"Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon." [1]
SpaceX tweeted:
"At approximately 9:07 am ET, during a standard pre-launch static fire test for the AMOS-6 mission, there was an anomaly at SpaceX's Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 resulting in loss of the vehicle.
The anomaly originated around the upper stage oxygen tank and occurred during propellant loading of the vehicle. Per standard operating procedure, all personnel were clear of the pad and there were no injuries.
We are continuing to review the data to identify the root cause. Additional updates will be provided as they become available." [2]
The first stage for this launch was brand new. They have not launched a reused stage yet (they just announced a contract with SES about such a launch).
1. What kind of insurance will be needed on a billion dollar NSA satellite? $100 million? $125 million? It's not so cheep anymore, and considering delays etc. It's not such a great deal anymore.
2. They probably should have a "stable" platform and a "beta" platform, with a discount offered for beta.
Unfortunately, the "move fast and break things" attitude doesn't work with rockets.
Well, the whole origin of rocketry was about moving fast and breaking things.
Less glib, I'm not so sure. In shed development, you spend a lot to make perfect things. Aston Martin or Rolls Royce are great examples of this. In factory development, you spend a lot to make perfect systems. I'd hold up Toyota or Honda as good examples.
I'm not an expert in SpaceX technology, but i thought their big supposed advantage was tons of automation. With bespoke development, it's tough to bring down the failure rate. you just keep testing and verifying more. With a defined system, you fix the system to avoid those errors.
There's obviously a spectrum, and SpaceX isn't that far out on the automation scale, but i do think that's the intention. If they can survive long enough to reap those benefits, their launches will be cheaper and more reliable. In the mean time, lots of cheap, risky, attempts are probably better for debugging than thinking real hard and building the perfect thing.
Insurance policies for rocket launches typically expect 1 in 10 rockets to blow up on the pad. ULA's 100% success rate is unusual for the industry. Elon and SpaceX are obviously shooting for higher reliability than the industry standard, but I don't think you should chalk this up to 'move fast and break things' causing substandard reliability.
> Unfortunately, the "move fast and break things" attitude doesn't work with rockets.
Rocket technology has never advanced without catastrophic failures. "Breaking things" is the only way forward with it. Rockets, of necessity, have to push designs to their limits, or they'll never lift off the pad.
I don't know if I agree. Aside from Challenger (I know -- a pretty big aside), what catastrophic launch failures were there with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo program rockets? Or the Delta 2. And doesn't the old-fashion-can't-even-land-on-a barge Atlas 5 have a perfect launch and mission success record of 62 of 62?
It seems like building and launching a rocket that doesn't explode every 14th time is possible but its not cheap. The US has been doing it since the 60's. SpaceX may turn out to be OK for delivering Tang to the ISS, but let's let something else carry the Webb into orbit.
Apollo had 17 missions and at least four failures or near failures that come to mind:
* The Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, during a training session, using a 100% pressurised oxygen atomosphere. Three dead. Grissom, White, and Chaffee. I can list them from memory.
* Apollo 11 suffered a lunar lander computer crash in the final seconds before landing, was programmed to land on what would have been unsurvivable terrain, and had fewer than 30 seconds of fuel left when it finally touched down.
* Apollo 12 was struck by lightning as it left the launch pad, knocking out much of the electrical system, which had to be reset. Fortunately they built things robustly.
* Apollo 13 had an oxygen tank explode as it was en route to the moon. The mission was aborted, though orbital mechanics meant that the astronauts still had to orbit the Moon, then return to Earth.
Any of 11, 12, or 13 could have ended with fatalities. One scenario for the command module pilot (Michael Collins in Apollo 11) was, if needs be, to leave his two crew members on the lunar surface and to return to Earth alone.
Apollo 13 also came a few seconds away from blowing up during launch. The second stage center engine began a pogo oscillation that at its peak was vibrating the engine at 16Hz with an amplitude of about three inches. By luck, the intense vibration tripped a fuel sensor and caused the computer to shut the engine down just before it would have ripped the whole thing to pieces.
