Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

by politician • 12 years ago

504 245 12 years ago

Video of the explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHMmMgdcOSU

...and I believe this is the water-tower you can see in the video: https://www.google.se/maps/place/NASA+Wallops+Flight+Facilit...

bennettfeely• 12 years ago

This video seems a little better quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo

callesgg• 12 years ago

I expected it to self desturct.

Why would it not do that? Was it to close to the ground?

ericcumbee6• 12 years ago

I'd say it was to close to the ground to self destruct. And there would have been a call from the Range Safety Officer in the event he ordered a destruct or the computer called a destruct.

trothamel4• 12 years ago

I don't think Antares can command itself to destruct. The destruct has to be commanded by the range. There isn't any point to issuing the destruct command unless the impact point is dangerously far from the flight path, and that wasn't the case here.

_kst_2• 12 years ago

There wouldn't have been much point in a self destruct. The rocket launched, then it looked like there was an explosion in or near the boosters (which apparently caused a loss of thrust), then it fell back onto the pad and exploded. Blowing it up at a higher altitude just would have spread the debris a little farther.

rodrigocoelho• 12 years ago

There's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPHkDc-CwoQ

jwise0• 12 years ago

There aren't many blogs covering this right now, but there are no personnel injured (according to the launch loop) -- just "significant property damage and significant vehicle damage".

Nobody has said much yet: https://twitter.com/OrbitalSciences/status/52722568241456742...

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

Well, that's good. Property damage is insurable - let's hope that's the only loss.

Listening to the audio feed for a few minutes, I always find it a bit sad how people resort to 'officialese' bullshit when they're embarrassed or stressed, eg 'we're going to triage the data'?!

iolsantr• 12 years ago

I don't think that's just officialese. They are going to be under enormous pressure to find out what went wrong as quickly as possible. Orbital Science's future may be significantly affected by how well (and quickly) they deal with the aftermath.

engi_nerd2• 12 years ago

Having been an engineer in control room environments for both rocket launches and fighter jet flight operations -- it's not really "officialese bullshit". Aerospace has a definite jargon and there are preferred ways of saying things on comms to reduce ambiguities. "Triage the data" is actually a good way of describing what you do in an anomaly investigation. You figure out what the most likely thing that went wrong is, then the next most likely thing, etc. and look at data regarding those things in order.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

> "significant property damage and significant vehicle damage"

This wasn't launched in a desert/uninhabited area?

Edit: Thanks for clarifying below.

pdabbadabba• 12 years ago

I imagine that the "property" that was damaged is to the launch facility itself. The launch was on Wallops Island, VA which is largely (if not entirely) uninhabited. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallops_Island

jonlucc• 12 years ago

I'm guessing they mean the launch tower.

Xophmeister• 12 years ago

"Property" meaning, presumably, their infrastructure (e.g., the tower that holds the rocket up before it launches, etc.); and "vehicle" is the rocket itself... Don't worry, they didn't launch this and blow-up over suburbia!

veemjeem• 12 years ago

The rocket's payload may also be considered property. Lots of expensive equipment inside.

whoopdedo• 12 years ago

And to be clear, the debris field is over the Atlantic Ocean. The launch was scheduled for last night but had to be scrubbed because a boater had entered the restricted area.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

The town of Chincoteague is a few miles away from the pad. I'm guessing the worst impact there was some windows got rattled by the shockwave from the destruction of the 2nd stage.

ericcumbee6• 12 years ago

Rockets don't explode they experience "Anomalies"

baq• 12 years ago

the technical term seems to be 'rapid unscheduled disassembly'

jsmthrowaway• 12 years ago

Under Orbital's license for this launch, LLO 14-091, they were required to take out more than $110 million in insurance for liability and government property. The portion of the insurance specific to U.S. government property is $45 million.

So, that'll be paying out.

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast...

kilroy123• 12 years ago

What a bummer... Getting to space isn't easy.

Osmium• 12 years ago

Very sad that this has happened. I can only imagine what it must feel like to those who worked on the rocket and its payload. It can really happen to anyone, even the best. At least we can all be thankful no one was hurt.

matthewwiese2• 12 years ago

My entire physics lab watched this happen live. It started going up and everyone was cheering. Seconds later just caught fire, and fell to the ground and exploded.

