SpaceX update: The engine did not explode

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20121008

by trafficlight • 14 years ago

325 122 14 years ago

lutusp7• 14 years ago

> SpaceX update: The engine did not explode

No, it just became a "Falcon 8" while enroute.

All joking aside, as a former NASA Space Shuttle engineer I'm very impressed by this private-enterprise venture into heavy-lift launch services. People have often speculated about how much cheaper launch services might be if they were in the private sector -- now we can find out. The preliminary signs are very good.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

This is Paul (fucking) Lutus for people who might just miss the username.

tar• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus

luke_s2• 14 years ago

For those who don't know who Paul Lutus is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus

Some key parts: "Lutus designed electronics for the NASA Space Shuttle and created a mathematical model of the solar system that was used by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the Viking Mars mission" and then "... he started writing computer programs on his first personal computer, an Apple II. In the 80s, he would eventually program Apple Writer,"

I also recommend his book about sailing around the world "Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor"!

phaedrus• 14 years ago

Hey I think I met this guy. I was in Houston for a NASA internship, he had a telescope set up in front of a Barnes & Noble, and he was introducing random passers by to a view of Jupiter (or Saturn) in the telescope.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Responding to a dead comment by stallker:

stallker 4 hours ago | link [dead]

Why 'f * ing'? (Sorry, I'm italian... of course I know the meaning of the word, but I would like to know why do you use it for Paul Lutus, TIA)

I'm not the OP, but in some circles the four-letter expletive is used to emphasize the importance or intensity of something. E.g. "William [freaking] Shatner" means the original, unique, William Shatner, not some other William Shatner. "So [freaking] good!" means extremely good.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

Still use your Windows NTP utility, upon occasion. Thank you.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

That reminds me of a euphemism that I found delightful that I heard once while working for a space company... "achieving submerged geostationary orbit," I think it was.

eridius• 14 years ago

I assume this means "crashed into the ocean"?

indiecore• 14 years ago

My favorite spaceflight euphemism is still "rapid unplanned disassembly".

olex• 14 years ago

Another good one is "rocket undergoing rapid unplanned disassembly shortly after launch": http://i.imgur.com/lnuqG.jpg

sehugg• 14 years ago

"Lithobraking" is a good one (litho = stone or rocky surface, braking = ... well, stopping suddenly)

adastra• 14 years ago

aka "hydro-synchronous orbit"

derleth• 14 years ago

I always thought "controlled flight into terrain" was a good euphemism for "pilot error leading to crash". If you don't think about it, "controlled flight into terrain" almost sounds good: It's controlled! It's flight! Terrain is involved!

It really means "The plane crashed because of pilot error, not because the pilot lost control due to a mechanical fault or extreme weather."

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

No, it just became a "Falcon 8" while enroute.

DUDE, give them a break.....

read next line

Oh. OH! I have no business commenting on this subject.

nkoren• 14 years ago

Yes, I need to retract my prior comment about the engine "exploding" [1]; the failure mode was much more benign, and the surround engines were never under threat. However, the nozzle was very clearly ejected following the shut-down, so for all intents and purposes, it became an ex-engine. And the Falcon didn't flinch. Impressive.

Watching this private space stuff manifest is absolutely thrilling. I was tangentially involved in things way back in the early 90's, when the private space geeks were regarded as crackpots by the mainstream aerospace community, if indeed they were acknowledged at all. They certainly didn't have any money (aside from odd forays such as Andrew Beal's[2] and Gary Hudson's[3] abortive adventures), and often did come across as crackpots, but for the life of me it seemed like they had a valid point. To see those sort of folks finally succeed is just infinitely thrilling.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4625221

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket

maaku4• 14 years ago

The nozzle wasn't ejected; relief panels were as a precaution in case it did explode.

wamatt3• 14 years ago

>I'm very impressed by this private-enterprise venture into heavy-lift launch services.

The fact that an engine failed, should be viewed as a success, as it allowed for the validation of the fault tolerant design.

It's not that one should never have failures, what matters is how they mitigate and adapt, in order to complete the mission.

greglindahl• 14 years ago

A successful test of the one-engine-out code! Given that they don't want to initiate this failure on purpose, it's handy that they had one so early.