Eh, Apollo 11's difficulties were not a computer crash, but the computer throwing up repeated alarms saying "You are asking me to do to much, so I'm going to follow the rules you instilled in me about what tasks are vehicle critical and what tasks can be dropped." AKA the 1202 program alarm. Which happened because the rendezvous radar was left in the AUTO mode for descent, when it was only meant to be used for ascent.
It wasn't "You are asking me to do to much, so I'm going to follow the rules you instilled in me about what tasks are vehicle critical and what tasks can be dropped.", but "You are asking me to do to much, so I'm going to reboot". It also overcompensated throttle lag due to old documentation.
Your reference confirms the parent's interpretation as well as yours:
> During the braking phase, up to the time the landing radar locked onto the surface, the duty-cycle margin was over 15%. After the radar acquired, the extra computations involved in converting the body-referenced radar data to the navigation coordinate system lowered the margin to perhaps 13%. When a monitor display such as Verb 16 Noun 68 was added, the margin shrank again, to 10% or less. Buzz Aldrin was perceptive when he said after the second 1202 alarm, "It appears to come up when we have a 1668 up"[16].
> With a 10% margin and a 13% drain, the LGC simply did not have enough CPU time to perform all the functions that were required. Thanks to the flexibility of the Executive design — and quite unlike what would have happened with a boxcar structure — there was no collapse.
[...]
> Having a relatively low priority because of its size, SERVICER got last crack at the available computation time. With a negative time margin it was SERVICER that had not yet reached its conclusion when the next READACCS, running punctually, scheduled SERVICER again. Because it had not reached its end, the earlier SERVICER had not released its core set and VAC area — so the next time READACCS called FINDVAC to schedule SERVICER the Executive assigned a new core set and VAC area. That SERVICER also did not finish. After a short span of such operation the Executive exhausted its supply of core sets and/or VAC areas. When the next request was made the Executive, unable to comply, called BAILOUT with a 1201 or 1202 alarm code.
[...]
> The interesting effect of this train of events, during P63, was that the problem fixed itself. The software restart reconstructed only the most recent incarnation of the SERVICER job, and flushed the uncompleted SERVICER "stubs" that had accumulated. In addition, it terminated functions that had not been restart protected because they were not deemed critical — including the DELTAH monitor Verb 16 Noun 68. This is why, following the two alarms in P63, the display returned from Noun 68 to Noun 63.
[...]
> During P64 the situation was different. Added to the regular guidance equations was new processing that provided the capability to redesignate the landing site. With this addition, the essential software by itself left a duty-cycle margin of less than 10%. The alarms kept coming. There were three 1201 and 1202 alarms within 40 seconds. Each time, the software restart flushed the Executive queue but could not shed load.
> At MET 102:43:08, forestalling the next alarm, Armstrong switched the autopilot from AUTO to ATT HOLD mode, easing the computational burden, and then entered semi-manual mode P66, where the burden was still lighter. After 2 minutes and 20 seconds spent maneuvering in P66 without alarms, the LM landed.
Right. Like I said, no catastrophic launch failures.
They did build things robustly back when the US still had a manned space program. I wonder how well a SpaceX rocket would do if it was struck by lightning as it left the pad.
Then again, Apollo 11 couldn't land on a barge. However it could land on the moon with two humans on board and then take off again and return then safely to earth. 47 years ago.
There's a hierarchy of severity that's expected in industrial accidents, as I've recently learned running across a reference to the concept. The work was done a long time ago -- ~1930s - 1950s, and I think the earlier part of that period. It's used fairly heavily in the insurance industry still, from what I understand.
(I'm being a little vague because I can't immediately turn up that reference, I'll take a look for it.)
The upshot is that if you've got a base incident / accident / failure rate, you can predict with a fairly high degree of accuracy the likelihood of major accidents -- fatalities, major injuries, or catastrophic to plant and equipment.
(Now to see if I can find that.)
Here: H. W. Heinrich, Industrial accident prevention: a scientific approach (1959)
The publication date is later than I'd thought, but the data were collected much earlier -- 1931.