"That's what happens when you set 'a' to negative." a good lesson from my TA

sillysaurus3• 12 years ago

What's 'a'?

eric59• 12 years ago

Acceleration

bglazer• 12 years ago

Acceleration?

wolf550e• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion

Rebelgecko• 12 years ago

Too bad your TA didn't work on that Russian rocket that crashed a year or two ago... IIRC the accelerometers were installed upside down so as soon as it took off it incorrectly thought it was pointed straight down. The rocket flipped around until it thought it was "up" and slammed into the ground.

phkahler2• 12 years ago

> My entire physics lab watched this happen live.

Now imagine how people felt back in '86 when the challenger exploded with 7 people on board including a teacher. Shuttle launches were common by then but a lot of people were watching live due to the teacher on board aspect. It brings a whole different set of emotions to the event. Nobody made a joke that day.

matthewwiese2• 12 years ago

Of course they didn't. We all knew this flight was unmanned, so it was easy to laugh off such an event. Like other posters have said: 1) A shame for the scientists and engineers who worked many hours to put this together. 2) An unfortunate loss of tens of millions of dollars. BUT 3) We're human and make mistakes, just in the case of aerospace the smallest error is make or break. Aviation wouldn't have made progress to the point we're at now without learning lessons.

blueboxjesse• 12 years ago

A good reminder that no matter how bad your day goes at your job, things can always be much, much worse. My thoughts go out to the the Orbital Sciences team.

blhack4• 12 years ago

I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on.

Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.

It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.

To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.

Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.

Don't fret the failures.

foobarqux• 12 years ago

Don't fret the failures.

Except when it kills people (though this accident didn't).

blhack4• 12 years ago

Fair point. Although I'd say: fret the suffering of people, not the fact that something really difficult ended up being difficult.

snarkyturtle• 12 years ago

Or when it costs billions of dollars from NASA.

hyperbovine• 12 years ago

To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.

This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.

dsjoerg• 12 years ago

The word "failure" is used to mean two distinct things: 1) bad outcome, 2) made the wrong choices given the available information at the time.

They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.

kiba• 12 years ago

There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them.

GrinningFool4• 12 years ago

"If you're failing, you're doing something right."

I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.

Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time.

Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.

blhack4• 12 years ago

I'm going to get up from my chair and go to the water cooler to fill up my water bottle. I bet I will succeed at it.

How is this different to you than launching rockets?

It's different to me because launching rockets is much more difficult. There are many more things that can cause you to fail catastrophically.

To me, failure is to be expected when you're doing something that is difficult. That is the definition of doing something difficult.

lutorm7• 12 years ago

If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.

I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means.

If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have an acceptable risk of zero. This means you can do very few things. Every time you get into your car, you are taking a calculated risk of severe injury or death. And that happens to many people who never do anyhing wrong.

solistice2• 12 years ago

As I've understood it, it means that the scale of your ambitions is right.

Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail.

Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always succeed at are fully mastered. Any knowledge or skills to be gained in those areas are at best minuscule improvements.

Then there's the part where you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. But each time you fail, you gain more data on how you failed, and you think about how you can fix those points. You're learning, and you're improving.

Now there are also tasks at which you'll consistently fail. Passing the BAR exam as a programmer with no preparation would be a good example. Since you have no sucesses to compare to in that area, you wouldn't learn a lot trying to retake the BAR exam, no matter how often you did it. You're lacking in knowledge and skills required, and trying to perform at that level doesn't do you any good.

Now the ratio of failures and sucesses is more of a rule of thumb, and not an ironclad model. If you do turn it into an ironclad model, tell me, because I'd love exact metrics to shoot for. The reason that the common adage is "If you're failing, you're doing something right", at least so I believe, is that "If you're failing some and succeeding some, you're closer to your optimum failure/success ratio for growth than if you are at either end of the extreme" simply doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. You can't put that on the cover of a self-help book. And since almost everyone is inclined to default to the "sucess" side of the continuum (coloquially known as your comfort zone) instead of the "failure" side (excluding select masochists), it makes a lot more sense to tell someone to fail more often. It's not a curse, it's a call for more ambitious projects. In this specific case, it's a comforting call to the fact that they're trying hard enough to fail at something. And I think that is commendable.

ams6110• 12 years ago

For me the essence of the idea that failure is part of (and maybe even required for) eventual success is expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

travelhead• 12 years ago

Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.

krisgenre• 12 years ago

I once read this on the Internet a long time back - "The problem with most people is not that they fail trying to reach their goals, the problem is that they set their goals too low and succeed"

The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.

teekert• 12 years ago

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. -Winston Churchill

Personally I think he meant that eventual success is often achieve by applying this strategy.

