Status available at link.
Status available at link.
Holy Pelosi!
Ooops! Back to the drawing board.
Bummer
Today's flight would have been the 24th for Sea Launch since debuting in 1999. This is the second total failure for the Zenit 3SL vehicle configuration.
Is this a private company or government run operation?
Goog picture for a ZOT.
Yikes!
Gonna be interesting to see how many lawyers it takes to sort out the liability on THIS one!
Old news... I already read the book.
-PJ
This must have been just east of Jarvis Island(154 deg W). Years ago I thought that would be ideal site for an EMSL cannon, esp the quenched superconducting ring design.
It would be a cannon 300' to 500' long at a 45 deg angle pointing east. With 20 kg projectiles at say one/10 sec in continuous firing mode, that's 172,800 kg/day reaching LEO. That's about 19 shuttle loads at 20,000#/payload.
One pound in LEO is worth(mv^2/2 + mgh)4 KWH, or about 40 cents at 10 cents/KWH. That's cheaper than 39 cents/oz postage(16:1). At a 10% system efficiency that's $4/#, vs $20,000/# to LEO on the shuttle.
The recent railgun demo for the navy shows what's possible with a superconducting cannon. Too bad boeing has to lose so many millions on the CHEMICAL ROCKET when for the same money they could be shooting BULLETS into LEO for a tiny fraction of the energy cost. Ah well, archaic thinking and VESTED INTERESTS....
The Odyssey platform's going to be a mess. I think it's going to be a while before they launch again.
That's $90 Million worth of ex-Soviet rocket fireworks (not counting the value of the payload).
The Zenit rocket has a checkered history. It had looked like SeaLaunch had worked out the bugs and has had a rather impressive string of successes, but maybe the Russian/Ukrainian quality control slipped a bit on this one.
WHAT HAPPEN?
BTTT!