DaniFong2• 14 years ago

Hi there,

I read your IAmA where you had a reply to a message, now deleted, in which you must have been asked about aerial circumnavigation. You mentioned that you'd use a solar balloon, and that you merely would have to have a strategy for darkness.

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this, and it may interest you to know that:

Water vapor has both a lower molar density than air The phase transition of water vapor gives more than enough energy to heat up more than the equivalent volume of air to displace the reduced volume of water vapor turning to liquid.

So, a possible strategy for darkness is to have a two bladdered balloon, one with water vapor + air, one with just air. Then, when the water vapor condenses, transfer the heat to air sourced from outside the balloon via a counterflow heat exchanger. Put that warmed air in the air bladder. You won't stay at precisely the same height, but you will retain volume and you can stay buoyant.

Many things work well when your thermal energy storage is positively buoyant.

Regards,

Come visit the next time you're free around Berkeley or Oakland.

lutusp7• 14 years ago

This is an interesting altitude-control scheme. When I think about this problem, I consider a method that involves a flexible helium container (in the simplest form, a helium balloon) and a control system that involves pumping helium out of the balloon into a high-pressure tank to descend, and releasing it from the tank to the balloon to rise. It's a variation on the submarine buoyancy method, which also requires power to run pumps.

The advantage is that the method doesn't just throw away the helium, it recycles it, but the recycling activity require a lot of power. And it's way complicated compared to your method.

davedx• 14 years ago

Hi Paul,

Just a heads up - I tried to send a message to you on your website (arachnoid.com) and got the following error:

Error: embedded tags.

Warning: eregi() [function.eregi]: REG_EMPTY in /home/arachn5/public_html/messages/processMessage.php on line 84 Please press the "back" button to correct your entry.

I don't have any HTML in my message, and I'd really like to send it :-) Do you have an email address I could use please?

lutusp7• 14 years ago

> Do you have an email address I could use please?

Yes, But for obvious reasons I don't want to post it in this forum.

Please post a plain-text message to my message board and I will reply. Then you can embed links and tags in your reply if you want. That way neither of us needs to post our e-mail addresses in a public forum.

Thanks!

ghostfish2• 14 years ago

>"Panels designed to relieve pressure within the engine bay were ejected to protect the stage and other engines."

Can anyone that knows something about the Falcon 9 design or rockets in general shed some light on this? That sentence makes it sound like the panels were purposefully jettisoned, which doesn't make sense to me. What do those panels do, what do they look like, and where are they?

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

Purposefully jettisonning panels is a way of preventing an explosion from damaging the rest of the ship. The rocket creates energy in a direction, but what if something prevents the energy from going in that direction? The energy, in the form of expanding gasses, has to go somewhere. If these panels didn't break away to give the energy somewhere to go, it could have forced into another rocket or into the ship's body, causing a much bigger problem.

jlgreco• 14 years ago

So are these panels kind of a sort of relief valve?

luke_s2• 14 years ago

When they say "Jettisoned", it makes it sound like one of the flight computers decided to drop the panels. Wouldn't it more be the case that the panels are deliberately designed to be blown off? I have a hard time believing that any control system could react in time in case of an engine explosion...

jccooper• 14 years ago

They probably refer to breakaway panel fairings above the engine isolation armor. Space X has an armor "cup"around the dangerous parts of the engine, and put fittings on top of that for some reason; aero probably.

Their statement suggests these came off when pressures radically changed during engine cut off, which is plausible. It was at max aerodynamic pressure, and removing all the pressure the motor generates is a big swing. I find it more likely that the nozzle (bell) shattered, as it is more exposed to both aero and combustion pressures. Maybe both happened.

A visual guide:

1) naked engine: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2355/2230438397_487afd40a2.jp...

When a liquid engine fails energetically, it's usually going to be a failure in the chamber. Nozzle or throat burn-through or other failure may also happen. The turbo pump might also let go and shred some stuff nearby. Plumbing failures may also kill the engine, but not destroy much; there are plenty of valves to fix leakage before it gets bad.

