Glory Satellite Lost To Taurus XL Failure 246
FullBandwidth writes "The protective nose cone of an Orbital Sciences Corporation Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA's Glory environmental research satellite apparently failed to separate after launch Friday, preventing the spacecraft from achieving orbit in a $424 million failure. It was the second nose cone failure in a row for a Taurus XL rocket following the 2009 loss of another environmental satellite."
$4 for every US Household (Score:2)
Damn.
Skip eating lunch today, and "make up" for the loss.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I've got a better idea. Let's ask the top 1% not to open the second bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild at dinner for a week and pay for the space program for a year.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$4 for every US Household (Score:4, Interesting)
I prefer the bottom 99% show up at the 1%'s homes with torches and pichforks and solve the whole problem in a night.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh man, I better go long in pitchfork and torch futures ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ebay duh!
Re: (Score:2)
You only need one or the other. It's hard to used both at the same time, although I have seen combination torch/pitchforks. The problem with those is, if you ever need to use the pitchfork function, one of your hands is grasping the business end of the torch mechanism.
But this is slashdot, we don't need to use 14th century weaponry. Grab your bat'leth and your 9 LED head lamp and let's go!
Re: (Score:3)
So raising their taxes by another 2% will solve all the problems.
Thanks for volunteering that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That 1% pays more taxes than the bottom 95%.
And they hold more of the country's wealth than the bottom 98%, which, in my book makes them undertaxed.
Re: (Score:3)
He really does not know what he is talking about.... but I do.
I'll post the info for him...
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph [motherjones.com]
the inequality is so huge that it's utterly disgusting when I hear even 1 of them whine about taxes. we can DOUBLE their taxes and they will not notice.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:$4 for every US Household (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got a better idea. Let's ask the top 1% not to open the second bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild at dinner for a week and pay for the space program for a year.
How about you put your money where your mouth rather than Other Peoples' Money? If you aren't willing to kick in, then I can't be bothered to get the 1% to kick in either.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Second, why in the world is paying the same percentage the "fair" thing? Why not the same dollar amount? At best a percentage-based system is just a vague - a really vague - approximation of whatever kind of fairness principle you have going. You probably don't even have an identifiable principle on which you are basing it.
The principle is that income is at least proportional to the benefit gained from government.
Re: (Score:2)
And the assumption behind is that every benefit is gained from government existing.
Re: (Score:3)
So, unlike every other service, we pay for government based on benefit and not cost?
In short, yes.
This is one of the problems with government services and taxes. There is no market where people voluntarily choose to buy the service at the given price voluntarily offered.
Re: (Score:2)
When it comes to federal expenditures, like this one, how are the rich getting more benefit from NASA, or the launching of an environmental satellite, than the rest of us?
They own the companies the build the satellites, launch vehicles, the parts that go into either, the ground station equipment, the dish antennas and provide the fuels for the launch vehicle. And on top of it, they own the large corporate farms and logging/paper companies that stand to benefit most from the information provided by these satellites. It would be hard to come up with any specific benefit the poor get apart from potentially more stable food prices.
Re:$4 for every US Household (Score:4, Informative)
Sure they do. They use the courts more, they use infrastructure more, they benefit from increased access. They get more benefit from the Dept of Education because they hire people who have learned to read and write. They benefit from the Dept of Agriculture because thanks to the food stamp program there are not starving people overrunning their property and killing and eating their thoroughbred horses.
Remember, there isn't anyone in the United States who has gained wealth on the basis of their hard work and ingenuity alone. Not one. Their use of "the commons" and their benefit from "the commons" goes up along with their wealth.
Re: (Score:3)
Second, why in the world is paying the same percentage the "fair" thing? Why not the same dollar amount? At best a percentage-based system is just a vague - a really vague - approximation of whatever kind of fairness principle you have going. You probably don't even have an identifiable principle on which you are basing it.
For the same reason a sales tax is percentage-based - it keeps the tax relative to the value. And it dates back to the classic church tithe (as in "give the church a tenth of what you make").
I would be thrilled to see a proper flat percentage, with the barest minimum of deductions for the poorest.
Re: (Score:2)
You are missing the point that Buffet does not pay payroll taxes on anything above the income cap, and doesn't pay any payroll taxes on capital gains. That's an addition 9% or so that his secretary pays that he does not.
Second, why in the world is paying the same percentage the "fair" thing? Why not the same dollar amount?
