Ouch:
…the Commercial Crew prospect – after enjoying a perfect flight in the air – suffered a mechanical failure during landing, resulting in her flipping over on the runway.
Hopefully it’s repairable.
[Update mid-afternoon]
Here’s the official statement from Sierra Nevada, trying to put the best face on things. And Alan Boyle is reporting that preliminary reports indicate that it will be fixable. “The pilot would have walked away.”
It’s interesting that they did the test on a Saturday. I wouldn’t have thought that Dryden employees would be thrilled about working weekends. Though maybe it’s a better day for getting airspace clearance. We used to do a lot of weekend flying with the T-39 for parabolic flight out of Mojave, because the Air Force was more flexible in terms of giving us a big box of air to work with.
Ouch is right!
Hrm…. Out chasing the dream, then it collapsed and flipped upside down on the rollout, kind of like a health care program we all know. But then the Dream Chaser wasn’t designed to crash like Obamacare, and wasn’t designed by a committee of lawyers.
I hope the pilot is uninjured. Back in Dryden’s heyday when something like that happened to a test pilot they’d just slap on some bionic replacement limbs, but now under Obamacare $6 million dollars is the deductible – and he’d be lucky to escape a death panel.
.
It’s an unpiloted vehicle.
So who do they name the street after?
I hear that it ended up right side up and “in one piece” but whether it’s repairable at an acceptable price I don’t yet know.
The whole matter could turn into another demonstration of how these days failures are unacceptable programmatically and in budgeting.
Keeping my fingers metaphorically crossed.
DC-X, SpaceShip One, Armadillo Aerospace, Dream Chaser —
It’s too bad we don’t have a government agency that could do basic research on things like landing-gear design, as the NACA did for aviation.
I remember someone suggesting, several years ago, that NASA fund a series of prizes for robust, light-weight landing-gear design.
I also remember being told that prizes were politically incorrect; that they would distract from COTS/CCDev, which was the only PC way for the government to support commercial space. Ironic, then, that a CCDev vehicle suffers a landing-gear failure.
It seems to me that spending several hundred thousand dollars on a prize which might save hundreds of millions would be a good investment for the taxpayers.
Nah. Clearly a ridiculous idea…..
Landing gear design is fairly well understood, but it is one of the more nitpicky aspects of the design of horizontal landing vehicles, and can be expensive to come up with ex nihilo. So most aircraft try to reuse an existing design whenever possible. I haven’t heard what SNC did for this vehicle.
I this this DreamChaser test article uses main gear units scavenged from an F-5A or T-38. I think the production DreamChasers will use heavier-capability F-5E main gears. Nose gear is a strut with a skid-pad, not wheel(s).
Is there a general problem in landing gear technology?
It would seem to me after a century of flight, that landing gear are pretty mature.
They apparently broke the first rule of flight test – “never raise the gear on first flight.”
And did they not have a backup system to force the gear down and locked?
Dream Chaser is a lifting body which means that even with the gear retracted, it has a lift over drag (glide) ratio somewhere between an anvil and an F-104 with an engine failure. Leaving the gear down for this test would’ve made things worse and wouldn’t have been representative glide test. IIRC, the only full scale flight test of a lifting body with the gear down the whole time was the M1F1 (the first lifting body aircraft) back in the early 1960s.
If the L/D is so bad (and I am fully aware of the aerodynamics of lifting bodies and other low aspect ratio vehicles), then the little bit of extra drag due to the gear won’t have that big an impact; I’d be more worried about the pitching moment. If the flight test landing gear lacks sufficient redundancy or testing to be high reliability in getting down and locked, then the prudent approach (pun semi-intended) is to pin the gear down. The GNC needs to handle it both ways anyway. The primary purpose of a first flight is to prove out the basic flying qualities anyway, not to show that the gear can be reliably extended.
Regarding the Saturday flight – EAFB standard practice in the past has been to put risky UAV testing on weekends. First flight of a new UAV is pretty much by definition high risk, so I can definitely see why they did this on Saturday.
And please don’t get me wrong – I’m rooting for SNC too. But ISTM this incident is showing their lack of experience as the vehicle prime. I’m surprised that Dryden didn’t kick them in the rear and tell them “no way in hell are you putting the gear up on first flight on MY range.”
The primary purpose of a first flight is to prove out the basic flying qualities anyway, not to show that the gear can be reliably extended.
By all accounts, the glide and approach portion of the test was successful.
