Today's Antares launch just failed

Today's Antares launch just failed. From watching the replay on CNN, my
guess is that one of the first stage (Russian) engines failed. The
vehicle came down with what appeared to be at least one of the engines
still firing. Of course when it hit the ground there was a big
fireball.

This is a sad day for Orbital.

Wolf Blitzer had to remind the American public that the vehicle, which
was to travel to the International Space Station, was unmanned. Well,
duh! No manned US spacecraft is even remotely ready to fly astronauts
into orbit, let alone to ISS. :-(

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...


Today's Antares launch just failed. From watching the replay on CNN, my
guess is that one of the first stage (Russian) engines failed. The
vehicle came down with what appeared to be at least one of the engines
still firing. Of course when it hit the ground there was a big
fireball.

This is a sad day for Orbital.

Wolf Blitzer had to remind the American public that the vehicle, which
was to travel to the International Space Station, was unmanned. Well,
duh! No manned US spacecraft is even remotely ready to fly astronauts
into orbit, let alone to ISS. :-(

Jeff

Yeah, woke up from a nap to this.
(not nearly as bad as when my wife woke me up from a nap to tell me about
Columbia thankfully!)

Very sad.

This IS rocket science folks. Unfortunately.



--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net

I was going to say, failed is rather an understatement.
Seems not enough checking was done here. Does not matter where the engines
were from, I feel a flaw big enough for that to happen should have been
spotted in an x ray of a part.
The other issue of course is that the vehicle is not fault tolerent.
Orbital seem to have this kind of way of working. In thepast this has been
obvious.
Not probably possible in this case, but considering the cost of the gear
being transported nowadays, surely they could fit some kind of escape system
to save the cargo?
Brian

--
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"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

Today's Antares launch just failed. From watching the replay on CNN, my
guess is that one of the first stage (Russian) engines failed. The
vehicle came down with what appeared to be at least one of the engines
still firing. Of course when it hit the ground there was a big
fireball.

This is a sad day for Orbital.

Wolf Blitzer had to remind the American public that the vehicle, which
was to travel to the International Space Station, was unmanned. Well,
duh! No manned US spacecraft is even remotely ready to fly astronauts
into orbit, let alone to ISS. :-(

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

JF Mezei wrote on 10/28/2014 :

And if we look at the video where the rocket stayed in upwards
orientation, what would have happened if, instead of range safety, they
triggered stage separation and got stage2 to fire away ? It wouldn't
have had the "umph!" to get to orbit, and likelly spashed down in ocean,
but at least would have reduce impact at the launch site and preserved
the rest of rocket for investigation. Thoughts ?

The flight path would be too unpredictable to be able to do that
without dramatically increasing the risk of serious consequences.

/dps

--
There's nothing inherently wrong with Big Data. What matters, as it
does for Arnold Lund in California or Richard Rothman in Baltimore, are
the questions -- old and new, good and bad -- this newest tool lets us
ask. (R. Lerhman, CSMonitor.com)

This is all down to we don't do it that way here' again I think.
With no proven model of what might happen, they prefer it to just go boom
where it is it seems. Russia on the other hand seem to do it the, well if it
fails it just crashes way, but then, there are no huge cities near where
they launch from, and one wonders what they would do if a launch did go the
wrong way and end up over somewhere populated.

Being contracted to Nasa and in the US they probably have to do it the
accepted way. I'd not chance a second stage sep at almost on the ground to
do much else than comlicate the issues.
Brian

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From the Sofa of Brian Gaff Reply address is active
"JF Mezei" wrote in message
eb.com...
On 14-10-28 18:38, Jeff Findley wrote:

Today's Antares launch just failed. From watching the replay on CNN, my
guess is that one of the first stage (Russian) engines failed. The
vehicle came down with what appeared to be at least one of the engines
still firing. Of course when it hit the ground there was a big
fireball.


video of launch. there are others but this was posted minutes after event.

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


nasa press conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=y5HaD5zZjeE


Range safety was triggered just before Antares hit ground.

Are the engines built in Russia or built in USA with a license from
Russia ? I know they are tested at Stennis.

Anyone know how much horizontal travel the rocket would have done in the
roughly 6-10 seconds after launch ?


Once the kerosene has been pre-heated into gas, is the rest of the
engines fairly similar to a shuttle engine with a high pressure turbine
pushing/mixing the gases into the combustion chamber ?


When they execute range safety, what happens to a second stage made of
solid fuel ? Does it ignite it ?

And if we look at the video where the rocket stayed in upwards
orientation, what would have happened if, instead of range safety, they
triggered stage separation and got stage2 to fire away ? It wouldn't
have had the "umph!" to get to orbit, and likelly spashed down in ocean,
but at least would have reduce impact at the launch site and preserved
the rest of rocket for investigation. Thoughts ?

In article ,
says...

Yeah, woke up from a nap to this.
(not nearly as bad as when my wife woke me up from a nap to tell me about
Columbia thankfully!)

Very sad.

This IS rocket science folks. Unfortunately.

This is the "rocket science" of expendables. When a launch fails this
close to the launch pad, it's clearly some sort of "infant mortality"
problem. Because of this, I'd argue that if the stage was reusable,
this could have been caught on a test flight without a customer's
payload on top. Expendables may "maximize your payload for the size of
the vehicle", but that doesn't matter one bit if your payload goes up in
a fireball near the launch pad.

If SpaceX can pull off a re-flight of one of its Falcon 9R first stages
next year, this will be game changing for the industry.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

In article ,
says...

