SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon CRS SpX-1 MISSION GENERAL DISCUSSION

[Ben the Space Brit]

The ORBCOMM prototype satellite was, at best, a side show in the eyes of the public.

Personally, outside of ORBCOMM shareholders, staff and space geeks (like ourselves), I suspect that the ORBCOMM end of the mission was entirely unknown.  Certainly, I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the press coverage of the launch so far.

[simonbp]

If you're that paranoid about "debris flying overhead", I suggest you don't go near a Delta II launch...

Indeed. Imagine the bellyaching if this happened to Falcon...

[MP99]

But since there is only one (?) flight of Merlin 1C left, and then SpaceX transitions to the very different Merlin 1D, the failure has come at about the worst time in that version's manufacturing cycle.  SpaceX has a few hard decisions to make going forward (in my view).  While unlikely, they might wish to transition earlier to the F9v1.1 than they had planned...but that creates it own set of problems.  Tough call and I wish them the best.

I could see SpX-2 going up on v1.1.

If that happens, who'll give me odds on 9 "special offer" F1's appearing on the sales page to, use up those M1Cs? ;-)

cheers, Martin

Amusing thought but unlikely.  Considering the costs involved in restarting the line, producing Falcon 1s, marketing to sell the flights.  From a business perspective it would be more cost effective to strip the excess engines of common parts to feed back into the manufacturing line and scrap the non-common parts.

Agreed with all that (and I did put a smiley in there, too).

However, SpaceX moved payloads from F1e to secondary payloads on F9. That makes a lot of sense with the performance of v1.1, because I believe it works out much cheaper. But, it puts the secondary at risk if there's a performance issue or shortfall, and I suspect the keep-away requirement for ISS may be larger (quite rightly) than it would be for other objects, so Orbcomm couldn't be lofted to an intermediate orbit. That suggests the risk to secondaries on CRS flights may be a bit higher than it would be when sharing with other primaries.

OTOH, once v1.1 is flying, I believe there'll be a lot more spare performance on CRS flights because pressurised cargo will still be volume limited, so maybe this becomes less of an issue after SpX-2.

Cheers, Martin

[ugordan]

Thank you for your insight and trajectory calculations of unplanned exploded\ejected debris.

45th Space Wing's safety record speaks for itself. Quite simply put, if your viewing location was deemed unsafe in a worst case scenario of total vehicle destruction, you would not have been allowed to watch the launch from that particular location.

You can be sarcastic all you want, my point still stands. Neither NASA PAO was an official flight source nor was your location in danger.

[MP99]

If you're a customer thinking about launching on some launch vehicle, I think you should look at primary payload success separate from secondary payload success. In that case, currently it is 100% (within, say, half a launch either way) for primary missions and much less than that for secondary (you might even want to count the failure of relight on Falcon 9 flight 1 in that case... though, of course, that was clearly a development flight).

How about:-

"If you're a primary payload customer thinking about launching on some launch vehicle, I think you should look at primary payload success separate from secondary payload success" ?

0/1 on secondaries (seems reasonable not to count F9 #001, to me).

cheers, Martin

[ugordan]

Indeed. Imagine the bellyaching if this happened to Falcon...

I was thinking about up to 6 pieces of "debris" that are released from the vehicle at about T+60 s which for all practical purposes present the same amount of "risk" to an observer several miles upstream of the pad.

[MP99]

In my opinion, mission-wise, a second stage restart failure, if that turns out to be the case, is more significant to potential SpaceX customers than the first stage engine shutdown, because a restart issue would be a flat out launch failure.

I would agree, but note that Chris' article says something different (and you have access to check out the source on L2, too, I think):-

Source information (L2 LINK) noted the health checks were specific to the stage’s pneumatic pressure, tank pressures, propellant mass, attitude and orbital radius, with some of the checks being carried out at SECO-1 during the mission, with another check scheduled at SES-2 (Second Engine Start 2).

Unfortunately, the propellant mass check at SECO-1 failed to pass the requirements to ensure safe insertion of Orbcomm and the second stage in an orbit away from Station, resulting in no second burn commanded.

cheers, Martin

Edit: oops, Ed's post was before Chris's article was published (I noticed it when quoted on a more recent post), so I changed "remember that" to "note that".

[iamlucky13]

It also occurs to me, it worth asking: if this had occurred on a manned flight would it have triggered activation of the LAS on dragon or would the flight have continued on the other 8 (considering the apparent violence of the failure, brief though it was)?

It depends where they are in the flight. The basic answer is at EVERY stage in the flight, there will be a set of conditions of things that can go wrong, and the response.

For example, a single engine out that leaves you with insufficient velocity to reach the intended orbit does not mean you can't simply abort to whatever orbit you do reach, then handle your re-entry at appropriate leisure (and target) instead of firing the abort motors and coming down where ever you may.