_asciiker_• 12 years ago

I agree, this isn't a failure when trying something new, we have done this hundreds if not thousands of times. It should have been a routine mission, failure should not be accepted.

golgappi2• 12 years ago

| If you're failing, you're doing something right. Wrong. This only goes on to emphasize the stigma associated with failures. This sentence is a cover up for the fact that someone did something wrong, or at the very least, things did not go as planned. Failures are bad and heartbreaking, and we should accept it in its entirety.

| Don't fret the failures. Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.

lutorm7• 12 years ago

A failure means you took risk, which is something you should do if you want to push the boundaries. So you did do something right. No one would suggest you did everything right.

Conversely, absence of failure may mean you took a calculated amount of risk and it paid off. But it could also mean you were overly conservative, didn't push the boundaries, and took a minimum of risk. There's no way to tell the difference purely from the absence of failure.

The worst outcome is when a failure happens and you though you were very conservative but actually had no idea what the real risks were. That's the Challenger situation.

WalterBright• 12 years ago

Since this is an unmanned operation, the calculation is fairly straightforward, balancing:

1. the cost of failure 2. the probability of failure 3. the cost of reducing the probability of failure

If these can be accurately calculated, then a certain failure rate can be quite acceptable. Of course, it's still worthwhile to determine the cause of any failures, and hence the cost of eliminating that cause and a reevaluation of points 1..3.

zura• 12 years ago

Glad to hear it was unmanned!

cjdulberger• 12 years ago

Makes me think of the Michael Jordan quote:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

smegel• 12 years ago

If you're failing, you're doing something right.

That seems to be a little bit of a stretch.

I prefer Steve Jobs take - if you're failing, at least someone is making decisions!

dinwal• 12 years ago

Failures are inevitable. I am sure the team has learnt more from it than it would if it had worked. When you have failed once you don't leave any stone unturned and in the process improve on tens of more things.

nikanj• 12 years ago

A lot of people are trying to build mechanical perpetual motion engines, and have failed for thousands of years. Failure doesn't always signal you're doing something right.

easytiger2• 12 years ago

These guys, whom i believe to be an investment scam, are the most recent:

http://www.steorn.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

They've erased some of the history from their website and interest hasn't been high enough for full exposure of their nonsense. Yet a decade of failure hasn't shut them down. I feel sorry for the people who poured €11 million into them. Never seeing that back.

gohrt3• 12 years ago

http://www.cyclingforums.com/t/402918/another-quadriplegic-c...

KhalilK• 12 years ago

Will the logs suffice to determine the cause of the explosion or will they have to reassemble the wreckage and look for anomalies?

daeken4• 12 years ago

Probably way too early to tell even that. There will be hundreds of possible causes that will have to be narrowed down; no one will know anything concrete for a good while most likely, even inside Orbital Sciences.

krisoft• 12 years ago

You most probably meant inside Orbital Sciences Corporation. Antares is just the rocket.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

In crashes like this there often isn't enough wreckage to reassemble to tell one thing or another. But there will be lots of data to comb through which will probably lead to the cause.

ericcumbee6• 12 years ago

They are securing the vehicle because it has sensitive crypto equipment on board.

rl32• 12 years ago

As well as for accident investigation purposes.

MichaelAO2• 12 years ago

I also heard that comment. Does anyone have insight into what 'crypto equipment' might entail?

ericcumbee6• 12 years ago

I know the Shuttle carried DOD Secure comm equipment in addition to it's in the clear UHF and VHF Radios. I'm assuming that ISS has something similar.

lutorm7• 12 years ago

I assume the vehicle telemetry downlink and the comm link to the ISS are encrypted to avoid interference.

biscotti• 12 years ago

More discussion on spacex reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2km5vq/ot_orbitals_a...

djyaz12002• 12 years ago

Reddit thread is interesting. Pulled this off there... wow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl12dXYcUTo

SuperChihuahua2• 12 years ago

Speaking of rocket anomalies - This is a video of the Chinese rocket that's considered to be the worst rocket accident ever (counting human losses)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EnrVf9u8s

