Posted on 07/18/2013 10:55:28 AM PDT by null and void
Human error to blame for blast
A few weeks back, a Russian rocket called Proton-M exploded over a spaceport in Kazakhstan a few seconds after it launched.
[scary video at link]
The rocket was carrying three navigation satellites into space and fortunately was unmanned (no one on the ground was injured either). It reached a height of 1 km before disintegrating and then falling back to the Earth, piece by piece.
An investigation into the who, what, and why behind this massive blast was launched and this past week, it was closed. The result?
Human error.
Investigators found that the rockets angular velocity sensors had been installed upside down. An easy mistake to make, one would suppose, except for the minor fact that they had arrows on them showing which way was up and which way was down.
As a result of the misplacement of these sensors, the flight control system was getting the wrong information about the rockets position. When it tried to correct things, it swung out of control and exploded.
The person responsible for this mistake was an inexperienced technician. Whats more, his work, records indicate, was never double-checked. Even if it had been fixed, however, the rocket was still doomed, as the report also details an engine fire started when the rocket first took off. No indication as to why that happened has been determined yet.
As if all of this isnt already bad enough, the three satellites that burned up were not insured. Barring any setback, Russia plans on simply moving forward from this mess, having since announced plans to launch two replacement satellites this fall from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
Story via: americaspace.com
"Reach for the sky!"
Human stupidity. Do they fire the novice or his supervisor?
Many of them rich folk cancelling their rocket trips on Russian rockets.
NASA’s Genesis spacecraft crashed on its return back to earth in 2004 for the same reason.
But Russians are smart. They dont have to take precautions like that, because they dont do human error like Americans. </hubris>Its human nature to sucker for that kind of thinking.
. . . and Murphys Law strikes yet again.
It's amazing how often designers DON'T do that. You want to PREVENT errors, not find them, often the hard way.
It is up. If it was down we wouldn’t be able to read the words!
Well seeing that it was probably written in Russian with Cyrillic letters, it was an honest mistake......
Supervisor: Do you like skiing, comrade?
Technician: Why, Yes! I love skiing!
Supervisor: Good. Then you won’t be too bored in Siberia for the rest of you life...............
The Challenger disaster killed seven and was determined to be caused by a faulty O-ring design.
Looks like the Russians got off easy here, and there’s little cause for jeers.
I agree, an honest mistake.
No jeers from me.
No need to install a self destruct package if you launch your rockets from the middle of nowhere. Dont you worry. It’ll blow up when it hits the ground.
Might have been interesting if he installed the homing sensor for downtown Moscow instead of an angular velocity sensor.
No? Where is launch control? Where do the ground support and their families live?
How far do you suppose a fully fueled second stage can go with an orbit-capable first stage driving it in the wrong direction? Ten miles? A hundred? A thousand?
The Soviet Union lost a bunch of top Generals in a launch pad accident back in the day.
Not you - I usually reply to the top post when addressing no one specifically.
No problem, no offense intended or taken.
Way back when I created a few dummy screen names for just such occasions. You can always address comments to “no one in particular” “all” and “y’all”. They aren’t real people...
The Mod Squad stopped me when I was trying to create “the author of the article” *sigh*
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