2) un faired: http://www.spacenews.com/images/Falcon9engines_SpaceX02.jpg

Here you can see the armored tub around the chamber section of each engine. It is meant to contain any problems. Mostly these would be hot gas from holes burned in the chamber or throat, fuel or oxidizer from leaks in the plumbing, or shrapnel from the turbo pump coming apart. Note that the other major failure mode, excessive vibration, cannot be armored against, but that is more a design thing than a random failure.

Most to all of these failures are easily detected by various pressure and flow sensors, and usually before they become big problems. Turn off the propellant valves, and the engine rapidly becomes safe, though off. But the armor does keep the neighbors safe from any problems, presuming it holds. I would guess it is good enough for most failures.

3) faired vehicle: http://www.brendans-island.com/blogsource/20101015ff/falcon-...

Here you can see pretty white fairings hiding everything but the nozzles. Note that they appear to be a bunch of different pieces. Probably that is because they are meant to break away individually if something goes wrong.

Those are what I think the statement refers to. I doubt they are actively jettisoned, but may certainly be designed to pop off in an over-pressure situation. One could probably compare vs the video to see if the pieces look like that, the nozzle, or other engine parts. The corner fairing might also have failed under some circumstances.

Having seen the video in slow mo a few times, I think their assessment is plausible. Probably they will be able to tell what happened by telemetry. I don't know if they are still trying to recover stages, but if they are, they might get their hands in some physical evidence. Whether we will ever see any of this data, though, I don't know. They've been reasonably open in the past.

rorrr• 14 years ago

If anything, this shows the fault tolerant design that works.

biot2• 14 years ago

It's essentially a RAID6 design for rocket engines.

tomasquintero• 14 years ago

RAID5, they can only sustain one failure.

btilly12• 14 years ago

I was curious about how reliable we should predict a Falcon 9 launch to be based on the stated design parameters (survives the loss of any 2 engines) and current launch data.

I found that under a simple Bayesian model, the estimated probability of catastrophic failure during the next launch is 3.6%. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-reliable-will-falco... for details.

Update: I made a careless calculation error. Change 3.6% to 2%. Oops.

ghostfish2• 14 years ago

Two thoughts here. 1) You're working from an awfully small sample, especially for a component that is supposed to be of such a high reliability. Then again, look at the probabilistic assessment of Shuttle success vs. actual. 2) The Merlin 1C engine is only going to make a few more flights afaik. Starting some time in 2013 they'll be switching to Merlin 1D.

btilly12• 14 years ago

Indeed, predictions are extremely hard. Especially about the future.

At least I am explicit in the assumptions behind that model. They are:

1. A priori, all possible reliability numbers for a single engine are assumed equally likely. (This can be debated endlessly, but you need SOME prior for Bayesian analysis. If we had more data, then the prior would matter a lot less, but we don't so it does.)

2. Failure of engines is independent.

3. The rocket actually operates according to design parameters. That is it will survive the loss of any 2 engines, but not the loss of 3.

4. Past performance is a predictor of future performance.

Every one of those assumptions is questionable.

hyperbovine2• 14 years ago

What is the variance of your estimate?

btilly12• 14 years ago

Sorry, your question does not make sense.

In Bayesian analysis you have some set of prior theories with associated probabilities, you observe data, you alter your estimate of the likelihood of those theories, and then your next prediction becomes a weighted average of those predictions.

That number has no attached variance.

throwaway54-762• 14 years ago

Are failures independent?

btilly12• 14 years ago

I am assuming so, yes.

In fact the failure of your neighbor likely affects the odds of your failure. So I'm being too nice to SpaceX.

robryan• 14 years ago

One factor that I don't think has been answered, if this engine shutdown was going to be the 3rd and would cause a mission loss, could if have been persisted with.

It isn't clear whether it was on the way to complete engine failure or it was shut down to play it safe.

gus_massa• 14 years ago

To make comparisons, IIRC the failure ratio of the unmanned missions is 10-15% and in the manned missions is about 2%.

