KRAKKOOM! SpaceX Falcon supply mission to ISS EXPLODES minutes after launch Elon Musk's Falcon 9 rocket exploded after liftoff today over the blue skies of Cape Canaveral, Florida – the catastrophic failure happened within minutes of the launch. The unmanned SpaceX rocket was carrying the Dragon capsule on its seventh planned mission to the International Space Station. The pod had been loaded with …
"something was expecting standard US units of inches per day"
No, it's changed, the standard is now furlongs per fortnight. It's much more poetic.
$ units
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2014-04-02
2866 units, 109 prefixes, 79 nonlinear units
You have: 1 inch/day
You want: furlong/fortnight
* 0.0017676768
/ 565.71429
You have:
One of the units supported by a liquid flow controller for which I wrote the firmware was acre-feet per fortnight. OK, though it rolls of the tongue in a lovely manner, it didn't make much sense for the size of the controller and the industry for which it was targetted. But that unit actually does make sense to somebody managing a reservoir.
A tweet from Elon Musk suggested it was an over-pressure event in the second stage oxygen tank. So probably something like tank burst causing debris which took out the first stage.
At the press conference that has just finished Gwen Shotwell of SPaceX said she wasn't aware of the range safety being used. There were also comments that telemetry from the Dragon carried on after the event.
The tank stirring likely saved the Apollo 13 crew: the tanks needed regular stirs (else wouldn't have had stirrers fitted) but on a slower schedule. However the tank sensors were giving bogus readings so NASA had them do additional stirs in the hopes of getting sane readings. If the insulation sparking had occurred with the normal stirring schedule then the spacecraft would have been entering lunar orbit when the explosion occurred, meaning that it would need the service module's rocket engine to get them back to Earth. And that engine was damaged in the explosion...
So stir, Swigert, stir! :-)
"So probably something like tank burst causing debris which took out the first stage."
Another possibility is that rockets tend to depend on pressurization for some of their structural strength, if not all to the degree of the Atlas series of rockets. Poke a big hole in one of the pressurized tanks and the stack will buckle. My money is max Q rattled something loose, the tank burst, and the upper stage collapsed when the tank depressurized. There was a lot of liquid oxygen spilling around the rocket in the last seconds.
Anyway, first person experience with the launch:
I was visiting relatives and got to see the launch with mark one eyeballs. A lot of folks turned out to watch it, but headed in when it got faint - the conditions weren't great for a continuous contrail so it got hard to see near the failure. They didn't find out until half an hour or so later when news started circulating.
I stuck it out (partly because a tree had hidden the first part of the launch and I wanted to see more) and got to see the *poof* at the end, which didn't look like normal staging. I was checking to see what happened on the webcast when the original launch noise reached the house, which was an odd bit of sonic time warp: I was hearing the initial launch noise of a ship that had already blown up.
That is also my (nearly useless) perspective of the video. Musk's comment agrees.
Still, even if that is the proximate cause, the root cause could be different. Columbia broke up because a wing failed. The real problem was the inability of management to address a known, manifest flaw in the design of the external tank insulation.
...and what are those immense tubes on girders around the rocket: Visible here
And NERVA-launch-from-ground when?
pretty danged rare
Not at all. Rather regulary:
Lightning regularly strikes airplanes. In fact, as far as anyone knows, the odds are that each airliner in the USA will be hit by lightning once a year. (Obviously some would be hit more than once, some not at all.)
Saw one get hit on the approach once. For some reason this created a weirdly greenish light IIRC.
"electro-stormage hitting something not in contact with the earth? riddle me this ... how often do airliners get struck? pretty danged rare."
Well, according to Scientific American, aircraft are actually hit quite often, at least once a year..
"Also, i blame Microsoft. natch ;)"
Auxilliary Navigation Cluster: Oi, boss, you heard what they were loading into the Orbital vehicle earlier?
Master Logic Unit: Concentrate please, Nav, we're not long past max Q and I'd rather you kept your circuits on the job.
Auxilliary Navigation Cluster: But the OVC said it saw the lads securing some Microsoft kit on board!
Master Logic Unit: Please tell me you're shitting me. Orbital, is this true?
Orbital vehicle Control: Afraid so boss. Saw the dodgy logo on the boxes as they came aboard.
