Shyster's thread of Spaaaace.

[Silentom]

Boom.

[Shyster]

Obviously a Very Bad Day for SpaceX as well as Spacecom and Israel Aerospace Industries, who respectively are the owner and manufacturer of the Amos-6 satellite that was lost in this accident. You can see the payload fairing with Amos-6 inside fall at 1:20 and separately kablooey on the ground at 1:24. This was a test-fire for a launch that was supposed to take place Saturday morning. Each test-fire runs through the full launch sequence including a brief fire of the first-stage engines. This explosion, however, happened long before ignition and even before retraction of the strongback launch tower, which starts at T-0:03:30. I'm not sure what could have caused an explosion at that point.

This is a severe setback for SpaceX. Not only did they lose a vehicle and payload, but the damage to LC-40 may be serious. We can see from the video that the top of the strongback launch tower has been heavily damaged, and who knows how much damage there may be to the plumbing, storage vessels, etc. around the pad. SpaceX was scheduled to launch up to nine more missions this year (six of them from LC-40), and even if the cause of this incident is something easily identified and fixed, it might take months to repair the pad. While SpaceX is working on a second pad at LC-39A (one of the two former Saturn V/Space Shuttle pads), it's not yet ready to support launches yet.

In other bad space news, the Chinese (we think) launched the Gaofen-10 Earth-observation satellite earlier today aboard a Long March 4C rocket. China usually doesn't provide live coverage of launches and usually only confirms missions once the satellite has been successfully inserted into the intended orbit. The launch supposedly occurred more than 12 hours ago, but there's no news from the Chinese space agency. Neither have Earth-based tracking stations detected anything new in orbit, and there are some reports from the ground that local police and security officials are assisting with "satellite wreckage recovery tasks." So it looks like there were two rocket failures today.

Space is hard.

[dodint]

Do you have an insight as to if the payload is insured and how? My understanding was there was a $95M Facebook satellite on board that is now obviously a total loss.

[Gaucho]

Did the rocket yell allahu akbar before it went off?

[Shyster]

Do you have an insight as to if the payload is insured and how? My understanding was there was a $95M Facebook satellite on board that is now obviously a total loss.

https://twitter.com/pbdes/status/771409983074426881

Whether the "marine cargo" insurer will pay out is another matter entirely.

[dodint]

Daaamn. Nice.

[dodint]

Neat:

https://twitter.com/StateMachines/statu ... 5328459780

[Shyster]

User Squeazle on reddit, claiming to be with the CCAFS Fire Department, posted a few things in regard to LC-40 pad status. This information cannot be confirmed, but his post history seems to support that he lives in Florida and works at CCAFS.

While I am not an official spokesperson for either Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Fire Department or Kennedy Space Center Fire Department, I am a member of CCAFS FD and was on scene at yesterday's anomaly and was involved with the eventual extinguishment of the remaining fires. I can confirm that NO personnel from either side were injured or airlifted from the scene. The Air Force's Explosive Ordinance Disposal team preceded closely in front of fire crews and did a superb job clearing a path for us to follow and approach the pad.

[In response to a question as to how bad the pad was damaged] Quite. Granted, I'm not in construction or an engineer but it seems like it will be months before the pad is usable. Dozens of pressurized vessels and tanks were destroyed including 5-6 pressurized rail cars. The gantry itself, while still standing appears to be a total loss, as may be a lightening arrest tower at the corner of the pad. Several buildings located on or near the pad are either destroyed or severely damaged. There's no power at the moment and I can tell you from first-hand experience that the water mains and hydrants are compromised. Debris made it as far as pad 39A, which is quite a distance. They'll be finding pieces of it in the surrounding woods and beach line for years, just as they've found pieces of 1997's Delta II mishap as recently as a year or two ago. I have loads of pictures and video, including the initial walk-down of the pad with Fire, EOD, SpaceX, and AF investigators, and know people who have posted them to social media but without SpaceX' and the Air Force's expressed permission, I'm wary of posting them.

I'm fairly certain I saw a rocket motor, or at least it's nozzle, directly under the gantry on top of the pad and a black composite tank that looked fairly intact off in the field, but that's about all that was recognizable.

The hangar actually doesn't appear damaged but I'm sitting on the opposite side of the pad right now and can't see it close up. As for concrete, I'm not sure yet but plumbing and piping leading into/out of the pad definitely is.

