FAILURE: SpaceX Falcon I Launch III - August 2

[jimvela]

Great, tonight Alt.Space died and with it all hope of making the space program viable in the long term.

Nothing is dead.  SpaceX learned another valuable lesson. Bought it the hard way.  Bet they wish now they stopped to inspect that launch vehicle to see why the turbopump pressure was low.  (if that is indeed why they had the first abort)

If it was hosed, remember that the gas generator exhaust is used for roll control...

Maybe next time they actually scrub for a day and go out and inspect the vehicle- like the mature providers do.

Maybe they also put formal rules in place about just what limits exactly someone can tweak on the spur of the moment without analysis.  You'd think after the first embarrassing abort that they'd have thoroughly reviewed EVERY limit, and that tweaking one in a fit of launch fever would be less likely, not more.

[Rocket Rancher]

Did anyone else notice a puff of flame around the engine shortly after liftoff? That's about when I noticed the roll oscillations started.

 I saw it too but thought it was noise in the video feed

[pbreed]

My post to Arocket before the launch.....

I wish them the very best.
I hope they make orbit with 100%  of mission objectives met.

If I had to make guesses where things might go wrong:

5% chance roll problems with the new Merlin 1C, this is a new  chamber design.
I hope they have enough roll authority.


10% chance that the 2nd stage was not slosh but something else.
It would be real easy to write a spacecraft simulator where one made assumptions about things that might matter in the real world.
I'm thinking of things like the electric motors in the TVC actuators imparting a torque offset from the CG,
leading to the sort of conning error we saw last time.

[shuttle_buff]

It appeared there was a fire (again) on the engine below. Hard to tell. I saw it and was concerned.

[Oberon_Command]

Did anyone else notice a puff of flame around the engine shortly after liftoff? That's about when I noticed the roll oscillations started.

 I saw it too but thought it was noise in the video feed

That's what I thought as well, but I didn't see it again... the replay will probably show it better.

[DaveS]

It appeared there was a fire (again) on the engine below. Hard to tell. I saw it and was concerned.

Nope. That was nominal plume expansion due to lower ambient pressure on the exhaust plume. Happens on all launch vehicles.

[EE Scott]

From website:
T+140s: Vehicle switching to inertial guidance mode. 1050 m/s, altitude of 35 km

Any possible issue with inertial guidance system?

[Jim]

I'm thinking of things like the electric motors in the TVC actuators

They are hydraulic

[CzarB]

That seems like it was really close to first stage MECO/sep....

Yes.  Video was stopped at about 2 min 20 sec.  Second stage pressurization was supposed to be at 2 min 25 sec, then MECO at 2 min 38 sec. and stage sep at 2 min 39 sec. 

 - Ed Kyle

2 min 11 sec according to the onscreen counter.    Below is last frame captured by my stream before Quicktime splashscreen.

[dmc6960]

It appeared there was a fire (again) on the engine below. Hard to tell. I saw it and was concerned.

Nope. That was nominal plume expansion due to lower ambient pressure on the exhaust plume. Happens on all launch vehicles.

Yes, but almost immediately I recall there being extra brightness and extra buldgyness in the exhaust plume in the upper right of our view.  That could have been the GG exhaust if the rocketcam was in a different spot this time.  Hard to tell.

[Zachstar]

Well seeing as thinking about what happened before they give us any PR info is rather useless I would like to talk future...

This is the 3rd failure... And worse than that it is the 3rd failure of a LONG period. So if you say "so they will just do an investigation and fix it" Fix what? Problem 3 out of 100? What will go wrong next?

The solar sail spacecraft is the worst loss yet in my view.. It had the means to actually give a historic first for SpaceX because solar sails have been dreamed of for decades...

3 failures done THIS bad with PR would kill a public funded company. Especially when launches took this long....

So what now? Obviously they Can't pack up and go to Tesla... They have a COTS mission to do...

They need to fail and fail and fail until they fix this thing. No more .gov payloads... No more student projects... No more anything. They need to build and launch build and launch. That is how the best aircraft engines ever made were built to last.. They were run and run and run until they fell apart...

[ZeeNL]

I still don't think it was the roll "oscillations." They were not getting bigger before the feed was cut, maybe smaller even.

[pbreed]

>The rolling did look odd like it was fighting some consistent torque in the other >direction. I don't recall that from last time.

The old chamber was ablative, the new chamber extension is a helically wound
tube wall chamber, it WILL induce a consistent rolling torque  on the vehicle.

Note in  the time line that at 2:20 about where it went bang the system shifts to "inertial guidance mode".  so it could also have been an inertial guidance failure.

[Dalon]

Yeah, but Sealaunch showed their defeat.

We still have never seen the first flight failure from the ground.

I doubt we will see this one.

Geez, I wish I had gotten the job on Kwaj a few years back, I could report what really happened.

While SeaLaunch did show their explosion, I think it was only because it happened DURING launch, a time when a lot of fire and smoke is expected.  I think the only reason we saw that SeaLaunch explosion is because they weren't as quick on the kill-switch as they would liked to have been.

SeaLaunch DID quickly (like within 5 seconds) cut the entire video feed and went right to a SeaLaunch logo screen with no explanations at all.

SpaceX actually did more than SeaLaunch, in that they at least went back to their commentators and explained that there was an anomaly.  As for why they quickly went off the air, likely because SpaceX won't know the exact cause of the anomaly was for days or weeks. 

I guess we're all so used to the press endlessly speculating on things like this that we fail to remember that the answers to these things are usually weeks or months in coming. 

Had their commentators stayed on air, what could they possibly have said?  What intelligent observations could they have made?

At this early stage, probably none.

[Oberon_Command]

Solar sails seem to have bad luck with LVs... Wasn't there a solar sail spacecraft that was supposed to be launched on a Russian rocket, but that failed as well?

Is it possible that they only lost telemetry and that the vehicle is still going?

[pbreed]

>They are hydraulic
Not on the 2nd stage, if you read the comment I posted carefully the rool refered to the first stage, and the tvc sim question had to do with possible issues with the 2nd stage other than slosh. The TVC's on the 2nd stage are electric.


Paul

[DaveS]

Solar sails seem to have bad luck with LVs... Wasn't there a solar sail spacecraft that was supposed to be launched on a Russian rocket, but that failed as well?

Is it possible that they only lost telemetry and that the vehicle is still going?

Yep, Cosmos-1. Launched on converted SLBM called Volna that had a terrible track-record.

[William Graham]

Solar sails seem to have bad luck with LVs... Wasn't there a solar sail spacecraft that was supposed to be launched on a Russian rocket, but that failed as well?

Cosmos-1, which was supposed to be orbited by a Volna. IIRC, the rocket launched and was never seen or heard from again.

Japan's solar sail failed to contact the ground after launch in 2006, but the launch was successful.

[clongton]

There was nothing they could say. At least they had the courtesy to say there had been an anomaly and that they would get back to us as soon as they had something to say. Only then did they cut the feed. Really, what else could they do, just sit there and smile?

[tnphysics]

Hope problem doesn't carry over to F9.