I was going to say, failed is rather an understatement.
Seems not enough checking was done here. Does not matter where the engines
were from, I feel a flaw big enough for that to happen should have been
spotted in an x ray of a part.
The other issue of course is that the vehicle is not fault tolerent.
Orbital seem to have this kind of way of working. In thepast this has been
obvious.
Not probably possible in this case, but considering the cost of the gear
being transported nowadays, surely they could fit some kind of escape system
to save the cargo?

Escape systems are a concept invented to save a crew from an exploding
(expendable) launch vehicle and cut into payload.

What is needed is reusability. This problem likely would have been
caught on a test flight, if the first stage were reusable.

My guess is that Orbital will accelerate their plans to use ATK solid
stages to replace their current liquid fueled first stage. The supply
of used, surplus Russian engines was always limited and they knew they'd
have to do something about this situation in the long run. Gambling on
these "cheap" engines doesn't seem to have paid off.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

In article om,
says...


Are the engines built in Russia or built in USA with a license from
Russia ? I know they are tested at Stennis.

If memory serves, they are surplus engines from the failed Soviet N-1
lunar launch vehicle program dating back to the 1960's. In other words,
they are "new, old stock" engines that have been sitting in storage for
about 40 to 50 years. The engines are imported into the US and have
their control systems replaced with modern components (by Aerojet?)
before they are handed over to Orbital.

Anyone know how much horizontal travel the rocket would have done
in the roughly 6-10 seconds after launch ?

Very little. I would expect massive launch pad damage if the kerosene
from the first stage burned on the steel launch pad structure. I
shouldn't have to remind anyone what happens when a large kerosene fire
happens on a steel structure. :-(

When they execute range safety, what happens to a second stage made of
solid fuel ? Does it ignite it ?

No. Solid fuel must be under high pressure to burn. A range safety
charge typically blows off the nozzle or "unzips" the side of the solid
rocket motor casing. Either of these prevents the pressure build-up
needed for energetic burning of the solid fuel. The "old engineer's
story" related to this was the tale of the solid rocket propulsion guy
who used a chunk of solid rocket fuel as an ash tray to demonstrate the
inability of solid rocket fuel to burn at atmospheric pressure.

There will certainly be some burning of solid fuel if burning kerosene
gets on it, but it won't be "energetic" since any burning will be at sea
level pressure. And I'd expect the solid fuel would stop burning much
at all once the kerosene is all burned off.

And if we look at the video where the rocket stayed in upwards
orientation, what would have happened if, instead of range safety, they
triggered stage separation and got stage2 to fire away ? It wouldn't
have had the "umph!" to get to orbit, and likelly spashed down in ocean,
but at least would have reduce impact at the launch site and preserved
the rest of rocket for investigation. Thoughts ?

Range safety is triggered when you don't know what happened but you want
to prevent any collateral damage to populated areas. You'd have a
possibly uncontrolled 2nd stage in that case. At the very least, the
2nd stage might not be pointed in the correct direction. Worst case,
failure of the first stage could be a control system problem which would
mean the 2nd stage might very well be uncontrollable too. Lighting a
possibly uncontrollable solid fueled 2nd stage would absolutely,
positively, NOT BE A GOOD IDEA in a situation like this.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

In article ,
says...

Yeah, woke up from a nap to this.
(not nearly as bad as when my wife woke me up from a nap to tell me about
Columbia thankfully!)

Very sad.

This IS rocket science folks. Unfortunately.

This is the "rocket science" of expendables. When a launch fails this
close to the launch pad, it's clearly some sort of "infant mortality"
problem. Because of this, I'd argue that if the stage was reusable,
this could have been caught on a test flight without a customer's
payload on top. Expendables may "maximize your payload for the size of
the vehicle", but that doesn't matter one bit if your payload goes up in
a fireball near the launch pad.

If SpaceX can pull off a re-flight of one of its Falcon 9R first stages
next year, this will be game changing for the industry.

Yeah. This is one of the lessons I think we CAN take from the shuttle
program. Reusability at the very least lets you gain experience with the
same engines and equipment. While it may not have been economic to refly
the SRBs (the SSMEs probably were economic to refly) we did gain a pretty
good database of real flight data. More so from than say the F-1s at the
bottom of the Atlantic.



Jeff

--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net

As soon as its evident there is a major problem as far as I am aware. they
need to make sure all data is preserved etc.
As for the surviving parts, I imagine some evidence of destruction or
otherwise will be seen in various views of the explosions.

It did state that debris was around the pad area, so one would imagine the
heavier and less destructable the debris, the closer to the pad or the
explosion it will be found.

Brian

--
From the Sofa of Brian Gaff Reply address is active
"JF Mezei" wrote in message
eb.com...
NASA released a simgle image, aereal view of the launch pad.

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/octob.../#.VFF_5ee6BoU


There appears to be very little debris. Is this because NASA deliberatly
chose to release an image that has the real debris out of camera angle ?

Or because the self-destruct really results in little to no debris ?

Is it possible stage 2 and or 3 fell in water and not visible ?

Is payload also destroyed or just separated from rocket when range
safety is activated ?


Is it fair to state that there will be little to no information gathered
from the debris, and the investigation will focus on the videos and
telemetry as well as all the actions between the last engine test and
failure ?

(I ask in a context where aircraft engines generally survive a crash and
provide valuable information).

Also, during an "event" like last night's, must the flight controller
wait until no telemetry is reveived from the ship before declaring the
"lock down" to secure all computers etc ?

Say the Cygnus had fallen onto water, floating and still sending out
telemetry while there is the "towering inferno" at the pad from the
failed rocket, at what point does the flight controller declare the
lockdown ?