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

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

"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

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

--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________


"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

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