3rd3• 12 years ago

This has nothing to do with the current event, right? Linking to it is pure sensationalism.

rplnt2• 12 years ago

If I remember correctly, the cause of this accident was that one of the nozzles had been wired in reverse, causing it to move differently from what the rocket ordered it to.

justin664• 12 years ago

Interesting in that case that the range officer didn't destroy the rocket, or waited a really long time.

rplnt2• 12 years ago

Just a note: Reddit now (officially) supports encryption, i.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/

rl32• 12 years ago

Yesterday's launch was scrubbed due to a boat violating the range safety exclusion zone: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/space-station-cargo-ship-prepped...

trothamel4• 12 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo is a high-quality video.

ars• 12 years ago

Anyone know what the cargo was? Anything unique or expensive? Or just regular supplies?

daeken4• 12 years ago

Nothing out of the ordinary for the ISS, as far as I know. However, it was carrying the Arkyd-3 test platform satellite, which is a bit of a bummer.

MichaelAO2• 12 years ago

According to Motherboard:

- A pea growing experiment from students in Houston

- A human health study investigating blood flow to and from the brain in space

- 19 student projects from New Jersey

- A reentry breakup recorder

- A meteor dust analyser

- 1,360 pounds of food

- Spacewalk equipment

- Flight crew equipment

- Fight procedures books

- Computers

- Classified "Crypto equipment"

Source: https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/527235620578787328/ph...

kijin• 12 years ago

The students from Houston and New Jersey must have been so disappointed. I really hope that they get another chance to send their projects to space before they graduate, and that some of them will eventually take up a career in rocket science despite this minor setback.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

- A reentry breakup recorder

Right, there was to be a video recording of the Cygnus spacecraft as it reentered and broke up (it's designed to disintegrate). Kind of ironic now.

ebildsten• 12 years ago

Also 26 satellites from Planet Labs

https://www.planet.com/pulse/space-is-hard/

ericcumbee6• 12 years ago

They are waiting to hear from the FAA if the NTSB will be involved in the investigation. Seems like something that would have been decided beforehand.

daeken4• 12 years ago

In addition to the COTS resupply provisions for the ISS, this craft was also carrying the Arkyd-3 satellite (basically the whole Arkyd space telescope minus the optics, to serve as a test platform). While this is always sad, no lives were lost and that's what insurance is there for. Kudos to Orbital Sciences for pushing the boundaries of space flight, even if these losses are anything but fun.

trothamel4• 12 years ago

The first stage engines that exploded were AJ-26 engines. These are remanufactured NK-33 or NK-43 engines built in the Soviet Union in the late-60s or early-70s for the N-1 moon rocket, but never used.

In May, an AJ-26 exploded on the test stand at Stennis space center in Mississippi, severely damaging the test stand.

gresrun• 12 years ago

Pure speculation but I wonder if they rushed to test the engines that just flew. AeroJet's parent company claims they have lost over $31MM on the AJ-26 YTD[1]. There may be pressure from higher-ups to push through the issue seen at Stennis in May.

[1] http://www.spacenews.com/article/financial-report/42180aeroj...

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

I wonder if this is going to be a pressing problem, given the Russian's lack of enthusiasm for supplying more rocket gear while under sanctions and the dwindling stock in the US.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/david-a-deptula-the-russians-...

sedachv• 12 years ago

AeroJet owns pretty much all of the existing NK-33 inventory and a license to manufacture them. The work for integrating the NK-33 into the Antares rocket was actually done by a Ukrainian firm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares_%28rocket%29#Design

ianstallings• 12 years ago

These engines were talked about in the documentary *The Engines That Came In From The Cold"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM

I watched it on netflix myself. Fascinating stuff.

codeonfire• 12 years ago

The part at 42:00 makes it sound like the engine is/was considered sort of a gamble. I wonder what the current thought on this engine is.

adamfeldman• 12 years ago

Story from the day of the failure: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1405/22aj26test/#.VFAjH4vF-h...

azurezyq• 12 years ago

Even in the computer field, picking up a 30-year-old unmaintained project is very hard, original designers gone, everything around it retired, use case changed and maybe some tricks may never be known.

As for these engines, they're currently retrofitted with new kind of fuel, new electronics and some modifications, after 30 years, by a totally different team.

