Business, Space, Technology and Society

SpaceX Failure Effects

22 Comments

They have a long list of customers left in the lurch.

[Update a few minutes later]

Another story, from Eric Berger, with political implications.

[Afternoon update]

New details emerge:

The Falcon 9 was at an altitude of approximately 45 km and traveling in excess of 5,000 km per hour when a problem developed in the second stage. SpaceRef can confirm from sources within SpaceX that the Falcon 9 first stage performed nominally i.e. as expected. Indeed, if you watch launch video, you can see that first stage continues to function steady and stable even while the front end of the rocket was destroying itself. That in and of itself is impressive.

According to SpaceX sources telemetry received from the Dragon spacecraft showed that it too was functioning normally after the mishap occurred and this telemetry continued to be sent back from Dragon for a significant period of time.

Despite an earlier statement from NASA to the contrary, SpaceX sources now confirm that the U.S. Air Force Range Safety Officer did initiate a destruct command but that this command was sent 70 seconds after the mishap occurred, as a formal matter of process. There was nothing left to destroy at that point.

That’s probably what confused Senator Nelson, when he said this morning that the Air Force had destroyed the vehicle.

22 thoughts on “SpaceX Failure Effects”

  1. I wonder how much this will affect the Falcon Heavy test. The present failure seems to have occurred in the upper stage, which isn’t (AFAIK) the object of interest for the FH test.

    1. But FH still needs an upper stage, unless they just want to test the first stage and cross feed with an inert mass on top. What happened yesterday could have taken out three cores.

      1. An inert mass simulator was what I had in mind. Don’t know how difficult it would be to come up with one — perhaps a real upper stage with water rather than oxygen/kerosine?

    2. FH customers presumably want to see a complete test mission, including an upper stage delivering something (e.g. a dummy payload) to orbit, before giving the green light for their launches.

      SpaceX doesn’t seem to be working on cross-feed any more, which makes sense given that they don’t have any customers for missions that need it.

      2. This is perhaps drifting a bit off topic (does that ever happen on the Internets?), but I also remember reports from a few months ago that the cross-feed idea was being put on hold/deferred if not abandoned. OTOH, the SpaceX page on FH, http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy , says that a cross-feed option is available. You’d think that would need to be tested.

        Separately, I too have never quite figured out what FH is actually for. Paying customers who need/will need the lift capacity? A component of Musk’s Mars plans?

        1. There are quite a few military payloads (e.g. AEHF, MOUS, and probably SBIRS) that are heavier than a Falcon 9 can lift to GTO. The Falcon Heavy could probably handle all of those heavy payloads even with the disadvantage of a relatively low performance upper stage.

        2. Bigelow Aerospace BA330 space station modules and large military earth reconnaissance satellites. The same things that currently need a Delta IV Heavy or an entire Ariane 5 ECA to launch.

  2. The Berger story is, unfortunately, behind a paywall.

    The use of paywalls for local news stations still boggles me, but that’s why I’m not in the media business, I suppose.

      1. “To continue reading this story, you will need to be a digital subscriber to HoustonChronicle.com.”

        Subscription service appears to start around $2.50-$3.50 per week.

      2. I got to the story from Berger’s Twitter feed, and got a message that said I was allowed to read it because it’d been shared by a Chronicle subscriber. The paywall has some holes to encourage social media sharing.

    2. “but that’s why I’m not in the media business, I suppose.”

      They right not be for long either.

  3. I wonder if any customers would say, Well, my odds are pretty good: why don’t you just go ahead with my launch while you investigate.

  4. I wonder if the Mission Control Team had much warning from the second stage telemetry before it happened. It seems reasonable to believe that the oxygen tank pressure was one of the telemetry points they monitor, so perhaps they had a few seconds of “Oh, S**t!” before things came apart. I don’t recall ever reading of a booster failure happening for this reason before. In the end, the reason could prove as mundane as a frozen pressure regulator or relief valve that allowed the tank pressure to exceed limits.

    Does anyone recall if they close the second stage O2 tank vent valve before liftoff or while in flight? I recall hearing the call on other boosters that “second stage tank pressure increasing” shortly before staging. Could it be that the valve was closed too early or that warmer than usual ground temperatures caused the pressure to rise faster than normal? Just speculating here. I was on the road yesterday when it happened (watched the launch on my iPhone while at the Wright Brothers Memorial near Dayton, Ohio) so I wasn’t able to gain much information.

    Other than a destruct command, you probably don’t send any commands up to a booster while under power so even if they had noticed, there probably was nothing they could’ve done about it even if they saw the problem building.

  5. It would be bad if the data doesn’t give a clue and the only hope is recovering a magic piece of debris. There are of course some failures that don’t show up in instrumentation, such as when a tank just ruptures at a bad weld, or when an SRB is burning through.

  6. It sounds like I was overly optimistic yesterday when I said they would probably find the problem quickly. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

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