Wow, your education was severely lacking. The rich get the most benefits from a stable society. The poor get very little from it. And apparently you can't see that taxing the poor at an amount greater than their annual income would both be unfair, and would quickly lead to a very unstabl
Re:$4 for every US Household (Score:4, Informative)
The middle class pays more by percentage of their income than the upper class (even if it's not more total). The middle class also lives much closer to the line of having to cut out various expenses if income changes, as compared to the rich. We already are putting our money where our mouths are [washingtonpost.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Don't be silly. Sacrifice is for OTHER people.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.
These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural thi
Re:$4 for every US Household (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.
These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural third world classroom built in his honor ($125)? Maybe instead of that iPad for that special someone, you could pay for the education of five girls at $100 apiece; provide a dozen vaccinations to children at $45; or teach ten women to read at $50 apiece. You can reintegrate eight child soldiers to their community through education and apprenticeship programs for only $58 each.
I was excited about that website until I read the fine print:
Meh. It's general-purpose charity with a fashionable front-end.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, Captain Working Class: instead of buying that second six pack of PBR, why not feed an impoverished family in Liberia for a week?
What makes you think we don't? I spend a lot of money things that the government should be doing, but doesn't because the right wing thinks poverty is a character flaw not a societal defect exacerbated by an economic policy that places the needs of the wealthy above all else.
Re: (Score:3)
Every single one of those studies used charitable deductions on income tax returns as their raw data. There's another one that has the same results that is often trumpted by right-wing trolls that uses self-reporting for data.
I don't know about you, but I believe if you try to recover your donation via deductions against taxable inco
Re: (Score:3)
Of course this is a monetary loss, something worth half a billion dollars was destroyed. The half billion was spent to create something of value, had it been spent on something else that was not lost, we would have spent the money and had something of value to show for it.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course this is a monetary loss, something worth half a billion dollars was destroyed. The half billion was spent to create something of value, had it been spent on something else that was not lost, we would have spent the money and had something of value to show for it.
The thing of value was the knowledge we would have gained from the satellite. The post above you was dead on correct.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing of value was the knowledge we would have gained from the satellite. The post above you was dead on correct.
This should be pretty obvious. I mean, does anybody honestly think the components in the satellite are worth half a billion dollars? The vast majority of that money went to paying the people that developed it over the past several years.
Time for a launch loop (Score:3)
Enough with malfunctioning rockets.
How many payloads have gone to waste because of rocket failures, and at what cost? Enough to explore the idea of a sort of launch loop [wikimedia.org]?
Re:Time for a launch loop (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope.
Don't get me wrong, I would love easy access to space, but there are enormous up-front costs to constructing a mega launch service, like a launch loop or an elevator, not to mention significant technical risks, very few of which are in the process of being retired.
Rockets are a tried, tested, and true method of getting to space. They have put up many times the value of spacecraft as they have lost, not to mention a growing number of human payloads. They are also getting cheaper, with public ventures like SpaceX. I think it's going to be a good long while before you see someone investing heavily in alternative launch methods.
Aikon-
Re: (Score:2)
Why not develope a cure and save them all? Why not develop a more efficient gateway to space and save the $424 million next time?
enormous up-front costs ... significant technical risks
Re: (Score:3)
Atleast this way its slightly distributed, and the aerospace community learns something. Consider how much fuel is spent, per day, fighting two wars. How much it costs to build a fence acrosss the border (which is the same security they use t
Re: (Score:2)
Treating cancer is also a tried, tested and true method of saving *some* people. Why not develope a cure and save them all?
If there was a potential avenue for a cure, but there were a lot of issues left with it that you didn't know how to solve, and the cost of researching it was prohibitively expensive, would you stop all current cancer treatment to pay for it and let all of those people die in the pursuit of this potential payout sometime in the future?
People are working on the technologies that will enable mega launch systems, like room-temperature superconductors and carbon nanotubes, but we're just not at the point where i
Re:Time for a launch loop (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we're a long way from any 2000km-long megastructure being a viable solution to the problem. There's a lot of good ground between rockets and sci-fi megatech that should be explored first.
Like what? (Score:2, Interesting)
No offense, I'm seriously curious.
What is the middle ground between rockets and sci-fi megatech?
1. Rockets ...?
2.
3. Launch-loops / space elevators / etc.
Re: (Score:2)
You left out the 'profit' step. Without that, nothing will get done.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking something along the lines of launching to LEO from the back of hypervelocity suborbital cargo aircraft, like that X-Prize competitor but on a bigger scale. We're still talking old-fashioned chemical propulsion, of course, and there will have to be a chemical->physical switchover in launch systems eventually.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1) Expendable vehicles. Use once and throw away. Best choice when you only launch a few times a year. Minimal infrastructure.
