Posted on 10/29/2014 9:10:49 PM PDT by Jack Hydrazine
An Orbital Sciences rocket operating under a NASA contract exploded shortly after launch on Tuesday evening, much to everyone's surprise — except, perhaps, Elon Musk.
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, trashed Orbital Sciences for using outdated Russian engines during a 2012 Wired interview:
"One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."
Two years later, Musk tweeted his condolences about the explosion, in which no one was injured:
"Sorry to hear about the @OrbitalSciences launch. Hope they recover soon."
The Antares rocket was carrying a Cygnus spacecraft that was supposed to deliver supplies to the International Space Station on a routine mission. The exact cause of the explosion is still unknown. However, the Orbital Sciences team wasn't tracking any issues prior to launch. The private space company says it will conduct a thorough investigation starting immediately
SpaceX has a similar contract with NASA to supply cargo to the space station.
It’s great to see the self-destruct being triggered after it hit the ground.
Me? I was wrong about everything. Frinstance, after the moonwalk, I thought I might soon thereafter be going on a Mars Moon Colony Mission, like my Heinlein Heroes. Instead I got treated to decades of "Science Fair" type "scientific Projects" in the old shuttle. Now the only way I'll leave the planet is the same way Heinlein did! m(And I won't need some Soviet Cold War Surplus Engine, either)
Some day, Americans will get into real space. When they get to Mars, I hope they like Chinese food.
dear pelican,
“I’d say either a turbopump, a fuel or oxidizer line, or the nozzle catoed.”
Find a closee-up pic from the base of the rocket. There are eight fluid lines ... on the outside of the skin! I do agree that you have ‘good candidates’.
dear lurker,
I explain ... You find a straight road for many miles, with perfect weather. You stomp the gas pedal. The engine “pauses” for a heartbeat, and then WARP SPEED!
The rocket’s 108% is as a combat fighter aircraft has an ‘afterburner’. It’s not used for all the burn time, but it gives that extra push to get things started.
Obviously, the rocket failed, in that ‘pause’ to get going faster.
Just got home from 2 year stint with the US Army courtesy of the local draftboard and watching it on the local TV channel. Made us feel proud.
Now just a low simmering disgust at what a mess we’ve made out of the last 6 years.
Thanks.
Well, I wouldn’t want to see the rocket still going on the ground...
Imagine the thing rocketing off along the ground into the nearest town!
You honestly think NASA is capable of doing it quicker, better, and less expensive than private industry? Really?
I did not say that. Perhaps you have misread my post.
God I miss living in America when our country was run by an adult like Reagan and our fellow countrymen shared our collective desire to reach out to the stars and expand human horizons beyond our wildest dreams. Sometimes I wonder if that yearning for discovery will ever be rekindled...
Sigh...
Well said.
I don’t dispute the technology is impressive. But the tech is not his.
Rockets landing on earth is a fanciful idea, but completely impractical, save for draining meager resources away from other valid scientific endeavors. Until a non-chemical method of reaching orbit is attained, we are limited to simple math: What goes up, must come down and takes a given quantity of fuel to lift a given quantity of mass.
Musk started out well enough but then degraded into the typical liberal that sucks at the government teat.
It’s time he (and all the other BS grant-suckers) was cut off and science/research dollars redirected back to a reinvigorated NASA (though I understand that that will never happen with current leadership...rather, lack thereof). Perhaps a new generation of scientific minds at NASA, with the old generation gone, can restore this country back to a respectable pillar of scientific achievement.
.02
That’s known as a landshark!
Here are some good examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOs0Gn8rIcE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s46oPVwJZV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA1aWcWPA4U
Well you seem to be assuming that fuel is the only real cost to go to space. Our current system would be like if every time we took a flight to Europe, they threw away the plane afterwards.
Rockets are not cheap (in the neighborhood of $100 million), and if we could get to a point where the only cost to go to space was fuel, that would be a huge improvement.
“I don’t dispute the technology is impressive. But the tech is not his.”
Then who's is it? As far as I can tell, no one in the history of space travel has been able to land a rocket on its feet.
Besides these up and down tests that I already linked to, they have already started to attempt to land actual mission rockets (after placing the ISS resupply module in orbit) once they come back down over the ocean. They are currently building a new ocean platform and the next ISS resupply launch is in about six weeks. Musk says that they think they have a 50/50 chance of sticking the landing on this next launch.
So maybe we can continue this discussion of whether or not this idea is “fanciful” and “impractical” in six weeks.
McDonnell Douglas' Landable Rocket About to Be Mothballed : Aerospace: Despite successful tests, the Defense Department's funding for the project is running out.We'll see what we'll see...
January 27, 1994It was a spectacle right out of Buck Rogers.
A 42-foot-tall, 21-ton, cone-shaped rocket lifted 150 feet above the New Mexico desert, stopped, moved sideways 350 feet, stopped again, then floated back to Earth, landing tail-first on its four pods as smoke and flames poured from its engines .
Never had anyone seen such a vertical landing by a rocket, except in science-fiction movies. And despite lasting only 60 seconds, the maiden voyage last August of the unmanned Delta Clipper-Experimental (DC-X) generated waves of publicity.
(snip)
Champions of the DC-X believe it would be a cheap, reusable and dependable space launch vehicle that would not need to toss away expensive boosters and other hardware and could be quickly refurbished and launched again.
Hatched by the Pentagon as part of its "Star Wars" defense program, the DC-X is also an ideal prototype for a rocket that could launch commercial payloads for far less money than either the Space Shuttle or existing unmanned rockets, proponents say. In that role, it could bolster the United States' role in the increasingly crowded space launch business.
Well you seem to be assuming that fuel is the only real cost to go to space.
Fuel is weight. When they launch a rocket with chemical propellant placing a 5+ ton payload in LEO (plus fuel & rocket) and land it vertically, I'll eat my hat. It's been over 20 years...IMHO 'fanciful' is apropos. "Bridge to nowhere" comes to mind...
I stand corrected! I’m surprised the DC-X didn’t gain traction (no pun intended) at NASA. Then again, a government agency does not have the same cost/benefit impetus that a private company does.
No prob. I still remember reading about it way back when and how exciting it was to watch the first videos.
Re your comment about ‘government agency’...it was McDonnell Douglas, not NASA. Boeing bought MD. I’m just a bit curious why Boeing is now ‘sharing’ a contract with SpaceX when they are touting technology that Boeing supposedly acquired the rights to with its purchase of MD. If the tech was so fantabulous, Boeing would be asserting its rights to the tech, wouldn’t it? Though a patent would certainly have expired by now, given how many decades ago the concept was demonstrated.
I come back to my ‘bridge to nowhere’ comment...
Rocket propulsion is literally the most efficient chemical propulsion known to exist. The only reusable system yet devised was the STS, and it cost between $500 million and $1 billion just to launch and recycle, every single time.
The proposed man-rated vehicle to put Americans back into space on American hardware won’t be able to get off the ground without extended versions of the solid rocket boosters used on the STS. It would literally be possible to just forget about the new liquid-fueled system — which is a pork barrel and nothing more — and loft future astronauts on the (reusable) SRBs.
It won’t happen.
Agreed.
3x
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