I’m surprised that Dryden didn’t kick them in the rear and tell them “no way in hell are you putting the gear up on first flight on MY range.”
Go back and look at the history of perhaps all lifting body flight tests except the M2-F1. They all did their first flight with the gear up.
This is what testing is for. Let’s hope it doesn’t put them too far back.
I hope this isn’t too big of a setback. I think SNC is doing a spaceplane right; small, and capable of launching on an existing rocket. I’m really rooting for them.
spaceplanes are hard. The russians fooled around with it and abandoned their efforts.
The USAF and NASA have been playing with this and haven’t seen a good convergence
between capability and economics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
Smashing success by all accounts.
What, the government did something right? and in space? Careful or you will be banned on this blog for blasphemy 🙂
I thought Boeing built it?
Yes, but under the “old” “evil” government contractor funding model 🙂
Is there a way to do a spaceplane right?
Unless it’s an SSTO, you have horrible launch abort issues, and anything that damages the wings probably makes you crash and burn. You have to carry those wings into orbit and back, which directly subtracts from your payload. You have to land on a runway, which restricts your de-orbit capability. There’s almost nowhere else in the solar system where you can use the same technology, since it’s designed solely for use in Earth’s atmosphere.
It just seems a crazy idea to me.
“There’s almost nowhere else in the solar system where you can use the same technology”
This could be said for pretty much everything right now.
Assuming SpaceX go their suggested route of removing the parachutes from Dragon and landing on rocket thrust, it could be used many places in the solar system. You’d need to install larger fuel tanks if you couldn’t use aerodynamic braking, but that’s relatively simple compared to having to start again from scratch.
SpaceX isn’t going to remove the parachutes from Dragon. They will need them in the case of a launch abort, which will use the same Super Draco thrusters that would ordinarily be used for landing.
Rickl, the Dragon that takes you to orbit may not be the Dragon that lands you.
If you were to board a Dragon prepositioned in mars orbit you would have no need of parachutes. This is one of the reason they want to use a wider heat shield.
Unlike the Shuttle, Dream Chaser is a true lifting body. It doesn’t have wings like the Shuttle, just control surfaces. Since it rides on top of a rocket, it can’t be hit by ice like the Shuttle. SNC has designed a pusher launch escape system, so it’s better able to withstand an abort than the Shuttle. While it does have to land on a runway, it’ll have a greater cross-range capability than a capsule. Capsules can come down in water but if there isn’t a recovery ship in the neighborhood (perhaps a couple hundred miles), you could lose the crew.
That would certainly help, but you won’t get far without control surfaces, either. I remember John Young saying in an interview that if they’d known about the body flap flexing on STS-1 early in the launch, they’d have bailed out into the Atlantic because they didn’t think re-entry would be survivable. And Columbia was eventually lost on STS-107 due to damage exceeding the control authority of the elevons and rudder. Making a vertical lander aerodynamically stable is much easier.
The escape system sounds like another X-20. I read some of the reports on the tests Armstrong and others performed to simulate that system, and it still sounds pretty crazy; if I remember correctly, even Armstrong said he hoped he never had to fly it in a real X-20. It’s also more dead-weight they have to carry into space, unless they have a use for it once they’re up there.
Apollo could land anywhere. Water was preferred because a land landing had a much higher chance of injuring the crew, but they’d probably survive. However, I was thinking more of a vertical lander like Dragon, which could land pretty much anywhere there’s a fairly flat piece of ground. A spaceplane requires agreements with numerous airports around the world for emergency access, as the shuttle had.
I just don’t see what a spaceplane buys you that even begins to compensate for the problems it introduces. It may have appeared to make sense in the Von Braun era when we were going to be able to launch hundreds of flights a month, but not when you’re sticking it on a booster with a 1% failure rate.
From what I can find online, it appears they have two hybrid rocket engines built into Dream Catcher. Those rockets serve more than one function. For normal missions, those rockets fire similar to the Shuttle OMS engines for orbital insertion, maneuvering and the deorbit burn. They’re also the abort engines so they aren’t dead weight at all. They’ll be used on every flight.
Dreamchaser is a blended lifting body.
Trent,
More like shaken n’ stirred than blended now!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist that low-hanging fruit. hope they can come back from this.
My understanding of the Saturday flight time was that the AF had to close South Base to allow an unmanned vehicle fly over it, so Saturday was a better day for that. Secondly SN had to also cover the costs of closing – much less expensive on a Saturday morning.