I really don't think this kind of thing would work.

lutorm7• 12 years ago

Was there any conclusion what the problem was in that incident?

pbreit2• 12 years ago

It seems so bizarre that we're using 40 year old, Russian-made engines. I'm sure there are plenty of smart folks who will say not too worry, but I wonder.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

Most of those smart folks are probably retired now - need more immigrants:

http://xkcd.com/984

Gravityloss2• 12 years ago

It is a fascinating case of uneven technological development.

The Soviet Union went so far with staged combustion engines in the sixties that that level of technology has not yet been reached elsewhere.

USA, Europe and Japan went with hydrogen staged combustion but that's quite different.

The ULA/Blue Origin decision about new indigenous US first stage engine development gets a huge boost from this problem.

It's just what can be reached when you put resources into it. Coming from the IT world it might seem strange that the investment has not lost its value, but it has not. It might be quite a lot easier to duplicate nowadays, but not child's play at all.

Sometimes it's chilling to think what kind of still secret projects were funded by the huge US defense budgets during the cold war. There are some public sides and declassified parts on things like very good glide ratio hypersonic vehicles, but officially they never went far and the space shuttle was the thing. ( http://www.456fis.org/THE%20B-52/FS-011-DFRC_popup6.jpg )

djyaz12002• 12 years ago

So glad no one was hurt! I'm not a rocket scientist but it looks like fuel was coming out the side of the rocked as it lifted off (kind of a puff) then it got worse and ignited from the nozzle at the bottom.

Sanddancer• 12 years ago

That looked a lot like normal venting. Here's what a daytime launch looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3L7crGudVU .

hnlurker• 12 years ago

You will not go to space today.

sandstrom• 12 years ago

This is a reference to an xkcd-post by Randall Munroe, a former NASA employee and space proponent.

http://xkcd.com/1133/ [text at the bottom]

hudibras2• 12 years ago

Wow, I've somehow lived through 40 years of math/science/space-geekdom without learning that the pointy thing on top of the Saturn V is a part of an escape system.

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

But don't worry, future-people-I-will-argue-with-on-the-Internet, I'm sure that's the final gap in my knowledge base.

codezero• 12 years ago

This is a bummer, I hate to see stuff like this happen. The payload in this rocket was the heaviest that has been included in an Antares launch, I doubt this had anything to do with the failure, but hopefully we'll find out.

Rocket science is hard, after all.

In the video, there are several pieces of debris that fly off and spin in a helical motion, I wonder what those bits are!

rglover• 12 years ago

Terrible situation, but the radio chatter on the live feed is a wonderful way to learn about handling crises in a calm, collected manner. Impressive considering what's going on.

joeblau• 12 years ago

That was the most impressive part for me. It's like listening to Air Traffic control--Some of the most professional conversation even in the face of tragedy.

jakozaur• 12 years ago

Launching to space is very prone to failures and (almost) everyone got one.

Though NASA seems to be paying for Orbital launches more than SpaceX (even considering the difference in payload): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153960-private-spacefligh...

vermontdevil• 12 years ago

Wonder if the boat didn't stray into the restricted area yesterday, things would have been different?

I know we might never know but I did wonder if the draining and refueling the fuel caused an anomaly somewhere and lead to this?

Such a big loss for us.

toufka• 12 years ago

Or different in the other way - where had they launched with the boat there and it still had exploded. Then ORB/NASA would have to deal with a lot more than simply economic consequences.

seanflyon4• 12 years ago

I don't think the rocket made it that far.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

If so, it's better to discover now. Later on, lives could be lost in a similar situation.

uptown• 12 years ago

Truly unfortunate that it failed. Here's Elon Musk's comment about the Antares rock two years ago:

Musk: The results are pretty crazy. 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.

http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

UnoriginalGuy• 12 years ago

And he was wrong. They had 4 successful launches since then. Plus it seems unprofessional to be bad mouthing a competitor like that in public.

readerrrr3• 12 years ago

What exactly was he wrong about?

ajross• 12 years ago

Which is now good for an 80% success rate. And from the video it certainly seems like an engine failure is the most likely scenario. I think if anything Musk is looking pretty vindicated now.

No comment on the unprofessionalism bit. I don't disagree, but then it's hardly uncommon in high tech either.

joelrunyon• 12 years ago

Here's his statement on twitter from today: "Sorry to hear about the @OrbitalSciences launch. Hope they recover soon"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/527247155954610176

Was he speaking facts? Because if they were using rockets made in the 60s - he's not really badmouthing them as much as he is making public facts.

surge• 12 years ago

It was also part of a larger conversation about how little rocket and aerospace technology has advanced since the 60's because they're afraid of trying anything new.