Fair enough. According to Wikipedia of the 26 Mercury program missions there were 6 pre 1962 Mercury program launch failures before the 6 successful manned missions. 5 of the 6 failures were test flights without payload.
Speaking of insurance: the type of insurance policy that was taken on this unfortunate payload would only kick in at launch (ignition). Test firing was not covered.
Be careful with that assumption: the standards for reliability and safety for crew-rated vs. uncrewed vehicles are very different. I've heard figures at around 10% hull-loss accident rates as expected for uncrewed, vs. an order of magnitude less for crew-rated. There's a very good reason that the pad had been cleared of personnel, and no one was injured in this launch. While spectacular, this explosion didn't inflate any body counts, because the risks were understood and well-managed. Spaceflight is hard, and people die, but we need to make sure we are comparing the same categories when we assess risk, reliability and cost. Trimming that 10% hull-loss rate down to 1% can be done, but probably not at anything like a cost that would make it commercially viable. The only other way to ensure reliability is the way commercial aviation did it: break enough vehicles (and lose enough people) that you understand the failure modes so well you can very nearly eliminate them.
A brain surgery can result in worse still: like, surgeon performs a surgery, makes some mistake, the patient is alive and gets up and goes home, but due to the surgical damage caused becomes a serial killer.
So, strictly speaking a brain surgery can also result in a body count that is greater than 1.
On a similar note, there's also the case of the leg amputation that killed 3 people: the patient (gangrene), the assistant (gangrene from fingers accidentally being amputated) and a spectator (from "fright").
Please don't create such novelty accounts to post jokes with—we ban them, and then the main account if it continues. Comments on HN should be civil and substantive.
Honestly? Such tremendous superpowers, and out of all the good you could be doing for the planet, you're wasting your time playing dress-up and trying to save a rocket?
You can get cheap consumer cameras now with pretty absurd zooms. The $600 Nikon P900 [1] has an 83x optical zoom lens, giving it the 35mm-equivalent focal length of 24-2000mm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SC_2yD6wKk.
It's shockingly good for what it is, which is why the camera was sold out for six months and still commands pretty much its original retail price nearly a year after release.
Its big weakness is autofocus speed (making it useless for birders, etc.)
In my experience the autofocus speed in daylight is fine and it's especially good at focusing on what you want it to focus on, so it's great for birders. The problem is noise-reduction i.e. image quality. Do a bit of pixel peeping and it begins to look like a watercolor painting.
I was lucky enough to get one the day it was released early last year. Fun toy, and great for travel/sightseeing where you often can't use your feet as a zoom, but not even close to 1" type sensor quality let alone SLR.
Saving my pennies for a Sony RX10 III 24-600mm equiv superzoom, thought it's roughly 3 times the price of the P900. Good review here: https://youtu.be/Ad1JDfmyNxI
Not even close to a DSLR. It uses a small compact-style sensor (6.17 x 4.55mm), which is about 14 times smaller than an APS-C sensor (e.g. Nikon D5500 at 23.5 mm x 15.6 mm).
Ok, the Falcon 9 1.2 [1] is 70m tall [2], and the rocket fills up about 80% of the vertical frame [3].
Using the "Image = FL * Obj / distance" equation, we get:
.8 * 24mm = x * 70m/4080m
Where x is the focal length of the lens assuming a full frame camera.
This comes out to a x = 1119mm equivalent focal length. If you have a crop sensor, this isn't too hard to obtain. I'd be amused if the video was taken with a Canon EF 1200mm lens or something, but the probability of that is 0.
It's pretty easy to mate an interchangeable lens camera (DSLR, Micro Four Thirds, etc) with a small telescope. There are standard adapters for it. That basically gives you the telephoto lens to rule all telephoto lenses.
The shot is totally within the capabilities of a 200 mm Schmidt–Cassegrain in good seeing, which is not very bulky and could sit comfortably on a medium-to-large size tripod.
The theoretical linear resolving power of that aperture at 5 km is 12 mm. But in practice it will be several times worse.
This is all napkin-based math, I've no clue what optics were used for the shot. Might have been a compact 150 mm apochromat refractor - still capable of enough theoretical resolution, and possibly a more popular option (though more expensive) in practice.