I may be wrong, but it seems unlikely that SpaceX will remove the parachutes from manned Dragon missions. I doubt they have enough propellant margin to do an abort and a propulsion landing. That would make the chutes dead weight on most missions but that’s less of a loss than a conventional abort system like that on Orion.
Personally, I’d want to begin firing the Super Draco thrusters (perhaps at a low power setting) at 10,000 feet or higher during a normal descent and have the chutes as a reserve in case of problems. When I was a paratrooper, I always jumped with a reserve chute just in case. There was a limited window for deploying the reserve but it was good to know it was there.
Columbia was lost because of because of damage exceeding the control authority???? The effing wing burned off, and it was due to the leading edge TPS being damaged by insulation delaminating from the ET. Shuttle losses were due to systemic problems that date back to 1970’s decisions which were made to get enough political support to get it past Walter Mondale. Shuttle losses and the deaths of the astronauts on them are the fault of politicians and the blood is on the hands of Congress for those failures. Now, as to Dreamchaser, what part of test program does anyone not understand? The only problem they have is that their HTVL cannot be tested incrementally via runway hops as easily as another VTVL spaceplane I could name. The SNC folks will dust themselves off, figure out their problems, and move ahead. Probably will not delay them more than a few months if the current test article is repairable. Might take a bit longer if they have to build a second test article, but believe me, the second time is always easier.
Is it repairable? Look at the wreckage of the M2-F2 on Wikipedia. Bruce Peterson survived that 230 mph crash, and lived to a fairly ripe old age. The M2-F2 was repaired, and a central fin was added to correct the aerodynamic problem that gave Bruce his PIO problems (which opened every episode of the $6 million Dollar Man). The M2-F3, as it was renamed, flew 27 more times with no problems. It hangs in Air & Space Smithsonian today.
As for Dryden employees, they are the most dedicated you will find at NASA. They live for this, and work any and all hours they can.
Any plane wreck can be repaired if you’re willing to spend enough money on it. I’ve seen WWII warbird wrecks where about the only thing of value left was the data plate. The restoration wizards built a new plane and attached the old data plate, usually for several million dollars. The issue for Sierra Nevada is whether it’s worth spending however much it’d cost to repair this vehicle when they only planned to fly it a few times. Did they get enough usable data on the one flight to go forward? From all (sketchy) accounts I’ve seen, it looks like the glide and approach portions of the flight were good.
Hey, I know some body shops in east LA. A bit of hammering… a little Bondo… we be back in the rodeo.
Yes, and a couple of the X-15 airframes were damaged pretty bad as well, one from an explosion that blew the front end off. I believe Scott Crossfield was in it at the time. But they fixed it and flew them again and again :-).
From this source:
The first accident happened early in the program, when an engine explosion occurred during engine start, and the pilot [Scott Crossfield] was forced to land at the launch lake. Not all of the propellants jettisoned; also, the oil in the nose strut had become aerated. Thus, the aircraft was heavyweight and the nose strut did not provide the shock absorption it was designed for. In spite of this, the damage was minor and the airplane was back in the air in three months with a modified nose strut able to handle the landing loads.
The second landing accident was again caused by engine failure. Here the fuel was jettisoned but the landing flaps failed to extend. The landing was therefore fast and the high download on the main gear after nosewheel touchdown combined with a faulty weld, caused the left main gear to fail. The aircraft veered sideways and rolled over, damaging the wings; destroying the tail surfaces, and injuring the pilot [Jack McKay], who suffered three crushed vertebrae.
There was a third accident that killed Michael Adams.
From WIkipedia:
The second X-15A was rebuilt after a landing accident. It was lengthened 2.4 feet (0.73 m), a pair of auxiliary fuel tanks attached underneath its fuselage and wings, and a complete heat-resistant ablative coating was added. Renamed the X-15A-2, this plane first flew on 28 June 1964, reaching a maximum speed of 4,520 miles per hour (7,274 km/h). in October 1967, flown by William “Pete” Knight of the U.S. Air Force.
Larry J,
I was also referring to this test stand explosion.
http://www.bobholland.com/me/x15-engines.htm
I was told over a month ago is that the reason they would have the flight on a Saturday is so there were fewer people in buildings that _might_ have been hit if the DC had gone haywire in flight. While they could’ve gotten around this by doing an even more detailed ‘probability of danger’ calculation for such an instance, they didn’t think it worth the time and effort.
I looked at the Dream Chaser PDF and under “Features” it said:
“Gentle horizontal landing on a conventional runway.”
They need to edit that a little bit. 🙂