TerraHertz• 12 years ago

In the videos you can see the quality of the rocket flame changes suddenly about half a second before the obvious explosion in the engine area. The jet becomes more orange and less convergent. At 1:03 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo

So, as a general comment, something bad happened with the gear that pumps fuel into the engines in the right proportion. Maybe involving a major leak of fuel into the structures around the engine. Leaked fuel explodes. Complete loss of thrust, rocket falls back to earth.

I wonder if the Russians would consider it a good or a bad thing for them, if the West decides to stop using those Russian-built engines? Specifically, who benefits if there's a series of failures of AJ-26 engines? Considering the current imposition of economic sanctions against Russia, based on quite untrue accusations related to Ukraine and MH17. The Russians are feeling considerably put out over that, and rightly so.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

The NK-33/AJ-26 is no longer manufactured, and most of the stockpile is owned by Aerojet-Rocketdyne or Orbital (something like 50 engines). Considering that those engines have already been bought and paid for, there's no real benefit either way to them failing just a downside to Aerojet-Rocketdyne and OSC.

avmich5• 12 years ago

I wonder if the Russians would consider it a good or a bad thing for them, if the West decides to stop using those Russian-built engines?

Definitely bad. Of course, that depends on whom you ask :) and which Russian we're talking about.

NK-33 is used on a recently created Soyuz-2.1v rocket (one engine on first stage). There is no production of NK-33 today in Samara - but the ability to sell engines to the West would oh so much improve economic situation for Samara's industrial space cluster. Among other things, NK-33 is a matter of pride in Samara. It's the only engine maker for first stages in Russia (if you don't count Voronezh'es LH2 engines, used on the second stage of Energiya) other than Energomash, its arch-rival. Since recently works are underway to restart the production of NK-33... and Orbital going away from using them, for whatever reason, is sad news.

Still NK-33 is a great piece of technology, in some aspects still unsurpassed. It's too early to consider it's over for NK-33.

As for politics and sanctions against Russia - this is quite different subject, almost completely unrelated. Leaders come and go... and people stop wars at some point, yet the aspiration of going to the stars remains.

justin664• 12 years ago

As for politics and sanctions against Russia - this is quite different subject, almost completely unrelated.

Considering the funding for these missions comes from the U.S. Congress, the matters seem pretty tightly coupled.

It was sure a topic of conversation when Elon Musk and Michael Gass (ULA CEO) testified before congress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0

stox• 12 years ago

Looks like one of the engines blew up as they went to full throttle. Since this was the first XL launch, I wonder if they are trying to push the AJ-26's too hard with the increased payload.

readerrrr3• 12 years ago

Spacex had an engine explosion during a flight, yet their primary mission was successful. This is the benefit of modern rocket technology.

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

That the SpaceX engine failure was non-catastrophic doesn't mean all failure modes are like that. I'd imagine it's still possible for a SpaceX engine to go ka-boom in certain situations. Modern tech or otherwise, they're still working with what's in essence a large bomb.

gedmark2• 12 years ago

Using 50 year old Russian engines was a risky move on Orbital's part, but in fairness the NK-33's are a pretty amazing piece of technology. The US has still yet to build anything matching its performance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

297 seconds of Isp is huge. The Saturn V's F1 engine only had 263 seconds. And the closest we've come since to that level of performance in a Lox/RP-1 engine is the Merlin 1D which will have 282.

They did it by using an oxygen-rich, fully staged combustion cycle. Which means that most of the fluid flowing around the engine and through the turbines of the pumps is super hot pure oxygen at 2000 psi. That's crazy. The US has brought over NK-33's and taken them apart and we still don't quite know how the Russians got it to work.

Of course, performance is only one consideration. All the other things you'd expect like integration costs, reliability of your suppliers, etc. made the Antares a pretty risky bet. But given Orbital's choices of developing their own engine from scratch, buying a hyper-expensive engine from Rocketdyne, or buying a wonder of engineering for cheap from the Russians, buying a bunch of surplus NK-33's wasn't totally crazy.

avmich5• 12 years ago

Closed cycle has another advantage over open cycle for kerosene - namely, the vibrations in the chamber are more manageable. Which paradoxically can make the engine more reliable.

