is extremely high. When they've been forced to cut costs and/or rush launches is when they've had problems. And that's exactly what the private industry is attempting to do now.
I think the lesson here is that space flight is difficult, it is dangerous and it is expensive. There are no shortcuts - not if you want a success rate anywhere close to 100%, anyway. And with the amount it costs to build and insure the average payload, anything less than near 100% is not going to be acceptable to most potential customers.
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Re:One company doesn't succeed at once (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA's success rate is extremely high? They've lost about 1 out of every 70 Shuttle launches, and that's manned spaceflight, with people getting killed when they fail. I haven't checked it, but presumably their unmanned launchers have a considerably worse record simply because unmanned launchers always have a considerably worse record.
There's a reason why "rocket science" is used as a euphamism for "something extremely difficult". Three launch failures of a brand spanking new rocket is nothing unusual in this field. NASA has certainly not done any better with theirs. To the extent that they do better now, it's because they're using proven designs, with the major early failures well in the past.
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More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Musk's Giant Firework Company seriously believe they can have Falcon 9 up and running in a few months, and have people inside it 'soon' afterwards [bbc.co.uk].
I've said it before and this seems to confirm it - entrepreneurs aren't good at rocket science. They look at government funded space programs, and see the redundancy as waste and the precision as bureaucracy. Then when they try and do space cheaper without these things, there are predictably explosions.
Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
A large portion of NASA's overhead does not come from axillary systems, it comes from managers and politicians.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the three launches have all failed for different reasons, and seemingly reasons not indicating design flaws but rather mundane problems and errors that weren't caught (a rusty bolt, separation failure of the stages, etc.,) it makes me wonder if this is not rather an exposure of a flaw in the business model. Essentially they are all quality-control issues. Could it be that you simply need to have a largish organization to provide the checks and redundancy to catch the flaws that are always going to crop up in a complex system?
Is this a failure not of the booster, but of a barebones, "cheaper" organizational structure that's just not up to the task?
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Quality is essential in any complex machine. Suppose the shuttle has 1 million critical points of failure. If each of them is 99.999% reliable then the chances of a successful launch is 0.99999^1000000 or 0.0045%. If you want to get off the ground you need to either reduce the number of points of failure (add redundancy or simplify the design), or increase the reliability of the parts (aka quality control).
If you want your bolts to have a tolerance of 1 um then you need a lathe that is calibrated umpteen times per day. Those bolts get individually packed in cotton and the box it is carried in gets followed by a procession of monks. The wrench used to tighten the bolt is also crafted with similar care, and operated by a $30M robot and not a human. When so much can go wrong the only way to prevent problems is to take extraordinary care with every step of the process. That costs a lot of money.
Software is the same way - everything is engineered with specs and written in something like ADA with extremely paranoid compile-time checks. Every function is tested on every boundary condition, every function call is carefully traced to ensure that the parameters will be in-range, etc.
And even so they occasionally lose a launch vehicle - even the best designs. What can you say - it isn't a cheap business to be in. That doesn't rule out private investment, but it does rule out cheap investment. I think that the only way it could be done privately would be if a company had a guarantee of profit in the event they got off the ground - the initial costs are just so high nobody would spend them if NASA might just decide to stick with their own rockets.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, it is called rocket science for a reason? Hypothesize, test, analyze results, repeat as required, right?
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost of the fuel on a spacecraft is so minor that in most cases it is covered as a part of the "overhead" of the rocket instead of even being considered as a significant cost center for rocketry development. Something like about 1% of the cost of actually sending something up. Even if you triple the cost of kerosene, it will be something still so minor that it is hardly something to even bring up to the customer.
The expense of rocket design has do to with the engineers and exotic metals, as well as production workers who have specialized skill like aviation-grade aluminum welding experience. Paying somebody to do that sort of work doesn't come cheap.
Keep in mind the engineering adage that you can have things built:
1) sooner (or faster)
2) cheaper
3) reliably
Choose only two of the above options!
A great many consumer electronics tend to select options 1 & 2. Most of the major military contracts concentrated on options 1 & 3, with the idea that cost really isn't a huge concern for a government like the USA. It is far more important that we have an ICBM that can get up *NOW* instead of sometime next year. The Apollo program especially was one that was "screw the cost, let's just get it done now!"