2) Reusuable vehicles. These range from simple reuse of parts of an expendable rocket (for example, SpaceX wants to recover the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket) to wholly reusable designs like air-breathing space planes with scramjets. Due to their design, they tend to be a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Time for a launch loop (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Really? If you are right, then so is he. At 18.5 cm, you can start meshing the things...
Re: (Score:2)
Dude seriously, Carbon nanotube are very conductive and they also tend to spontaneous combustion when flashed with a light, now imagine one reaching from the Earth's equator to LEO during hurricane season; it's not rocket science here.
Re: (Score:2)
spontaneous combustion aside, conductive is a feature, not a bug...
Re: (Score:2)
spontaneous combustion aside, conductive is a feature, not a bug...
Not when it get hit with a bolt of lightening [wikipedia.org] I'm sure the 30,000 C generated in a lightening strike is enough to fry you carbon nanotubes.
Re: (Score:2)
Because we never make ships, planes, buildings out of conductive metals... You know, there are solutions, and no-one says the cable will not be isolated.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know. I don't follow the field, but not long ago, 1 cm was science fiction. So progress is made at an amazing rate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not to rain on the parade, but from where I'm sitting, I don't see the US building one of these this generation. One, you don't have remotely the political will to fund it. (I would put a Republican joke here, but I don't see the Democrats doing it either). Two, you don't have the money to do it anymore. Three, before you can start building that sort of stuff, you'd need to rebuild your manned launch capability, and you may have noticed that's not going particularly quickly.
My money's on China being the one
Re: (Score:2)
I would put a Republican joke here, but I don't see the Democrats doing it either.
I think you'd see a Republican support space initiatives because of the possible military spinoffs long before a "We've got to solve all our problems here on Earth first" Democrat.
I believe that once we've diverted all our money into feel-good social initiatives and stop pushing forward the boundaries of science, we're doomed. We may already be doomed, in fact. We're pretty far along that road with all of the current 'entitlem
Re:Time for a launch loop (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Enough to explore the idea of a sort of launch loop?
I'm curious to know where you are going to put this thing. Its not a case of NIMBY, but NIMC (Not in My Continent)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Well you engineers can't seem to get the process of nose cone separation right, let alone the rest of the rocket. How about let's not lose any more missions because a nose cone didn't come off. Redundant systems hello???? When the thing failed to come off, there should have been two more systems behind that ready to crack that nose cone off the rocket.
Or maybe engineers are just a bunch of monkeys jacking off after all.
Sincerely, REPUBLICANS who fucking hate smart people.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The real world can't do this, because some Republican who hates smart people moans about costs being too high.
When was the last time that anyone else lost a satellite due to failure to separate the fairing, let alone two in a row? I remember the Agena docking target on one of the Gemini missions in the 60s and one other failure in the last few years (which may have been the other Taurus launch mentiohed).
As rocket science goes it really seems to be a solved problem that's been done successfully thousands of times before.
Re: (Score:2)
iirc, the beagle explorer to mars failed to jetteson a heat shield. And that specific problem has happened at least once more at mars when a probe did a flyby but didn't get the shield ejected and just took pictures of the inside of the cover.
Surprisingly common problem. You'd think they would have gotten a bit more focused on it by now?
Re: (Score:2)
No, the question is how one company manage to have something fail twice in a row when other launchers seem to have been able to do it thousands of times with no major problems.
Weren't there some other problems before the launch too? I remember skimming through an article about problems with this launcher last night and thinking 'well, I wouldn't want my satellite on that one'.
Two environmental satellites lost in a row? (Score:5, Funny)
I bet Big Oil is behind this.
Re: (Score:2)
Get with the times - everything these days is the fault of the Koch brothers. The KOOooOOooOOCH Brothers!
Re: (Score:2)
Charlie Sheen's global warming aliens are behind it... or maybe it is just Charlie Sheen....
Big Oil, China and the Republican Party (Score:2)
Fix to overcome problem next time... (Score:3, Funny)
IANARS
Just make the fairing lighter and stick a bit more fuel in the rocket, problem getting to orbit solved! As for getting the satellite out, perhaps they could stick a baby chick in who can peck their way through the shell?
(Absolutely no idea why NASA didn't hire me, what with all my lack of qualifications and everything. I have loads of useful ideas ;)
Re:Fix to overcome problem next time... (Score:5, Funny)
(Absolutely no idea why NASA didn't hire me, what with all my lack of qualifications and everything. I have loads of useful ideas ;)
Don't put yourself down Senator.
seriously wtf? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yea, the whole batch of self-sealing stem bolts is probably bad.
but honestly where do the explosive bolts or the explosive inside the bolts come from?
