Posted on 08/13/2012 9:02:18 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (AP) — Earlier this week NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars about 150 million miles away. But on Thursday here on Earth, a test model planetary lander crashed and burned at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just seconds after liftoff.
The spider-like spacecraft called Morpheus was on a test flight at Cape Canaveral when it tilted, crashed to the ground and erupted in flames. It got only a few feet up in the air, NASA said.
...
Morpheus is a prototype for a cheap, environmentally friendly planetary lander. Thursday was the first time it had been tested untethered in a free flight. It had performed 19 flights at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it was designed and made, and one more in Florida, but it was always tethered to a crane, Dean said.
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NASA promoted Morpheus as a "green" project because methane is more environmentally friendly than the toxic rocket fuels it uses. Methane, which is the main component of natural gas, is also cheaper and could even be made from ice on the moon or Mars, NASA figured.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Environmentally friendly prototype???
For the toxic environments of Mars, Venus or Saturn?
Or just for testing on earth?
After..
NASA's Morpheus lander prototype in flames during a failed free flight test at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2012.
Pathetic beyond belief...”green” rocket fuel that doesn’t pack much energy per pound, all in the name of not polluting some distant rock. People at NASA are now certifiably insane. Shut them down and start over.
The bad part about this is there are private companies making equipment like this, and I have seen videos of them not exploding. Why doesn't NASA just buy those?
Pathetic beyond belief...”green”
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Saw/heard a ‘good one’ yesterday (maybe here on FR) that if newspapers and the Lib magazines REALLY wanted to go green they would just not print an issue or two, so as to save ink, paper and fuel for the delivery trucks.
It seems they had a bunch of parts laying around and opted to do it themselves, unfortunately poooof.
Harvesting space for raw materials is a good idea and a necessity as we won’t be able to take much with resource-wise.
You must be reading our newspaper (San Jose Mercury News). They’ve cut the amount of ink in the Sunday comics in half — everything is dull, washed out, flat and listless. Never thought it might be a green-wash job.
Obviously, since it has to be “environmentally friendly”, they must intend to use this “lander” to explore some place on Earth. I might suggest they just tow it out to the site on a trailer pulled behind a Volt or Prius.
Did someone pull its finger?
The crash may not have anything to do with the type of fuel used. Don’t forget, there are many such explosions during the testing phase of any new vehicle. That’s why they test them
It blowed up real good!
NASA kept insisting that the foam peeling off the external fuel tank had nothing to do with them changing the formula to make it more “environmentally friendly”.
I never believed them.
You would think NASA would have learned its lesson when the agency used “green” foam on the Columbia space shuttle and murdered seven astronauts.
I knew it.
I always thought Laurence Fishburne couldn’t fly, now, finally, proof.
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