I’m at the Tall Ship Festival, but hearing that they lost a vehicle, maybe Grasshopper. Fortunately, with their production line, shouldn’t take long to replace.
[Late-evening update, after getting back from Port of LA]
Yes, I was using the informal “Grasshopper” to refer to SpaceX VTVL R&D test vehicles. It was the F-9R, version 1. Gywnne had said last year she was actually disappointed that they never lost the initial Grasshopper, because it meant they hadn’t been pushing the envelope enough. Looks like they solved that problem today.
Oh, and they had a successful static fire at the Cape today of the vehicle for next week’s Asiasat launch.
[Update a while later]
OK, Jeff Foust has the story up at New Space Journal.
Elon tweets and confirms it was the three-engine Grasshopper II that bit the dust.
Too bad. I presume it was the one at McGregor. But they have a second one in the pipe to use at Spaceport America so that might be able to be pressed into service at McGregor first. Of course the failure investigation has to happen before that.
From their Facebook Feed:
Earlier today, in McGregor, Texas, SpaceX conducted a test flight of a three engine version of the F9R test vehicle (successor to Grasshopper). During the flight, an anomaly was detected in the vehicle and the flight termination system automatically terminated the mission.
Throughout the test and subsequent flight termination, the vehicle remained in the designated flight area. There were no injuries or near injuries. An FAA representative was present at all times.
With research and development projects, detecting vehicle anomalies during the testing is the purpose of the program. Today’s test was particularly complex, pushing the limits of the vehicle further than any previous test. As is our practice, the company will be reviewing the flight record details to learn more about the performance of the vehicle prior to our next test.
SpaceX will provide another update when the flight data has been fully analyzed.
If was Dev 1 aka Grasshopper 1.
No great loss apparently.
Dev1 isn’t Grasshopper 1.
Dev 1&2 are F9R; F91.1 based, while Grasshopper 1 was more F9 1.0 based, and has been retired (it’s still at McGreggor). The one that exploded today was Dev1, informally called Grasshopper 2 (For reasons that elude me, SpaceX decided that it was better to call the vehicle DeV1 than Grasshopper 2, hence the confusion. 🙂
Ok, so it was the G2, a more significant loss.
Not Grasshopper. Falcon 9R.
Definitely Grasshopper: video here
I retract the definitely… err the grasshopper… err what Ed wrote ^^^^
During the flight tests of the Delta, every test article was lost. The same is true of the Redstone, Thor, Jupiter, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, Ariane, Soyuz, and Long March. They had to build a new rocket for every test flight!
They also lots of money to waste doing this. One reason the Europa rocket failed was the constant launch failures with the upper stages and a prolonged and expensive test campaign for the 1st stage which was really not required at all.
Grasshopper is supposed to be reusable. So its not nice when it fails. Still they did redesign it to increase number of engines and whatever and it is a lot harder to restart or throttle multiple engines in mid-air properly than just one. Remember the N1?
s/also/also had/
Damn, damn, damn… It was the F9R dev-1; also called Grasshopper 2.
It was a total loss of vehicle. The FTS activated due to something. Also, prior to FTS activation but after departure from horizontal flight, it looks to me as if the engine shut down (maybe commanded to do so.)
My personal wild guess is it was due to failure of the steerable engine bell – an actuator freezeup. I’m basing this guess on the way the rocket left vertical flight before the FTS blew it; the rate of angle change looked to me as if it had simply lost the ability to thrust vector. I also know that they’ve had actuator trouble before.
I hope they can find out what went wrong and prevent a recurrence.
As awful as this is, it’s worth remembering that this was a test flight, and this sort of thing is why they test; better it happen like this than on a real mission.
BTW, sorry if I’m repeating anything said above, but I can only see one post (M Puckett) while the system is reporting 5. I can’t see any others.
Here’s the video.
http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Rocket-Explodes-at-Space-X-272370541.html
An ANOMALY?!!
No doubt a couple of dickheads in Congress will see this as a justification to press ahead with resocializing US space efforts.
This happened at a very bad time, due to NASA being about to make its commercial crew selections.
I know there’s probably (depending on the actual cause of the failure) no logical connection to make, but at the moment, Boeing has completed all its milestones (all paperwork ones; they haven’t actually built anything other than a mockup) so I’m betting that Boeing gets selected. (I think they’re the worst choice of the three, which is one of the reasons I think they’ll get selected).
I can’t imagine that the source-selection team for commercial crew would be so stupid as to allow this completely irrelevant event to affect their decision in any way.
It’s irrelevant from a technical point of view.
Politically, it’s as relevant as Shelby & Company choose to make it.
NASA knows who signs their paychecks.
Rand Simberg said, “I can’t imagine that the source-selection team for commercial crew would be so stupid as to allow this completely irrelevant event to affect their decision in any way.”
Rand, they’re part of NASA, a government bureaucracy that has oft done stupid things, so I see no reason to assume that they won’t do so again. Further, they do not exist in a vacuum; politicians have great influence. (When it comes to bureaucracy, I’ve learned to never discount the likelihood of stupidity)
I earnestly hope to be wrong on this.
****************
Edward Wright said; “It’s irrelevant from a technical point of view.
Politically, it’s as relevant as Shelby & Company choose to make it.
NASA knows who signs their paychecks.
Yes, of course it’s irrelevant from a technical point of view. But since when has that stopped counter-factual linkages being made in the past?
I totally agree it’s mainly political, and politicians can and do grab ahold of sensational irrelevancies to use to their own ends.
And yup, NASA knows who signs their paychecks. That’s what worries me; the political dimension.
This is good. It means they’re pushing hard, it means they’ll get good data, and it may mean they are less afraid of taking certain risks during testing because they know what it’s like to lose a vehicle and it’s ok, it’s not some big unknown.
Also, it’ll be fairly easy to replace the F9R-dev1 and they still have the other one that should be doing high altitude, high velocity flights soon.
Well they have now demonstrated that the Falcon 9 v1.1 Flight Termination System works as designed! I am happy to see that they are pushing the envelope. More smoking holes and fireworks please! Fly the vehicle to and beyond the edge of the envelope.
This is about as “good” a failure as can be imagined. The FTS worked perfectly, and there was no damage to life or property. And SpaceX has always said that they expect to have days like this in their test program.
They should obtain some useful data from this. It remains to be seen whether their enemies will try to make hay with it.
I said “enemies”, not “rivals” because they have no rivals. Nobody else is trying to do what SpaceX is doing.
It remains to be seen whether their enemies will try to make hay with it.
Of course their enemies will try to make hay with it. I haven’t made the rounds of the other sites on Rand’s blogroll yet today, but the anti-SpaceX trolls will be delighted, no question. Finally, they have a real “disaster” to chew on and can rest up a bit from having to invent fictional ones.
The trolls might as well have a little fun while they can. It will shortly be apparent that this is quite a minor pothole on SpaceX’s road and not even an unanticipated one as others have noted.
This was a comment by Gwynne Shotwell during a Q&A for a Popular Mechanics article.
“The tests are going beautifully, which fundamentally means we’re not pushing the envelope hard enough. We should have some failures with Grasshopper. We need to push harder. I think we’re a year away from being able to recover stages, then we’ll take a look at them and extrapolate how many missions each stage can undergo. I hope to be reflying them a year after that. Rapid reusability, maybe another year. So in total, two to three years from now.”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/news/spacex-president-gwynne-shotwell-the-case-for-commercial-rockets-15608331
Big deal. They lost a test vehicle. Isn’t that why they are called “test” vehicles?