The frame rate isn't high enough to tell for sure, but it looks like the initial explosion might be between the strongback and the second stage, followed less than 1/30 second later by the second stage exploding. Certainly the initial explosion spreads out vertically much more than horizontally in the first 1/30 second, perhaps implying that the explosion was in vapour outside the second stage.
There is something flying just above when the explosion starts, probably a bird, but how hard will it be to just fly a drone there with some kind of projectile?
> but how hard will it be to just fly a drone there with some kind of projectile?
It's a massive long metal tube full of extremely flammable things...what seems more likely: drone with projectile entering a highly restricted piece of airspace, or as rockets are want to do, it blew up by itself.
Of course it's more likely that there was a malfunction, no one is saying otherwise, I was just wondering how SpaceX guards their lunch pad from aerial intrusions, hitting a small drone flying fast isn't an easy target and you'd have to have a constant watch for them.
> I was just wondering how SpaceX guards their lunch pad from aerial intrusions
Mostly by being on an Air Force base, many miles away from anywhere someone might operate a "drone". Wouldn't help much against a fixed-wing telepresence rig, but not much would.
Which is a sub-class of anomaly :-) it is really hard to scrub Youtube videos, and I (like probably a zillion others) was looking for root cause indicators; things like where exactly on the fuselage does it start? What equipment is there? How energetic was the explosion (oxidizer only? mixed with propellant? Etc. There are at least 30 frames between 1:10 and 1:11 (maybe 60). There are many things to rule out, was it a leak in the LOX hose? Was it a rupture of an internal tank? did the equipment detach prematurely? etc etc.
Can somebody properly explain the different stages of the explosion? Obviously there's the first explosion but then after about 3.5 seconds there's a second, bigger one.
What's exploding in the first boom and what in the second?
Then, about 12 seconds in, the "nose" is falling down and causing a 3rd explosion. Why hasn't the nose "co-exploded" already with the 1st or 2nd explosion?
The first explosion is the smaller second stage igniting. The second, bigger explosion is the first stage exploding. The first stage has most of the mass of the rocket in the form of propellant and is what SpaceX lands on the barge after it separates from the second stage. The second stage is smaller and lighter, and puts the satellite into low earth orbit, or into its transfer orbit in the case of higher orbits (eg geostationary orbit).
The 'nose' falling is payload and its protective fairing. The idea of a fairing is to protect the the satellite from aerodynamic, heat and acoustic stress. It explodes because the satellite has propellant in it - certainly for its rcs system for attitude adjustment and station keeping, and it might have a main engine to help it reach orbit.
First explosion related to second stage (upper).
Second explosion related to first stage's fuel igniting (I was expecting some much bigger, but likely there was already little oxygen left in that area and why it burned for so long.
Third Explosion was the satellite's internal fuel (Hydrazine or something like it) detonating due to the fall damage and contact with the rest of the flame.
Nice to see that the payload didn't start to topple until around 6s after the blast. Gives hope of the launch abort system having time to do its job had this been a manned launch.
No sign of a fire extinguishing or pad deluge system, such as NASA had for the shuttle. Maybe Space-X needs that. Fire crews can't approach until the fire burns itself out - too toxic.
The point of those systems was to limit damage from vibration and rocket exhaust on a normal launch, not to allow the pad to withstand an explosion. (And SpaceX does have them as well; the pad deluge system is more visible than usual in this video of the Dragon pad-abort test, which was conducted at the same launch pad they use for Falcon 9s, though without the rocket itself or any of its mobile support equipment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8 -- the large streams of water kick in a few seconds before the Dragon abort thrusters kick off.)
> Fire crews can't approach until the fire burns itself out - too toxic.
You're thinking of hypergolic propellants like hydrazine and nitric acid. This is kerosene (RP-1) and liquid oxygen. Not particularly toxic, just hot as hell.
The deluge system in shuttle launches was for the flame trench and sound dampening to avoid the air pressure from the noise damaging the vehicle, not fire extinguishing.
You can see the launch tower get charred black, that's the fire protective paint.