An important detail is what happens when 3 or more engines fail simultaneously. Can they transform the mission in a soft landing or the "payload" is totally doomed? (For example, the Apollo XIII mission was a failure, but no one died.)

cdash• 14 years ago

For a crew mission, yes the mission would be aborted and the Dragon launch abort thrusters would fire getting them away from the rocket as fast as possible and deploy a parachute where they would land in the ocean.

uvdiv• 14 years ago

I tried this independently, and have the same result (2.0%).

https://gist.github.com/3855660

And the probability of any rocket engine failing, per launch, is 1 in 3!

jules• 14 years ago

Here is a simulated posterior on the number of engines that fail: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/388822/rocketfailuredistr.png

Horizontal axis is how many engines failed, and vertical axis is how many times that number of engines failed in the simulation.

The code that generated this is:

    from scipy.stats import *
    from pylab import *
    failures = [binom(9,p).rvs() for p in beta(1,1,1e5) if binom(9,p).rvs() == 1]
    hist(failures, bins=9, range=(0,9))
    show()

The way this code works is it first picks a `p` from the prior. This `p` represents the failure probability for a single engine. Then we simulate the number of engines that fail when you have 9 of them, and filter out just the worlds where that number is equal to 1 as in the SpaceX launch. Or equivalently, we annihilate all the worlds that have a different observation than ours -- this is a central tenet in Bayesian statistics in contrast to frequentist statistics: we only base our inferences on the things that happened and not on things that hypothetically could have happened but didn't. In a slogan you could say "our fantasies are irrelevant". Then in the worlds that remain, where the same observation was made as in our world, we simulate the number of engines that fail on a new rocket launch and collect the results in a histogram.

So the posterior probability on the entire rocket failing for uniform prior is around 25%. Uniform prior means that you believe that all single engine failure probabilities are equally likely: you think it's equally likely that engines fail with 10% probability as with 63% probability. Tweak the first two parameters to beta to change your prior belief. If you've seen n engines fail in your life and k engines succeed, then setting the first parameter to n+1 and the second to k+1 is a reasonable choice (so the current setting corresponds to not having seen any rocket launches prior to this one). For example if you've seen 2 engines fail and 99 engines succeed you use `beta(3,100,1e5)`: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/388822/rocketfailuredistr_for_optim... Hardly any probability mass left for entire rocket failure :)

wamatt3• 14 years ago

Good stuff OP, nice to see Bayesian getting more attention recently. However, after reading your blog post, I can't help get the feeling this is how a natural frequentist would approach the problem. This method is effectively relying on known, statistical record of past events to form the priors.

Often a more useful and appropriate construct in the Bayesian world, is the use of a belief network or Bayesian Network. This is a probabilistic directed acyclic graph (DAG) that encodes priors, often in the form of subjective beliefs (yes subjectivity can be useful), including specific domain knowledge.

Common example: Consider a naive Bayesian classifier (a specialized form of belief network) that identifies individual pieces of spam. Do we arrive at the spam score by entering the probability of past events into a simple model based of the Bayes theorem formula?

No, it's trained using the vast amount of domain knowledge and pattern recognition (through our experience and own estimation of what 'spam' is) encoded in our minds, that provide the priors. Thus, even though there is a large amount of subjectivity involved, the overall result can objectively be measured, within a given utility function. Incidentally, this is often what makes many hardcore empiricists 'nervous', and hence avoid belief networks altogether.

Coming back to the Falcon 9: A piece of prior information outside the scope of historic safety records, for example, one of the lead engineers having a nagging doubt about a particular technical risk based on some observed phenomenon, could have an impact on the real world probability of the next event being a failure. (Which is a pretty useful thing to know!)

In fact, this exact scenario happened in 2003 with the disastrous destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. [1] An engineer spotted something wrong on previous flights, but management failed to heed the warning[2]. This could quite possibly have been averted, if a risk mitigation model were in place to account for such evidence.

Looking forward, it's quite possible to imagine a future where this decision making has been outsourced to a sophisticated AI based off a Bayes net, with far more accurate real world modeling of risk and failure probabilities, outclassing the amount of evidence and a human or committee could possibly hope to compete with.