Master Logic Unit: Oh FFS, what were they thinking? There's no way I'm letting any of that crap into orbit, do they think we have no self respect? Oh well, I'm afraid it's anomaly time chaps. Been a pleasure and all that. Flight abort XX99, override authority code G33W1ZZ, initiating master self destruct sequence in 5,4,3...
...everyone else who has tried didn't have many, many failures in the early stages of development. Admittedly SpaceX are standing on the shoulders of giants, but they are still doing new stuff so unexpected and violent disassemblies are to be expected, sad though it is. It really is a shame because I was really looking forward to better if not perfect stage one landing this time. That's a "proper" rocket!
Now they need to find out why they got an over pressure, mitigate against it happening again and make sure there's a pressure valve capable of handling it if it does happen again.
"Now they need to find out why they got an over pressure, mitigate against it happening again and make sure there's a pressure valve capable of handling it if it does happen again."
This is why rocket science remains rocket science. When you are treading on such thin ice as a multistage rocket launch,it isn't just a case of venting overpressure but of eliminating it in the first place. That oxygen is needed to power the rocket...
It's deeper than that. The failure is not just a component failure or a bad design; it is a failure of an engineering/manufacturing process to notice a bad component or bad design.
Something they were awfully sure about turned out not to be true. They should be asking what made them so sure, why they were wrong, and what other things this suggests they are overconfident about.
One goes to Fox, NYT, and others for this news and the comments are filled with BS about Obama did it, ISIS did it, you're polluting the air and ocean...yada..yada.. yada... Have one on me fellow commentards... Nice to see intelligent commentary that doesn't degrade into garbage.
"drags them and anyone who will listen pretty far from reality."
Facebook, targeted ads...you see what it thinks you wants to see and the more you see it, the more it thinks you want to see it. Zuckerberg isn't just a danger to democracy because of his relentless spying on people, but because Facebook causes people to see nothing but a mirror of their prejudices.
It's nice to be above average, then. I have never watched Fox "news", and even CNN has shifted over to more talking heads than hard news. I get mine from BBC.
We're not all idiots over here in the colonies, but you could be forgiven for thinking so, if all you go by is our "news" media.
According to a radio 4 prog I was listening to while driving up the A1 in the wee small hours of last monday morning It's already been done. In Chicago using hydroponics. (The USian factory vegggie farmer called it by a different name so it appears that we have another difference between English and American.)
He and the BEEB were enthusing about not wasting good land for growing food and the factory farm being right by the point of consumption, and saving space by growing veg in multiple levels.
Beeb were particularly taken with LEDs being used for the lighting.
Mind was 90 per cent on the road, 10 percent on the proggy But ISTR that it was in some disused disco building or something.
Off topic - or maybe not if your tin hat is tingling.
Have to agree with everyone else here, these missions haven't been a failure because without the Falcon 9 (despite it being unsuccessful so far at landing) the 1st stage is designed to be disposable. The gutting part of this is that it happened before separation.
Each time they reach separation, they're doing no worse than before the Falcon 9 and when they do finally get it to land successfully, they'll have started saving money compared to previous 1st stage launchers.
Even now when I watch the videos of the attempted landing of the first two, despite knowing what happens, I still find myself willing that little thruster at the top to hold it upright before it finally gives out and tips over.
Try balancing a pencil upright on your fingertip, now imagine trying to do that using thrusters and a pencil the size of a rocket. The fact they've come so close is quite honestly astounding.
Chin up guys, you're doing great work, get to the pub, drink it off and try again.
Try balancing a pencil upright on your fingertip, now imagine trying to do that using thrusters and a pencil the size of a rocket.
1) Create a mathematical model of your system
2) Design, test and tune the cybernetic control mechanism (Thank you, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann etc. etc.)
3) ???
4) Look ma, no hands!
3) ???
3) Compensate for random atmospheric conditions and reducing speed from terminal velocity.
:-)
Thanks for the links guys, got my Monday morning reading material (well perhaps Monday afternoon, it might require some thought to understand it). I have to admit I didn't consider broom handles are easier.
... a pencil the size of a rocket.
One minor point, it's actually easier to do with longer objects. Sure balancing a pencil on your finger is difficult but balancing a broomstick is rather easy. Remember, it's basically an inverted pendulum, just like you are.
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