After Nearly a Decade in Development, Japan's New Rocket Fails in Debut (arstechnica.com) 32
The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning, local time in Tanegashima, failed after the vehicle's second-stage engine did not ignite. From a report: In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 am (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation." The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine.
The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost. Japanese officials expressed dissatisfaction after the rocket's failure. Japan's minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Science, Keiko Nagaoka, said the launch failure was "extremely regrettable." She added that a task force would work with JAXA to "promptly and thoroughly" determine what caused the failure.
The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost. Japanese officials expressed dissatisfaction after the rocket's failure. Japan's minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Science, Keiko Nagaoka, said the launch failure was "extremely regrettable." She added that a task force would work with JAXA to "promptly and thoroughly" determine what caused the failure.
Telemetry (Score:3)
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Ya, I''ll bet when you field a blob of software you spent 10 years on it works first time, and if it doesn't we can declare you have wasted 10 years.
Doesn't sound like the new rocket failed (Score:5, Insightful)
The new rocket worked, the old rocket that was the second stage failed. I am not a rocket scientist, but I suppose it could be a new system that failed to trigger that old rocket design.
Regardless, space is difficult and expensive, and such failures remain a significant statistical probability. The only shame in it is if you didn't plan for it, which I don't believe is the case here.
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Also, if this was a test, then it's expected that sometimes tests have failures.
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It was a translation error. They thought it was "move slow, break shit."
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I am not a rocket scientist, but I suppose it could be a new system that failed to trigger that old rocket design.
The ESA has a few things to say about mixing new with old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Everyone who's ever worked with older and entirely new code glued together based on someone's PowerPoint architecture slide has these issues.
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SpaceX has had some spectacular failures. One ship vaporized. They are likely going in for major lawsuits when the Texas valley residents start dying of cancer in droves
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In other words, SpaceX rockets going ***BOOOM*** aren't actually inserting new carcinogens into the atmosphere (hell, it's not like the Japanese rocket used anything more complicated than kerosene either)...
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They successfully proved the be expander bleed cycle engines. That's a big deal, because they offer some big advantages that should drive down costs a lot. The engines should require a lot less refurbishment before being reused.
Design flaw found (well there's your problem....) (Score:1)
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Except that the hydrogen first stage worked.
Yes, hydrogen is a very difficult fuel to manage. I wouldn't probably choose it for a new rocket. I would expect to have frequent launch delays due to fuel leaks (as demonstrated recently by the SLS). But it doesn't seem to be the problem on this launch.
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You really can't beat the very high specific impulse of liquid hydrogen and oxygen with any chemical rocket. The Wikipedia pages on rocket propellants are pretty clear about that, and even a small difference in specific impulse scales to a large difference in the fuel needed to achieve orbit.
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Hydrogen first stages are a prime example of optimizing for the wrong parameter. Sure, the Isp is great, but a larger stage running on RP-1 gets you the same amount of mass to orbit for less money and fewer development headaches.
Re: Design flaw found (well there's your problem.. (Score:3)
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For that matter Musk is demonstrating that an in-between solution is even better. Natural Gas, Methane, gets you a smaller rocket than RP-1, but the cryonics are around the same as with liquid oxygen, so you mostly expand those, the majority of the rocket is at around the same temperature as LOX, so you don't have crazy thermal differentials to worry about, like the LOX freezing(liquid H2 is cold enough to make O2 solid), or the hydrogen going gaseous too early. You can pump Methane and LOX close to each
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Yes, but the problem with Hydrogen is that it's not very dense so you need very large tanks to store enough to get to orbit, even with the ISP bonus. For example, the SLS carries 537k gallons of LH but only 196k gallons of LOX.
new Rocket Engine worked (Score:3)
Still a win though, they demonstrated that the new rocket engine works. The stage II engine that failed was an older model. They need to beef up their QA is what it sounds like.
Re:new Rocket Engine worked (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't this typical in the rocket biz? (Score:2)
Almost every major redesign or platform introduction seems to have early setbacks. Experience fixes them over time. It's an industry where practice, testing, and experience matter a lot.
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The news that only publishes negative events would be to blame I imagine. Then again, it makes sense that countries that develop these things would experience more failures than successes. If they are successful, then there's not much need for further tests after all.
Russia had a failed test when Biden was walking around in Ukraine the other day(much lol), and NK just isn't worth talking about at all.
Don't get it twisted (Score:2)
Pretty good track record (Score:2)
So up until now this is the first failure for Mitsubishi rockets in nearly 20 years. They have a had a pretty good track record up until now. As other's have said, the new rocket stage performed flawlessly. I'm confident they will find out what went wrong with the second stage, which was a previously-proven design.
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Please address this question to the US Congress and NASA re: SLS
DOM surgery (Score:2)
Why do rockets stump experts? It's not like it's CSS [ycombinator.com].
It was the metric to metric conversion! (Score:2)
OK, grasping at straws with that, but I've been reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes, and Dilbert, cartoons lately.