[eddy]

do they know why it got all exploded yet?

[Kaiser]

my kerbal experience tells me they had the staging ordered wrong.

[robbiestoupe]

If my brother wasn't in Brazil at the moment I'd ask him. He usually runs these same tests in McGregor on the different stages.

[Shyster]

No official explanation yet, and I wouldn't expect one for a while. Even if there are already strong indicators a potential cause, I believe when investigating engineering disasters like this you want to assume nothing and make sure you investigate all possible faults before you draw any conclusions. I know that's how air-crash investigators work, and I'd think similar procedures would be called for here. All we really know is that there was a very sudden explosion that appears from the video to have come from somewhere around the middle of the upper stage. It's not clear whether it originated in the upper stage itself or originated from the strongback launch tower (which does have fuel, oxidizer, and LOX lines running though it). We know it didn't have anything to do with the Falcon 9's engines, as none were running or even preparing to ignite at the time.

From what I understand, this is the first time a launch vehicle has been destroyed on the pad in more than 30 years. I believe the last incident was Soyuz 7K-ST No. 16L, which was a manned launch to the old Salyut 7 space station (which was replaced by Mir). During final count a faulty valve caused a fuel leak that set the base of the Soyuz-U booster on fire. The Launch Escape System of the Soyuz spacecraft fired two seconds before the vehicle exploded, and the two crewmembers (Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov) both survived with only minor injuries. That was the only time in history that a Launch Escape System was ever "fired in anger" with an actual crew aboard. Plenty of other rockets have failed since, but they all did so off the ground.

[Shyster]

Long-Lost Comet Lander Philae Found:
http://www.seeker.com/philae-found-rose ... 32750.html

[Shyster]

The OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to launch tomorrow aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket between 7:05 and 9:05 p.m. EDT. So far the weather forecasts looks favorable for launch, and ULA and NASA are not working any problems.

Here's a NASA video describing the OSIRIS-REx mission:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IQDxm9oQWY

[Shyster]

The cause of the SpaceX pad failure seems to be proving to be elusive:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/774150065166229504
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/774150289314029568
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/774152037927792640
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/774153847371501569

[dodint]

Bummer.

Sabotage?

[Kaiser]

Check the video for jake busey

[Shyster]

Bummer.

Sabotage?

Unlikely, although SpaceX does not seem to be excluding that option. Musk responded to a couple people asking questions, and when Twitter user @ashwin7002 asked "there are some videos on YouTube claiming something hit the rocket. Any reality there?" Musk replied, "We have not ruled that out." In addition, user Matt Stohrer wrote, "that sound at 0:54 sounds like a metal joint popping under stress. e.g. weld failing on strut, welded seam bursting, etc." Musk replied, "Most likely true, but we can't yet find it on any vehicle sensors."

I think Matt Stohrer and Musk are referring to a version of the video that has been corrected to account for the time delay for sound between the pad and US Launch Report's camera, which was about 4km away. At around 1:18 of the video you can hear a creaking/popping sound, and the boom from the explosion reaches the camera about 6 seconds later. I think that's the sound in question.

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

[Shyster]

It's been known for quite a while now that Blue Origin has been working on a second orbital launch vehicle that will follow the New Shepherd launch vehicle, which is designed to carry space tourists on suborbital flights. Blue Origin has been developing the BE-4 main engine for that second rocket; it burns liquid methane and liquid oxygen and produce slightly more thrust than an RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engine. United Launch Alliance is planning to buy pairs of BE-4 engines to power its upcoming Vulcan rocket, which ULA is positioning as a "100% made in the USA" replacement for the Russian-powered Atlas V.

Jeff Bezos just gave more details on the new launcher that the BE-4 will power, and I think it's safe to say that it's going to be way larger than anyone thought. The "New Glenn" vehicle will have a first stage 7m in diameter (by comparison, a SpaceX Falcon 9 has a 3.7m core and a Delta IV has a 5m core) powered by seven BE-4s, a second stage with a single vacuum-optimized BE-4, and an optional third stage that is basically a reworked New Shepherd with a vacuum-optimized engine. This is one big honkin' rocket and much larger than what anyone was thinking.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/09 ... rbital-lv/



I'm not sure what exactly Bezos is going to do with this thing. It's comparable if not more capable than a Falcon Heavy and may overlap with the Block One versions of NASA's Space Launch System. It's way overkill for the vast majority of commercial satellite missions. I assume Bezos has plans for deeper space exploration much like Elon Musk and SpaceX have plans for a larger Mars rocket, and the New Glenn is designed for that mission. Bezos also hinted at a future "New Armstrong" rocket that would be even larger.