"self-sealing stem bolts" is a Star Trek reference, I think. http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Self-sealing_stem_bolt [memory-alpha.org]
Satellite Launch Failures Happen All The Time (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't launch a satellite without insurance against that sort of thing.
The US government does. I'm pretty sure they don't insure any of their satellites, they just ask Congress to fund them to build another one.
And Delta and Atlas have a 95+% success rate.
Re: (Score:2)
And let's not forget pre-launch failures like this one [wikipedia.org].
(NOAA. Environmental craft seem to have the same sort of elevated failure rate as Mars missions. What is it that the martians do not want us to know about the environment?)
Re: (Score:2)
So easy, a rocket scientist can do it..... sometimes....
Re: (Score:2)
what company wouldn't want to insure a giant metal can full of rocket fuel with a multi-million dollar, fragile device on the end. I bet that little Gecko would all over it..
If I remember correctly, Lloyds do or did launch insurance, even if no-one else does; I'm sure I read a story about them celebrating when the space shuttle recovered a couple of satellites which failed to reach their intended orbit in the 90s.
Ultimately it shouldn't be much harder than any other field of insurance, except that launch rates are so low that you need to err on the side of caution when estimating the chance of a failure.
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose it's a matter of the cost to build Vs. the cost to insure and how big your cahonies are. I expect the insurance rate for Taurus launches are going up past break-even for a while.
Outsource? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Even if the launch itself were cheaper, you then have to look into getting the payload over to the launch location ... and that might not be a risk they're willing to take.
When there were massive flight delays for some of the groups that I've worked with, they've talked about trying to get into the queue at Vandenberg, rather than Canaveral, but that'd require either trucking it across country, or a flight. Even with launch delays at Canaveral, it was costing them more to hold it on the ground at Canaveral
Taurus? (Score:2)
Shoulda gotten a Saturn!
This just in (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Look ma, no hands! (Score:2)
When a Glory satellite crashes, does it make a Glory hole?
It would not surprise me (Score:3)
Three Amateur Radio sats also lost (Score:5, Informative)
Also lost in this launch were three Amateur Radio Satellites [southgatearc.org].
Oh well. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And they're about to lay of a lot of other peoples dads. Bad news here.
Re:Womp Womp (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know, Orbital's board of directors looks like a who's who of republican lobbyists and military contractor sweethearts.
A few lunch checks get picked up, a few golfing trips to Manele Bay and everybody's good. Oh, there will still be layoffs, but as Speaker John Boehner put it, "So be it."
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Conspiracy alert: They caused the nose cone problems to prevent those environmental satellites from confirming global warning!
:-P
Re: (Score:2)
that's oddly believable.
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately after this they will be laying off more dads.
Re: (Score:2)
That's an interesting thought, actually. I found this blog post [startswithabang.com] on the impact of Shuttle launches, at least. Turns out that you wouldn't want to be in the wake of one for reasons other than the obvious uncomfortable warmth and gustiness. In the grand scheme it's not a whole lot of pollution of course.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking roughly the same thing. "Satellite orbited to study the environment fucks up (in a very small way) same environment, and cannot do the study it was launched to perform. Twice."
Third time's the charm?
Funny you should mention that: NASA is already paying Orbital to build and launch OCO-2 in February 2013.
On a Taurus XL rocket.
Re: (Score:2)
Because otherwise they'd have to completely redesign OCO-2 to fit in another fairing, and it wouldn't launch in 2013 and it wouldn't be cheap. OCO-2 is basically OCO with minor changes, to keep the cost down and the launch in the near future. There's no way it would be launching in two years if it was a complete redesign for another launch vehicle.
FWIW, I've heard that Orbital did a redesign of the fairing after the last failure. They thought they had found the fault and fixed it, and had apparently gone
Re: (Score:3)
I think technically they blow.
Re: (Score:2)
They could also just ditch Orbital and go with SpaceX for all of COTS.
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of a Falcon with so few launches so far.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of a Falcon with so few launches so far.
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of any launch vehicle, a Falcon with so few successful launches so far or the Taurus with two failures in a row.
There fixed it for you.
Re: (Score:2)
They could also just ditch Orbital and go with SpaceX for all of COTS.
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of a Falcon with so few launches so far.
It's also important to note that Taurus is the rocket with two failures in a row (three of the last four failed, even). Taurus II, a new medium-lift rocket that Orbital has developed with a liquid fuel first stage, is going to be used for COTS. If they were smart they'd rename Taurus II right about now and move away from that name. Their other products are far more successful.