A suspicion is that the engines didn't quite survive the long storage... indeed they weren't quite designed for that. But we'll wait for results of analysis of the explosion.

cromwellian3• 12 years ago

"The US has still yet to build anything matching its performance"

The Space Shuttle Main Engines had an Isp of 452s and 500,000 lb of thrust, easily the most efficient rocket engines ever built.

swatkat2• 12 years ago

NK-33 is RP/LOX, whereas SSME is LH2/LOX. LH2/LOX cryogenic engines have higher Isp compared to other solid and liquid engines.

ISRO's CE-7.5 LH2/LOX engine[1] has an Isp of 454s.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-7.5

jpetrik• 12 years ago

shuttle used hydrolox, antares uses kerolox, hardly comparable.

hydrolox engines have vastly superior Isp but come with their own set of limitations.

gedmark2• 12 years ago

I should have been clear on the propellant - the SSME is a hydrogen engine. For a lot of reasons, comparing engines of different propellants by using a single performance number alone doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you want to talk about hydrogen engines, the Russians built the RD-0120, which reportedly had a higher Isp and chamber pressure than the SSME...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0120

Although I don't believe we ever tested it on our own test stands, so it's impossible to know for sure.

By the way you are conflating vacuum Isp with sea level Isp (what I was using). The Sea level Isp of the SSME is 366 s.

The SSME is also a fuel-rich staged combustion cycle. The point I was making above is that the Russians were able to get an ox-rich staged combustion cycle working reliably. That's the key technology breakthrough that we have never duplicated.

dingaling• 12 years ago

but in fairness the NK-33's are a pretty amazing piece of technology

And we wouldn't have any at all if Kuznetsov hadn't ignored a direct order from Moscow to destroy all the engines and tooling, as part of the erasure of the N-1 launcher from official history.

IIRC the OKB knocked them off their inventory as them as 'surplus components' and stored them in a warehouse under plastic sheeting.

keehun• 12 years ago

It seemed like from the press conference that Orbital will be footing most of the bill. The best Frank from OS could say was that "some of the rocket" was insured. Someone below cited $110 million minimum insurance, but that's not even close to the number OS gave out in the conference at $200m for just the rocket (which I think included neither the manifest nor the damage to the pad/environment and any necessary repair/cleanup)

navila17• 12 years ago

Just wanted to confirm that Orbital's mention of insurance does not help the customers at all. It is up to the various companies to insure their own payload.

Also, it might be fun to note that no one on that launch gets a refund. Generally you pay for something like 90% before the launch (in different milestones leading up to the launch) and only 10% after safe delivery to orbit.

bd_at_rivenhill• 12 years ago

Makes me really wish SpaceX were public; would make for interesting trading tomorrow.

burkaman• 12 years ago

This was an Orbital Sciences rocket, not SpaceX, which is publically traded. Down 15.5% after hours so far: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AORB&ei=Gp5QVLiKLsm28...

hueving• 12 years ago

How do they root cause something like this when so much of the evidence is blown to pieces?

golgappi2• 12 years ago

Telemetry

gear54rus2• 12 years ago

Wondering the same thing. In addition to incidents like this, every once in a while, a story pops up that describes how programming error was the cause of rocket crash that happened TWENTY years ago... How? Just how can people be sure that it was programming error? It's not like you can debug a burnt piece of a microcontroller, can you?

Guess we've come a long way from a magnifying glass investigations :)

aragot2• 12 years ago

I entered an engineering school 5 years after Ariane V.

Each single professor explained us why their subject was the reason for Ariane V to explode. The physics one went about how the imperial/metric discrepancy was the cause, the mechanics one went about how error margin management wad the cause, the CS one about integer overflow... Each of them made it clear that their course was the center of the world, but altogether it didn't look smart.

I chose that the CS guy was right ;)

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

Well, part of the investigation is to find as many of those pieces as possible and examine them. For instance in airplane crash investigations the NTSB will sometimes secure a huge hangar, draw out an outline of the aircraft, and place every single bit they find in its approximate location on the airframe. The plane reconstruction was a big part of figuring out how TWA 800 crashed.

Then there is all the video and film footage. I bet some of it was high speed (so the resulting film will be slow motion). Slo-mo film helps show the exact sequence of failures and was a big part of the Challenger investigation.

