Want to watch a rocket blow up on the pad, at night (warning: about a hundred-megabyte wmv file)? I've never heard so much cursing in such colorful European accents. It happened three and a half years ago at Plesetsk, in Russia. Here's the story.

[Via Jim Oberg]

It's nice to know that F**king H*ll is now a universal phrase.

The Soyuz and its derivatives (primarily the Molynia with an additional upper stage) are arguably the most successful booster ever built. Almost 1700 of them have been launched with a success rate of over 95%. Because they've mostly left good enough alone, the vehicle is economical (no expensive R&D), pretty reliable, and even man-rated. While accurate cost numbers are hard to come by, it seems the Soyuz booster runs around $1000 per pound to LEO, making it one of the least expensive boosters anywhere. It's a good example of a successful "big, dumb booster."

Build it simple. Build a lot of them. Don't fix what isn't broken. Sounds like a good formula for lowering launch costs to me.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention - if you look at the Foton spacecraft, it should look familiar. It's essentially a derivative of the Vostok capsule. The Russians have used similar derivatives of the Vostok for several types of satellites such as Biosat and Earth Resources photographic satellites (ERPHO) and some that I can't talk about. Of course, they've improved it over the decades but only as needed.

I'm not too impressed with Russian range safety.
Judging by the time delay between the ground impact and the sound of the explosion, the people standing around in the field were less than a half mile from it. Question: why wasn't the rocket detonated in mid air as soon as a problem was obvious? If it had strayed a bit more towards the observers, there's a good chance that a lot of those folks would be dead now. Apparently, it killed one and injured some others. How close do they let people get to the launch, I wonder.

Note also (as Oberg points out over at sci.space.history) the utter absence of any announcements or alarm sirens.

Watching the guy in the dark tell the camera how scared he was, I started having flashbacks to Blair Witch Project commercials.

Has anyone analyzed the failure and put together a timeline of events? It looks like there was some sort of problem that cause thrust termination during the 1st stage burn, followed by the rocket falling back to Earth and then having its fuel detonate when on impact. It's interesting how much cheering there was when the 1st stage went out, generally the vehicle should be a lot farther away when that happens during a normal flight.

Oh, and here's something neat which I just did. You can time the delay between the flash of the explosion and the bang (like with thunder and lightning). I get about 1.5 seconds, which puts them about 500 meters from it!