It's not really possible to fight rocket fuel fires, just mitigate the damage.
Although the satellite itself had a lot of hydrazine on board. That's probably what caused the smaller second explosion when the fairing fell off and hit the ground.
Seems like a really good question to me! I'd guess there's some one-time stuff involved, so the replacement won't cost $200 million, but it won't be a whole lot cheaper. My totally uninformed random guess would be something like $100-150 million for the second one. Maybe more, it could be that the one-time stuff is already amortized across multiple satellites.
I wondered the same thing. I can't imagine more than a few million dollars of raw material goes into a satellite. I'd wager it's more like $150mil to design the satellite, then $20mil for parts and $20mil for labour to build it (since these things are so low-volume they've gotta be largely hand made).
It'd certainly suck to be one of the people who's slaved over the satellite for the last couple of years, to see your baby get blown to smithereens like this.
This disaster may have bigger implications for Spacecom. They were in the middle of being acquired by Beijing Xinwei and the successful launch of Amos 6 was supposed to be a factor in closing the deal[1]. I have no idea what blowing up on the pad means for the merger.
It's a deal breaker most likely, the terms of the deal were based on AMOS-6 becoming operational by march 2017.
There has been high level of criticism in Israel about the deal as many seen this as giving up it's sovereignty over its space platforms even tho under the deal the all operations of spacecom platforms would be still handled from Israel proper, I'm sure the r/conspiracies is already booming with sabotage theories.
But yeah it's not great for spacecom in general, Facebook also will now withdraw from their contract with them for supplying internet to Africa as AMOS-6 was supposed to replace AMOS-2 and enhance the coverage over Africa and the Middle East.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Amos-6-K...
Israel is one of the few countries that is pushing satellite coverage in the area, AMOS-6 was supposed to grant up to 20gbps of bandwidth to Africa over the leased Ka band which was desperately needed.
This is in the realm of conspiracy theory. No evidence points to this. Nothing the parent comment said suggests it. I think you are filling in the blanks with your own hypotheses but they're accusatory shots in the dark at this point. It's possible, sure, but so are a lot of things.
This waving of tinfoil is making me wonder just how vulnerable a rocket like this would be to a sniper rifle bullet. I mean, it's pretty big, and it's full of all sorts of explosive goodies. I'd expect the chances of something going wrong if it's hit by a shot just as it lights up for a test run to be rather high.
Edit: Now imagine if last week you'd shorted as much stock as you could in the companies involved...
I like the way you think. How could someone determine if this occurred? Rocket sabotage seems like a rather perfect crime, very little evidence is left afterwards.
Sounds like SpaceX just killed multiple deals for this company. Could someone who knows about this kind of stuff (I assume this subset of the population is small) comment on whether there is recourse against SpaceX for losing the payload?
Quite possibly with a termination clause. Insurance typically covers the cost of the satellite, not the cost of delaying time to revenue by what could end up being several months or years.
Private launches are required to carry insurance in order to receive a license; I looked it up when the Orbital rocket had a similar RUD, and the government had mandated something like $140 million or so between government property contingency and general liability, if I recall.
It's possible to insure against business risk as well as asset risk, though it's usually not worth the premium. Though I've never been in the space business I would be surprised if it were not common for launches.
There is zero need for your tone towards a user asking a simple question. He didn't know, he asked in a nice manner and it was an innocent question. How do you expect someone to learn or be comfortably asking questions on HN if they're told they aren't a "literate adult" for not knowing the specifics of insurance coverage within a high risk business sector.
Not all launches are insured. One of the largest satellite TV companies in America claims to have launched their first satellite without insurance because they were so strapped for cash.
Anyone know if the satellite owner took out pre-launch and transit insurance? That's a separate insurance cover from launch insurance. Satellite launch insurance starts at normal ignition and usually ends with the satellite in the desired orbit.[1]
It takes years to build a satellite, the bus, and every component is purposely built each component and the satellite itself goes through months of testing and even if they could build one within 6 months all of the contracts would expire by then which will require Spacecom to open the bids again.