SpaceX really is trying to see if they can build a rocket that may take a bit more time to develop, but can be done far cheaper and still maintain reliability. What I hope doesn't happen is that SpaceX engineers and technicians don't get under the pressure to get things done right now as well, in which case you simply end up with an expensive, delayed, and unreliable device. If you try all three approaches at once, you end up eating engineers and throwing lives away in one form or another.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it is a shame (and probably a liable thing) that satellites are destroyed during this phase
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Knowledge and know-how don't come cheap in the rocket business.
Which raises the question of whether or not a private organization can afford the learning curve.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
With other factors being entirely different, it does not follow logically that you can just isolate one factor (funds being paid to politicians and managers vs. no such funds) and conclude that is the cause of SpaceX's troubles.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Informative)
There was one failure in the Apollo program before XI: Appolo I with an electrical fire on board during a test, that killed all 3 astronauts. After that VII, VIII, IX and X were incident free, as well as XI and XII. XIII had a major problem but made it back home. Until XVII and the cancellation of the program there was no more incident.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there were multiple serious incidents... For example: Apollo 14 couldn't dock with the LM while extracting it from the S-IVB stage - so they (literally) rammed the CSM into the LM, exceeding the allowed force to force docking. During the landing, the LM lost the landing radar, rather than aborting the pilot continued the landing. While Apollo 16 was in orbit around the moon, and prior to separating the LM, it was discovered the wiring harness for the CSM propulsion system was seriously damaged. Mission rules required an abort of the landing and a return to Earth (so that the LM propulsion would be available as a backup) - but they waived that rule and proceeded with the mission anyhow. (Not to mention that the accident on 13 wouldn't have happened if they had investigated the faulty LOX tank rather than improvising an emptying procedure and using the equipment outside of it's design specs.)
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonder how many failed test launches the programs that led up to the Titan, Atlas and Apollo rockets had though, before the products was "finalized".
I grew up more or less in the shadow of the launch pads at Canaveral, back in the 50's, and can attest that there were a tremendous number of failures back in those days.
In particular, the Navajo, Atlas, and Polaris programs produced one stupefying fireball after another. And all of the other programs at the time had more than their share of flaming wreckage falling out of the sky.
To this day, when I watch fireworks, it doesn't really do all that much for me. It just doesn't compare.
And, as a small child at the time, I had no feelings of loss or remorse when any of these (thankfully unmanned) launch vehicles met their premature demise in the skies above the Atlantic Ocean, but instead loved every minute of it. Helluva damn show!
They finally got the hang of it (for the most part, anyway), and things quit blowing up on such a regular basis, but for a while there it was really quite spectacular.
SpaceX has their work cut out for them. In spades.
I wish them nothing but the very best of luck.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly right, private citizens have no right or business being in space.
If it weren't for this "bureaucracy" (NASA's incredible precision, redundancy, and lack of explosions), where would Roger Chaffee, Virgil Grissom, Edward White, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Rick Husband, William McCool, and Ilan Ramon be today?
Luckily, the former Soviet Union also has a perfect record that started at Nedelin where only 126 people died when a rocket exploded.
China and Bill Clinton also had a problem with an Intelsat 708 where it crashed into a village, but we should just stick with the facts and blame entrepreneurs.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly right, private citizens have no right or business being in space.
You're reacting to a point the parent never made. He simply pointed out the hubris that has been so characteristic of the space privatization movement of late. Space flight is hard and requires a huge investment of money, time and talent, whether done by governments or private entities. The "free market" - whatever that is - does nothing to obviate the need for extensive testing, exhaustive engineering, and redundancy that is necessary to achieve consistent success.
I hear people on this forum and elsewhere talking about space hotels and the like in just a few years through private enterprise, and they seem like naive children to me.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Informative)
Not for a from-scratch rocket, it isn't. Atlas, which was to become our workhorse, had an atrocious start. 3 MX-774 failures, then two XSM-65A failure. The third flew to its desired range, but that was only a mere 1,100km. 5 out of the 8 XSM-65s were failures. Then they had 10 launches of Atlas B with 3 failures, 6 launches of XSM-65C with 2 failures, The Atlas D had 135 launches with 32 failures. The Atlas E had 48 launches with 15 failures. Atlas Able had 4 launches, 4 failures. The Atlas F had 70 launches and 17 failures. I could keep on going. The overwhelming majority of these failures were early on in the program, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Yes, SpaceX has the benefit of looking back at what worked and what didn't. But they don't have the benefit of adopting already-tested technology, for the most part. And, to make it worse, they have to pull everything off in what's almost a mass-production environment.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense.