[Shyster]

For your entertainment here's a great old-school 1962 promotional film on the Saturn Propulsion System. The Saturn being covered in this film is the Saturn I, which was a smaller rocket preceding the better-known Saturn V. The Saturn I and IB rockets flew numerous proof-of-concept and test flights of Apollo hardware, including the unmanned Apollo 5 and manned Apollo 7 missions. After the moon landings were over, the Saturn I was used to ferry astronauts to Skylab and also launched the last flight of an Apollo service module (and the last U.S. spaceflight until the 1981 STS-1 Space Shuttle mission) for the 1975 Apollo–Soyuz Test Project.

The Saturn I's first stage was basically a cluster of strapped-together Redstone rocket tanks surrounding a Jupiter rocket tank. The contractor for that stage was actually the Chrysler corporation. The original Saturn I used an second stage called the S-IV, which was powered by 6 RL-10 engines. The RL-10 engine is still in use today more than 50 years later as a second-stage engine on both the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets. The later Saturn IB version used the S-IVB second stage with a single J-2 engine, which was identical to the third stage for the later Saturn V rocket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UcQC23sZ-I

[columbia]

YOU'VE NOW REACHED THE OUTER EDGES OF OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM


IT WOULD TAKE YOU ABOUT 23 MILLION YEARS OF CONTINUOUS SCROLLING ON THIS SCALE TO GET TO THE FARTHEST REGIONS OF THE OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE, ANOTHER 435,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 KM
OR 46 BILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY.

http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140 ... index.html

[Shyster]

SpaceX has apparently narrowed the cause of the Amos-6 pad failure to a failure in the second-stage helium pressurization system:

“At this stage of the investigation, preliminary review of the data and debris suggests that a large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place. At this time, the cause of the potential breach remains unknown."

Both stages of the Falcon 9 carry tanks of pressurized liquid helium that is used to maintain a constant pressure in the fuel and oxygen tanks as they drain in flight. Most rockets have such a pressurization system using either helium or nitrogen. For the Falcon 9, the helium is stored in composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) that are located inside the LOX tank. It looks like either one of those COPVs itself burst or the fittings/plumbing in the internal helium lines ruptured. The end result would be an overpressurization of the second stage and a burst from the pressure.

The in-flight breakup of the CRS-7 launch was also caused by a rupture of the helium system in the second stage. In that case SpaceX concluded that one of the metal struts holding a COPV in place broke (because the supplier was building them under spec), and the broken strut stretched and ruptured a helium line. It's certainly possible that earlier conclusion was wrong about a strut being the cause and this second failure was the same thing as the first. I would certainly hope that SpaceX is going to revisit that earlier investigation as part of this one.

SpaceX also said that the damage to LC-40, while significant, is not as bad as it could be, The support/assembly building adjacent to the pad is undamaged, the liquid-oxygen storage farm is undamaged and remains in good working order, and the RP-1 (kerosene) fuel farm was "largely unaffected." They could probably have LC-40 fixed by next spring, and LC-39A (the former Space Shuttle pad SpaceX is renting from NASA) is on track to be ready for launches in November. It will probably take long enough to complete the investigation and make any necessary changes that either or both of the Florida pads will be up and running by that time.

[shafnutz05]

Any of yinz ever do any binocular deep sky observing? I saw probably a dozen Messier objects in Scorpius/Sagittarius the other night. Just awesome. The open clusters (and the looser globular clusters) are breathtaking.

[dodint]

Yup. Binocular observing is highly underrated.

[Shyster]

Introducing the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA

Edit:

More details (Elon Musk is speaking right now):

The ITS will have tanks made of carbon fiber. Showed pictures of a massive test tank.

The first stage will have 42 Raptor engines, with a further 9 Raptors on the second stage.

SpaceX recently tested the first prototype Raptor engine. It burns liquid methane and liquid oxygen in a staged-combustion cycle. It's nearly the same size as the Merlin engine but produces 3× the trust because it operates at 3× the chamber pressure. Musk was surprised the first test engine didn't blow up.