All of the contracts were based on AMOS-6 being operational by a given date, AMOS-6 has been "under construction" for probably 4-5 years, SpaceX was selected as the launch contractor in late 2012 originally for a mid 2015 launch but the launch was delayed for various reasons.
Why does every satellite have to be custom made like this? Without knowing anything about it, it seems as though most communications satellites do pretty much the same thing?
They aren't built in very large numbers. There are maybe a couple dozen commsat launches per year, and they do have fairly different requirements a lot of the time. There are variables like frequency, spot size, transmission and receive power, and whether the satellite does any on-board processing or routing or whether it just acts like a "bent pipe." There is some standardization, but not a whole lot. Economies of scale just don't quite kick in enough yet.
Superficially maybe, but you want to send zero weight you don't need into orbit so it makes sense to build to the exact mission profile vs trying for a generalized solution.
There are many standard components, though satellites are low-enough volume that almost nothing is really "off the shelf". The custom bits and integration are plenty of work (and time) in themselves.
Also, we really don't want to have all the communication satellites to have the same bus, and find out years later that they have some bug that causes them to malfunction after years in orbit.
To a degree every satellite is custom because of custom requirements. To the extent that they're not they can use an existing platform, like Boeing does with the 702.
Unless you're banking on the sat being operational in a specific time frame for an acquisition to go through, like Spacecom did. They probably lacked enough capital to do so. Plus the failure still takes time to figure out.
They all say that so that people overstock useful items, so when nuclear zombie virus apocalypse hits and normals all die, there's lot of supplies stockpiled and easily accessible for the survivors.
For things like the Mars Rover, they built two so that if something goes wrong, they have one in the warehouse that they can experiment with before they try to remotely repair the one on Mars. I don't know if people do that for Earth-orbit satellites, though.
This was my first thought but then again I don't know how expensive the one was and if they built one and it launched successfully, what would they do with the second one? Seems like a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenarios.
Although whether it would cost an additional $200 million to build a second is another question, but I doubt there would be that significant an economy of scale for just one extra unit.
I think a lot of it is using electronics that are less susceptible to radiation along with needing a clean room to actually build the thing. Not sure if that accounts for the entire $200 million.
The design might be the "easy" part, these are 6 tons of one off highly specialized components with a huge lead time. Each component is custom and built for order by a contractor the lead time on some of them can be years simply because there aren't that many companies that design and build space systems.
That combined with the fact that they need to go to each subcontractor and ask them to bid again after Spacecom finds a way to finance it (there is no way the insurance payout is anywhere near the actual cost of the satellite) would probably mean that the time it takes to build a new one isn't that different than it was to build the original.
Think of it like this if you total your McLaren P1-GTR there isn't an easy way to get a new one ;)
I'm 15 years removed from the TV biz, but I vaguely remember 'birds' costing like $350m to launch, something like $200m + for the hardware, then $150m for launch fees and misc pre-launch insurances. In some cases, I want to say they insured them before taking possession of them, like if some guy at Lockheed has a bad day and drops a wrench on exactly the wrong part, you're looking at a substantial delay which could substantially impact business. Companies would talk up these satellites to investors for years before they launched, hard to imagine them not being completely insured up in to space. Then there was launch insurance and I think it included operations in many cases, TV birds had a lifetime of like 7 years and the operational insurance paid out if they had a certain amount of failure before the lifetime was up, transponders die and they need to spend fuel periodically to keep them in place when the fuel is gone the bird is done. I want to say the launch and ops insurances were like another $100m to $150m. All told you were in for half a billion to get in in to place and that's not including the lease on the slot of sky... I'm pretty sure Echostar was involved in some lawsuits about it and there are probably some public details that came out of that; maybe they wanted to claim more damages than the insurer wanted to cover or something like that and then no insurers wanted to sell them operational insurance.
It's not cheap but if that's your business you absolutely insure it. It's not cheap though. Would investors let you get away not insuring one? Rockets not making it in to space isn't uncommon.
I admire Musk as much as the next guy but SpaceX has always seemed fraught in the QA department[1]. I'd be surprised if they can survive long enough to accomplish their Mars mission if they keep screwing up this often.