I respect your right to your view, but that's kind of a crazy position to take. There's nothing intrinsically good at rocket science that government has to offer, and there is nothing to support saying that entrepreneurs as a group are all not good at it. "Good at rocket science" comes from the individual experts doing the work. The organization supporting them, be it government, private industry, or druid commune will be successful or not based on the ability to learn from failures and move for
Ambition... and experience [Re:More ambition t...] (Score:3, Insightful)
I've said it before and this seems to confirm it - entrepreneurs aren't good at rocket science. They look at government funded space programs, and see the redundancy as waste and the precision as bureaucracy. Then when they try and do space cheaper without these things, there are predictably explosions.
You learn by doing, and that includes learning by failing. Space-X is learning a lot.
Basically, when you try to revolutionize an industry, you have to accept some risk, and that means risk of failures along the way.
I'm still cheering them on. Space-X has changed from a group of charmingly enthusiastic but naive innocents into a team of battle-scarred rocket veterans, and done it the hard way. The space entrepreneuring field has far too many naive innocents that promote paper spaceships, and far too f
Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Informative)
Only one NASA rocket carrying humans ever blew up, and that was in 1986, killing seven. They lost three to a fire on the pad in 1967, and in 2003 seven more were lost when their vehicle broke apart on re-entry.
The Soviets have had rockets explode on the pad killing many ground crew, but they've only ever lost four cosmonauts - IIRC, all to re-entry problems.
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Re:More ambition than sense (Score:5, Interesting)
SpaceX are infinitely more likely to reach orbit than Scaled Composites.
HEY!!! You are dissing one of my heroes!
In all seriousness, I would be very curious to find out why you think so. I would expect the opposite, in fact. Burt Rutan is very definitely an engineer with decades of aerospace experience under his belt. Elon Musk is neither an engineer nor experienced, at least in aerospace. Reading a recent article on the development of the Tesla Roadster, I found myself shaking my head at some of the design constraints Musk demanded. If he runs SpaceX the same way the article alleged Musk ran Tesla, I am not surprised they are having difficulties.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While Rutan knows how to build aircraft and rockplanes he has absolutely no experience in building rockets.
The GP's point is that Rutan is an engineer. When they came up with the X Prize, he looked at the most effective way to solve the problem, and then did so. While other people were fooling around with overdesigned launch systems, he realized that a short suborbital hop was well within the capabilities of a glorified glider with a rocket booster stuck to the back.
Rutan's already said that he plans to go orbital with SpaceShip Three, assuming the line of SpaceShip Two's is a commercial success. He's also sa
Scotty's final trip (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scotty's final trip (Score:5, Funny)
"This article contains information regarding a deceased person who has recently been involved in a launch failure."
That's a new one....
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Question likelihood of privatization? (Score:5, Insightful)
this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry.
The government failed quite a few times before they got anything up. Let's not write off private space travel because of three failures.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Starting from scratch?
Yes. Starting from scratch. There's a big difference between "papers and studies" and bending metal. The Dreamliner comparison is spurious since it is a highly developed airplane by a very experienced builder of commercial airplanes. I do agree that three launch failures probably means there are serious problems somewhere. But as noted in this thread, SpaceX is trying a new design that has yet to successfully launch. Failure is likely under those circumstances.
It Happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I'm a child of the 60s. I watched every launch, and attempted launch, that I could. I can't tell you the number of times that NASA blew things up in those early days. Had they quit after only three failures, the world would be a very, very different place today.
Keep launching SpaceX! You'll succeed and the world will change again...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I'm a "child" of the 50s, and, yes, I can vaguely remember that sputnik was a real concern because there was failure after failure on the American side. If everything government does these days is evil by definition (and often practice) so we can't continue space exploration collectively, then private enterprise hopefully has a few people with a vague sense of history who will remind them that there are going to be some really deep-pocket expenses up front on space exploitation.
Still, the launch was an awesome surprise. (Score:4, Interesting)
IT raises questions about SpaceX alone... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. It raises questions about SpaceX and their ability to produce a launch vehicle with an acceptable flight record. It raises questions about private willingness to accept failure on a design they think is fundamentally sound. It doesn't raise any more questions about the "future" of private spaceflight than when an Pegasus blows up or when SeaLaunch has a failure. The ENTIRE spaceflight communit owes a debt to and exists on a continuum of government influence. That doesn't make government the only entity that can test those waters. It just means that in the 20th century spaceflight was subsidized heavily, by and large. Since the entire industry was basically created by government action and most products either had only a government use or were dual use, even corporations who were ostensibly private relied on these pioneering steps made by governments. Even with that in mind, plenty of companies out there operate without government subsidy--and if you consider a government contract earned (and not a subsidy....but I don't), many do so. There are THOUSANDS of companies supporting private aerospace and private spaceflight, just not exclusively.