While I've nothing against frequentist approaches (albeit Bayesian naturally makes more intuitive sense to me), a minor drawback is the reliance on the past to predict the future. For example if you had safety records on 1 million previous flights, then one might be tempted to say, "well that's that then, we now know objectively the probability of failures in the future -- end of story". But, the 1 000 001 flight may have been designed to fly on a completely different type of technology, that will change significantly change the safety record of space flight going forward for the next "x" years. Thus using a Bayesian approach account for all relevant priors, it would in theory be possible to reflect a more accurate probability for the 1 000 001 flight, before it took place.

Lastly Bayes nets are not the best tool for every job, and do have drawbacks in certain situations. They are vulnerable to things like Bayesian poisoning or confirmation bias. A Bayesian approach is only as useful as the ongoing real world relevancy and accuracy of the priors. As the old adage goes, GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jun/22/spaceexplorati...

loup-vaillant2• 14 years ago

> for example, one of the lead engineers having a nagging doubt about a particular technical risk based on some observed phenomenon, could have an impact on the real world probability of the next event being a failure. (Which is a pretty useful thing to know!)

You should know that there's no such thing as "real world probability". The rocket will crash, or it will not, period.[1] Probability, as a measure of your own ignorance, is subjective.[2] Your main point still stands though: knowing about the uncertainty of that lead engineer certainly should influence your assessments of the risks involved.

[1] What will actually happen is, the universe splits into many "worlds" (blobs of amplitude in configuration space), a fraction of which will have the rocket crash, and the rest won't. That's the closest thing we have from "real world probability", though it really isn't: the laws of physics as we currently know them are still deterministic.

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/

btilly12• 14 years ago

Let me get this straight.

You are criticizing me for trying to rely on data rather than a complex subjective model based on information from the beliefs of people that I have never met and have no input from? There is no way for me to attempt that approach that does not come down to some form of "making shit up".

More generally you are right that I prefer to work off of data rather than subjective opinion. Data I understand. Subjective opinion is valuable, but suffers from major potential biases. Correcting for that can be very hard.

molecule• 14 years ago

following the Engine-1 failure, did Falcon 9 continue w/ six engines operating, or was one of the two previously shutdown engines re-engaged?

HodCarrier• 14 years ago

The engine failed prior to MECO-1 (where the first two scheduled shutdowns occur) so there were still 8 lit engines. There's no capability to restart the engines that have been shut down.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

I saw the engine flame out and the panels come apart during the launch. I expected some comment on the launch radio because it was obviously not SOP (engines shouldn go out with debris), yet, due to good design, the entire launch remained nominal.

I am now getting hopeful that I'll be able to experience zero-G before I die. SpaceX team, you are my heroes. Keep up the great work!

rst• 14 years ago

The main mission (Dragon/ISS) wasn't affected, but a secondary payload (an ORBComm test satellite) was left in the Dragon's insertion orbit, and didn't get the scheduled secondary boost --- apparently because, after the delayed orbital insertion, the reboost would have gone too close to ISS, according to an ORBComm press release:

www.orbcomm.com/Collateral/Documents/English-US/ORBCOMM%20Launches%20Prototype%20OG2%20Satellite%20FINAL.pdf

jakkals3• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who got confused by the first sentence? "The Dragon spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station this morning and is performing nominally...".

Is everything fine now, or is it not? "Nominally" in this sense to me means that something is amiss, but reading the rest of the article seems to imply that everything is on track.

CUViper3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure where you get that sense of the word. Nominal = according to plan.

dtparr• 14 years ago

I see this confusion fairly often. Outside of the status of systems/missions etc., nominally often means something like 'in name only'. So to say it's proceeding 'nominally' to someone not familiar with its meaning in this domain sounds like "well, it's going according to 'plan', but ..."

jakkals3• 14 years ago

Hm. I have never heard that meaning of the word previously, and the link I previously provided (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nominal) also did not show that specific meaning (unless I am too blind to see it!). I do find it interesting though that you seem to think that it is commonly used in this sense, so I guess I am not moving in the right technical (aeronautics) circles :-) Thanks for the feedback.

bronson• 14 years ago

Unless reaching orbit with 8 engines was in the plan, I don't think your use of the term matches SpaceX's.

frabcus• 14 years ago

It seems to have a special space meaning:

"Aerospace & Engineering. According to plan or design: a nominal flight check."

