NASA Morpheus Lander Test Ends In Explosion

First time accepted submitter DishpanMan writes "For every success story from NASA like Curiosity, there is a failure story, like today's Morpheus project test flight at Kennedy Space Center. The project is trying to build a low cost Moon and Asteroid lander using clean fuels on a shoestring budget. While tethered flight test were successful, today's actual flight test ended in a crash and a ball of fire followed by a spectacular explosion. Initial feedback points to hardware failure, but the investigation is still ongoing."

Crash, ball of fire, *spectacular* explosion ...

[hey!]

I'm still waiting for the "failure" part.

I hate to say this...

[PseudoCoder]

But that's one yummy helping of spectacular engineering fail. And this coming from a guy who saw his rocket execute an un-prescribed loop-da-loop right out of the launcher, so I know the bitter taste of test failure on tape first hand. Not the same amount of money was involved in my case, though. Looks like this control system was determined to diverge as soon the legs stopped making contact. Tether saved us from a few failures in my day, but based on the history looks like they had done enough tethered testing and were ready to go free. Feel sorry for the team who had to get data the hard way. Hope you had telemetry, because there's nothing left to diagnose or debug.