It would be worthwhile to review the shuttle abort modes. The options are a little different for a capsule atop two liquid stages than for a glider with a solid stage 0, but it's a good start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes

[Prober]

   
I would say a reasonable definition of a full launch failure is one which would cause the crew of a manned vehicle to do an abort and leave the launch vehicle early and not enter a useful orbit, since that is partially what people use these statistics for (i.e. calculating launch vehicle safety). Clearly that wasn't the case in this flight.

When people think of a launch failure, they think of this:


They don't think of slight underperformance as a full launch failure.

 

Well, it depends on who 'they' are. Not everyone is focussed on the manned case. This particular case is a grey area - how much underperformance is 'slight'? When a Proton upper stage strands its payload in LEO rather than GTO, that's counted as a full failure.

Is it fair to say that Falcon 9 has a 100 percent success rate after 4 flights? I think that is rather generous. 75 percent, per Ed's rule? That does seem harsh.  96 percent, by my rule? I feel that's reasonable.

I look at the total mission so you have Dragon to usable orbit "success". 
2nd payload, 2nd stage engine no restart "failure". 

[Robotbeat]

If you're a customer thinking about launching on some launch vehicle, I think you should look at primary payload success separate from secondary payload success. In that case, currently it is 100% (within, say, half a launch either way) for primary missions and much less than that for secondary (you might even want to count the failure of relight on Falcon 9 flight 1 in that case... though, of course, that was clearly a development flight).

How about:-

"If you're a primary payload customer thinking about launching on some launch vehicle, I think you should look at primary payload success separate from secondary payload success" ?

0/1 on secondaries (seems reasonable not to count F9 #001, to me).

cheers, Martin

There were secondaries on some of the other flights, too. But yeah, the track record for secondaries isn't nearly as good as for primaries. And probably will never be as good.

[meekGee]

Why don't they use pop corn as packaging ? It would turn packaging into valuable payload ... 

Hard to get the butter off of everything later, zero-g and all.

Dunno... I think that problem can be licked :p

If there's one thing worse than a dictionary war, it's a pun war.

[upjin]

If you're a customer thinking about launching on some launch vehicle, I think you should look at primary payload success separate from secondary payload success. In that case, currently it is 100% (within, say, half a launch either way) for primary missions and much less than that for secondary (you might even want to count the failure of relight on Falcon 9 flight 1 in that case... though, of course, that was clearly a development flight).

How about:-

"If you're a primary payload customer thinking about launching on some launch vehicle, I think you should look at primary payload success separate from secondary payload success" ?

0/1 on secondaries (seems reasonable not to count F9 #001, to me).

cheers, Martin

What some people have posted about failure is illogical, because failure can imply a catastrophe and never getting to orbit or they are categorizing launches in a way that you can't separate a catastrophe from fulfilling the primary objective.

It is logical to separate the success of the launch, the primary mission, and the secondary mission.

If they resupply the ISS and the primary mission goes as planned, then that should be categorized as a success.

The secondary mission shouldn't be categorized as a complete failure, because again, it creates a situation where you can't distinguish a catastrophe on the launch pad from deploying the satellite into orbit. 

We don't know what the complete mission objectives of ORBCOMM's prototype satellite is.  It could be that even at the lower orbit, the prototype satellite may be able to complete it's mission.  Not reaching the proper orbit is a failure, but you can't say the mission was a failure.  This is where it appears more clarification is needed, after being placed in a lower orbit, how much of it's objectives can the ORBCOMM prototype satellite fulfill?

In this context, one could argue for scores in the range of 80% to 95%.  It is probably better to describe the mission as mostly successful with some issues or failures.

It is fair to say that companies need to keep their eyes on both the primary and secondary payload success rate, and see them as separate. 

And it's equally fair to say that SpaceX has accidentally proved it's engine-out capability.  In the greater scheme of things, this may work out to SpaceX's advantage.  It is better that this happens now, before any manned missions, because they will have seen it and have data on it.  It will help them with future designs, procedures, and contingency plans.

[iamlucky13]

In car racing terms, this sounds more like a cracked cylinder head vs. a blown engine where the block fractures and the bolts let go.

In terms of impact to the vehicle, yes. General audiences aren't familiar with multi-engine vehicles, but they are familiar with multi-cylinder vehicles.

In terms what actually happened, perhaps. However, as someone else pointed out previously, the energy contained in a rocket combustion chamber at any given instant is nowhere near as large as you tend to expect. If the chamber blows completely apart, the contents under pressure expand into an area several times the size of the chamber, even in the tightly packed engine bay of the Falcon. Thus, the pressure immediately drops to a fraction of what it was, and even that is almost certainly more than enough to blow off the fairing, dropping the pressure further. Then you just have fuel streaming out and burning, but no faster really than it was before and at lower pressure, and for less than a second before it's cut off...in theory too quickly to overheat anything in the engine bay.

So I'm not making guesses about exactly how severe the dome failure was, because I'm not sure what we saw is not consistent with a fairly complete rupture of the dome.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/rockets/why-the-engine-failure-could-be-good-news-for-spacex-13520351?src=rss

Who is this Rand Simberg, and why is he claiming absolute knowledge of what failed, in apparent contradiction to Chris' article stating that SpaceX says the fuel dome ruptured ? 