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/nominally

jakkals3• 14 years ago

Ah. That explains it. I did not know that meaning of the word, and the explanation I checked at: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nominal only showed the meanings that I was familiar with.

Live and learn, I guess. Thanks frabcus!

saraid216• 14 years ago

I'm getting the sense that it's used because "numbers != reality", so it's a subtle reminder that they're basing their call on sensor data, rather than actually having their head inside the engine.

I find that to be a sufficient explanation, though I'm just guessing.

russell• 14 years ago

Having listened to 5 decades of rocket launches, I would say that nominal means that it is working within mission parameters. There may be glitches, but it is going to work, i.e. the payload is going into orbit. The engine failure wasnt planned, but there was enough redundancy in the system for it to succeed.

thezilch• 14 years ago

Wikipedia has a better explanation than I or others' comments, so far, could provide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_versus_nominal_value, and it 's "secondary" meaning is not, at all, limited to aerospace linguistics.

bravesirrobin• 14 years ago

I have to admit that I'm impressed at how well the system they build compensated for the mechanical failure. It looks like they have some good people building things.

One aspect that's worth consideration is the private/corporate aspects of spaceflight. When there were failures in Apollo and the shuttle, the public had a right to know everything that happened since we'd paid for everything. SpaceX has been super cool about disclosure here, but how long can we count on that? At some point, there's too much money at stake for them to maintain full transparency.

wprice• 14 years ago

What's more important than disclosure to the public after something has gone wrong, is disclosure to the customers (e.g. NASA) and future astronauts ahead of time if something has been identified as a potential problem before launch. The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred because managers failed to acknowledge the warnings of engineers, who recommended postponing the launch due to cold weather which could prevent some O-rings from functioning properly. Having the ability to acknowledge and correct problems ahead of time, even if it means a launch delay and potentially some lost profits, will ultimately pave the path for a sustainable private space industry.

But I think that SpaceX understands that NASA is funded by the public and it will be easier to get the support of NASA if they have the support of the public. I would suspect that for this reason they will continue a decent amount of public disclosure.

knodi• 14 years ago

I am speechless in amazement. So badass!!

confluence2• 14 years ago

I saw the launch live and I saw the debris ejecting about 90 seconds in. What I found particularly amazing was that SpaceX either didn't know it, didn't want to confirm it or just realised that their design worked because all I heard after that was my favourite aerospace term "Situation nominal".

maaku4• 14 years ago

Simple efficiency of communication. The guy saying “situation nominal” was the one looking at the engine data.

dhughes• 14 years ago

I bet the ISS crew yelled the ice cream noo!

eupharis• 14 years ago

"Falcon 9 did exactly what it was designed to do. Like the Saturn V (which experienced engine loss on two flights) and modern airliners, Falcon 9 is designed to handle an engine out situation and still complete its mission. No other rocket currently flying has this ability."

Chills down my spine as I read this. I try to write eloquently, but sometimes the fact should stand alone: "No other rocket currently flying has this ability."

rplnt• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a major feature Chrome had when launched - to withstand a crash of any of the opened tabs. I thought it's a funny feature to have... other browsers just preferred not to crash in the first place. Then I tried Chrome and realized it was a great feature for them, because Chrome kept crashing all the time (back then).

What I wanted to say by this is that while it's a great thing for Falcon 9 to have fail-over in its maiden flights (as we could see yesterday), I wouldn't worry too much about "other rockets" not having this. Soyuz rockets are a great example (100% success rate for manned flights to ISS and over 97% success rate for all Soyuz rockets (that's since 1966)[1]).

1. my numbers are only from wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-7_(rocket_family) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_mi...

VSerge• 14 years ago

It's amazing that this could have worked as a Dragon 7. One engine failed and they still could have made it with one other engine malfunctioning. Bearing in mind the cost of the launches for SpaceX are forecasted to be significantly lower than old shuttles, this is all the more impressive. There was a misshap though, since the Orbcomm satellite wasn't nearly put on the right orbit. I have no idea whether the onboard propulsion of the satellite will be enough to get into the desired orbit, but if they do manage it, it will be a testament to the quality and interest of fault-tolerant space operations.

SpaceX update: The engine did not explode

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