We need to get out of the mindset of "only government can do X". Sometimes that is true. Sometimes governments are the only ones who can provide certain services (or more accurately, they are the only ones willing to). But in the case of spaceflight, this is not always true. In the 1960's, only government was willing to go to space because the cost was large and the payoff in dollar terms was small (and highly uncertain). By the 1970's cable companies and phone companies were paying to go into space. IF the space race had never happened, we would probably have built launch vehicles to enter low earth orbit anyway. It would have come later (maybe much later), but it would have happened.
Failures don't represent a fundamental flaw in an industry. SpaceX had insurance, so this failure is not financially fatal for them--insurance is a good counter to the argument of "too much risk" in private spaceflight. If they fail, someone else will take up the mantle.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"SpaceX had insurance, so this failure is not financially fatal for them--insurance is a good counter to the argument of "too much risk" in private spaceflight."
Funny how you talk about the government being the only ones willing to do something when everyone else is unwilling because of the high cost vs low rewards then come out with this gem of thought: "It's ok, because the rocket and it's payload of multimillion dollar satellites were insured, MetSpace will just cover that with a minor increase monthly premiums."
Insurance companies are not in the business of paying out money, they are in the business of getting something for nothing. Seeing that SpaceX already
Fools Commentary (Score:5, Insightful)
"While the company vows to carry on, this certainly raises some questions about the likelihood of successful privatization of the Space industry."
I cannot imagine that there exists on this world one person knowledgable in the field that would not have been hellishly impressed if SpaceX HAD succeded on their third try.
Actually BEING knowledgable in the field I can state with some authority that the poster is not.
Name one new launch vehicle that was succesful on its third launch. No derivatives allowed. And this isn't just a new vehicle, but a new everything. The whole stack, all newly designed.
It took over two years to determine the correct process to START the space shuttle main engines. To START them. The engine was already designed and built.
While unfortunate, this launch failure only proves that point which is already well known: engineering launch vehicles is damned hard.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As in, "I don't care"
Re:Why We Shouldn't Run Government Like a Business (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you know how many dead monkeys there are in space?
A lot. [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Why We Shouldn't Run Government Like a Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Project Mercury: six manned launches, all successful. total men in orbit: four. (that's fewer than the Shuttle carries on one flight, by the by.
Project Gemini: ten manned launches, all successful. total men in orbit: sixteen different men - four went up twice.
Shuttle: 123 flights so far, two unsuccesful. total men in orbit: about 800 (I don't feel like checking each flight for actual crew count, so it's only "about")
For the Soyuz fans out there: 99 flights, four unsuccessful (defining unsuccessful as either not reaching orbit or crew dying on reentry) OR ten unsuccessful (defining unsuccessful as ay of the above or failing to complete design mission (usually a failure to dock with Salyut when that was intended mission)), total men in orbit: about 245 (some were launched on one flight, landed on another - I may have miscounted some in sorting those out).
Note that Shuttle had 14 dead in its 123 flights (about 1.6%), Soyuz had four dead on its 99 flights (about 0.8%), but on a per flight basis, Shuttle had a failure rate of about 1.6%, Soyuz about 4% (or 10%), depending on definition of "failure". Neither Gemini nor Mercury suffered any failures (by either definition) but between them they put about 2% of the men into orbit that Soyuz and Shuttle combined did.
Note further that Shuttle put into orbit more men than all other space programs combined. By a factor of three.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That might be the reason that the government attempts succeed where private ones fail.
But reasons why something is true aren't proof that it's false.
You just proved that the government is better at some big things than private corps are.
And since just spending $billions on complex projects isn't any way to do anything but a lot of expensive work, there's clearly more to success than just a big budget. Even the government knows that.
Re:looking for actual followup coverage (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the "anomaly" thing, the rocket didn't blow up, they hit the big red panic button to blow it up rather than have one large toxic rocket possibly land on something important (although one of the main reasons the Kwajalein Atoll is used, is because there's not much out there, that and the physics advantages of being near the equator).
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