I think he was confused by SpaceX's first release on the anomaly (the "did not explode" quote), added in some of the speculation from the NSF forum as a source, mixed it with a bit of PM lingo (tends to be automotive based), and didn't have the same sources as Chris had for his article.

He refers to the powerhead as "the part that would have the potential to 'explode,'" suggesting he means the combustion chamber, and claims this remained intact. Chris, however, referenced a source in his article that the fuel dome failed...maybe this is not technically the chamber itself, but it is very close to it.

He states, "The company says that the visuals from the long-range camera show not an explosion, but rather an implosion" and then links to a source where they never use any word synonymous with implosion, but instead indicate a pressure release, which while it may not be an explosion, is still opposite of implosion and contraindicated by the video.

He also implies the fairing is not aerodynamically self-supporting, which I doubt for several reasons, and collapsed inward despite no other sources reporting the same. Chris's article states the opposite. However, a couple posters speculated almost exactly the same thing earlier in our discussion here.

So with due respect to Mr. Simberg, I think he jumped to some conclusions prematurely. I'll overlook the unclear terminology like "powerhead" because PM has a different audience than NSF.

And as a side note, this is why Chris has asked us many times to be careful to be clear when we are speculating. This would not be the first time journalists browsing NSF mistook speculation for authority, which can be pretty tempting considering how many posters with authoritative knowledge we have among us.

[GalacticIntruder]

I will attempt to sum up the F9 post launch debacle.

SpX: We may leave a trail of parts, and our boards are flashing yellow, but we still get our crap to orbit. That is what matters most. Get off our backs. That is why we have 9 freaking engines!!!! Run Flat Tires Baby.

Space Industry Elite: You are young and irresponsible. Everything must be perfect or there will be dire consequences. Even if the odds are literally astronomical and nothing bad happens, any risk is too much. Stand down all operations for several months until you address it. Might even need a Congressional Committee.

Is SpaceX closer to Soviet era space philosophy rather than West/NASA/USAF space philosophy? I mean the way SpX handles their design and operations.

[meekGee]

I will attempt to sum up the post F9 launch debacle.

SpX: We may leave a trail of parts, and our boards are flashing yellow, but we still get our crap to orbit. That is what matters most. Get off our backs. That is why we have 9 freaking engines!!!! Run Flat Tires Baby.

Space Industry Elite. You are young and irresponsible. Everything must be perfect or there will be dire consequences. Even if the odds are literally astronomical and nothing bad happens, any risk is too much. Stand down all operations for several months until you address it. Might even need a Congressional Committee.

Is SpaceX closer to Soviet era space philosophy rather than West/NASA/USAF space philosophy? I mean the way SpX handles their design and operations.

This is a good summary of some of the more extreme positions that were implied by some of the posters here...   It is not a summary of the incident or the responses or attitudes of NASA or SpaceX to it.

[edfishel]

You nailed it, Galactic Intruder.

[mr. mark]

I will attempt to sum up the post F9 launch debacle.

SpX: We may leave a trail of parts, and our boards are flashing yellow, but we still get our crap to orbit. That is what matters most. Get off our backs. That is why we have 9 freaking engines!!!! Run Flat Tires Baby.

Space Industry Elite. You are young and irresponsible. Everything must be perfect or there will be dire consequences. Even if the odds are literally astronomical and nothing bad happens, any risk is too much. Stand down all operations for several months until you address it. Might even need a Congressional Committee.

Is SpaceX closer to Soviet era space philosophy rather than West/NASA/USAF space philosophy? I mean the way SpX handles their design and operations.

Space Industry Elite as you call it knows the "risks" and what needs to be validated. They are professionals including the engineers at SpaceX. You can count on a review before anything goes up. This is not Ice Road Truckers where you fix things on the side. SpaceX knows that. 

[system9]

Thank you for your insight and trajectory calculations of unplanned exploded\ejected debris.

45th Space Wing's safety record speaks for itself. Quite simply put, if your viewing location was deemed unsafe in a worst case scenario of total vehicle destruction, you would not have been allowed to watch the launch from that particular location.

You can be sarcastic all you want, my point still stands. Neither NASA PAO was an official flight source nor was your location in danger.

That's interesting since they came on 7 minutes before launch and warned us we were on our own if something went wrong. There was an OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT made over the PA stating we were potentially in harms way.

Also, if your script says "all 9 Merlin engines are operating normally" and you are supposed to mindlessly read that 2 minutes after launch... You are either psychic or you need a better script.  /out.

[plank]

I was following this thread for quite sometime now and I still don't know whats going on.   I mean did the engine explode or did it not explode?

[Chandonn]

I was following this thread for quite sometime now and I still don't know whats going on.   I mean did the engine explode or did it not explode?

Per the official statement from SpaceX: the engine did not explode, as they continued to receive date from it.