Finally, there will be a ton of data that was collected from the rocket in its brief flight.

aragot2• 12 years ago

How do you fund an investigation when you've just lost some essential assets of your business, both material and immaterial?

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Ouch. A lot of rocket fuel burning all at once. I would be less concerned if this was the first or second flight but as the fifth flight one has to wonder what part of the process didn't work. This was apparently the first flight with the Castor 30XL which is the second stage, I suppose if it started its burn prematurely that would certainly be an issue.

As a testing problem, rockets have always fascinated me. At some level you have to trust in first principles but being so thorough so that you know will either fly or fail safe. That has got to keep folks up at night.

zaroth• 12 years ago

Right before the explosion you can hear launch control saying something like "Got engines at 108%".

I was curious about it, but from Reddit discussion, apparently this is totally normal; "Yes, the engines have been upgraded many times. To avoid having to recalibrate the software each time engines are upgraded, they are simply rated at over 100 percent thrust over the first engine's thrust."

Another interesting fact. The pad is NASA's. So you can imagine the crew that maintained it are pretty disappointed.... "Look at what you did to my pad!?!" The fireball was enormous. The view from the Cessna incredible.

That must have been just about a worst case scenario for the pad to sustain such a direct hit. Hopefully it was the strict safety protocols and not just dumb luck which kept everyone safe. That's another aspect of this event which can be studied and reported, so at least we maximize the take-aways. Track the entire response from T-6.

Apparently the rocket is designed to do that little lateral kick that you can see in the video and initially seems odd. 'Why is the rocket not going straight up' causes a little unease at first but apparently is nominal. If that's the case, then the time of the explosion may correspond to a point where they kick up engine output. It also may have been a heavier payload than usual requiring higher engine output? (Unconfirmed)

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

Link to the Cessna view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zarWT7H9t54

i_have_to_speak• 12 years ago

Heartwarming to see how positive and forward-looking the responses here are. Certainly more positive than the responses towards India's (successful) Mars mission.

neindanke• 12 years ago

What point are you trying to make?

nevergetenglish• 12 years ago

To decide is this is a success or a failure one need to determine exactly where was the error. If this new knowledge contributes to the design of better systems then this is a success, if the actual error provides us with nothing to learn then this is a very big failure. So there is an amortized cost of success/failure in long term enterprises.

TheBigSteve12• 12 years ago

Why was the payload lost? Was it considered cost-prohibitive to have furnished the payload with an escape rocket?

72deluxe• 12 years ago

Very interesting that they used the engines from the Soviet moon rocket from the 70s (?). The N-1 looked a great rocket, pity it never flew.

Even the massive arms for lifting the rocket into position are impressive for the N-1.

TheBigSteve12• 12 years ago

I happened upon this website as a result of a Google search re. yesterday's failed launch of the Orbital Sciences venture to resupply the ISS, and this URL appeared as the first search result. I've read your site guidelines, as well as the many comments on this news page, and as a lay person I humbly offer this question, which I hope someone will answer: Why was there no escape rocket atop the rocket's payload module? Was it considered cost-prohibitive? Thanks for your time. Cordially, Steve Logsdon. Post Script: I hope you won't think it patronizing of me to observe that I found the apparent erudition and literacy of the contributors to this web page to be most impressive.

narag• 12 years ago

With no human lives involved, I guess the cost of the payload is insignificant compared with the rocket, maybe even with the escape rocket.

Pinckney• 12 years ago

Antares has a maximum payload of 6000kg. This is roughly the same as the launch mass of the Apollo command module, which weighed 5500kg. To rescue the command module in an emergency, Apollo missions had a 4200kg launch escape system. So we might expect a escape rocket to cost Antares almost half of its payload capacity.

Furthermore, adding a launch escape system would mean adding parachutes and flotation to a payload which otherwise doesn't need it.

alexvr• 12 years ago

I was planning to watch it the night before, but it was cancelled because of a sailboat or something nearby. How silly, I thought. It's not like it's going to explode...

Evolved• 12 years ago

So on one hand it is possible and encouraged to fail out of sheer ambition yet on the other hand it is possible to fail due to ignorance or laziness.

Therefore failure does not always occur when one is trying too hard because it is also feasible to fail when not trying hard enough.

notjustanymike• 12 years ago

Someone accidentally hit spacebar twice.

Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

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