[1] Which also seems to be a problem at Tesla as of late.
Based on what others have posted, it's not necessarily a clause like, "If you launch successfully, we go ahead with the deal", but rather a clause like, "If the satellite is operational within X amount of time, we will go ahead with the deal."
This explosion probably put them way past the X amount of time so the deal would fall through.
Your legal and technical claims sound highly questionable to me. Satellite operators are not responsible for the successful operation of the launch vehicle, and one would expect their contractual arrangements to reflect that. That would be like firing someone because their commuter train derailed and they were late to work as a result.
It's irrational to argue that you would pull out of a merger because a 3rd party's rocket failure delayed a launch. Contracts almost invariably include escape clauses to avoid liability for matters that are outside the control of the parties. If the launch was already scheduled at the time of the merger agreement (which seems likely, a rocket launch is not the sort of thing you arrange at the last minute) then Beijing Xinwei would be expected to factor the risks into its pricing calculations.
The failure of the launch changes the real world situation. It's not irrational to argue that such a change also changes the pros/cons of a merger. The fact that it was related to a 3rd party is irrelevant.
They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area. Not an impossible scenario. Lots of energy stored up in one of those rockets.
Just like when we test software, they want to have everything as close to what they would expect on launch day as possible (2 days from now). All the stresses, the structure, etc. That means putting stage 2 and the payload on top of the main rocket before the test starts. They probably did a lot of tests before the payload was on board as well, and those didn't reveal whatever flaw has caused this issue.
Yes, it sucks that the payload was lost but there will have been insurance to cover the loss. No human lives lost, no cruise missile scenario, no out of control fire... this is the best case scenario for a rocket failure.
Nitpick: you're thinking of a ballistic missile. Cruise missiles are more like exploding fixed-wing drones. The V-1 flying bomb was a cruise missile, and the V-2 rocket was a ballistic missile.
If a fully loaded (cryogenic fuel + oxidizer) SpaceX rocket did a belly flop into downtown Orlando I suspect this distinction would be quite meaningless to the locals!
Not sure what exactly are you nitpicking here - ballistic missiles have propulsion for a short time after lunch and afterwards continuing on a ballistic (hence the name) trajectory towards the targets. Cruise missiles have propulsion usually during most of the flight.
A rocket straying off course could either smash into city under full power (thus being a cruise missile) or have its propulsion cut off remotely beforehand (thus being a ballistic missile), depending on a scenario. What kind of a correction were you making?
Cruise missiles are designed to rely on aerodynamic lift (and typically use air-breathing engines, although there have been some "boost-glide" weapons that used rocket engines).
> They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area.
In that case the rocket has a flight-termination system, though, which should activate as soon as it veers too far outside the planned/expected parameters of the flight.
For more context, all (edit: American!) rockets for decades have had onboard self destruct systems and a "Range Safety Officer" on the ground whose entire job is to determine if and when to deploy this self destruct system.
The cruise missile scenario is highly unlikely as the rocket itself would be destroyed soon after leaving its intended trajectory.
> Like Russian vehicles, there is no flight termination system that receives ground commands onboard Chinese launch vehicles. Only US and ESA launch sites have such a system. Correction, Falcon 1 did not have such a system for launching on Kwaj.
Phlarp's original comment was about 'a "Range Safety Officer" on the ground whose entire job is to determine if and when to deploy this self destruct system.'
The text I quoted implies there is an onboard flight termination system, even if there is no Range Safety Officer who can send external commands.
FWIW, a part from an exploded rocket, like the engine, could still destroy a school bus filled with children. The odds are very hard to estimate, and made more complicated in that there are few failure modes where a rocket failure halfway across a continent, at supersonic speeds, would reach the ground without breaking long before.
Nit: flight termination system does not cause the rocket to magically vanish. It will still continue on its current trajectory and impact Earth somewhere. It just causes the rocket to stop thrusting and, IIRC, disperses the fuel/oxidizer so that we don't end up with large quantities of fuel/oxidizer in a small area on ground.
Indeed, all it does is break up the rocket. Depending on when it happens during the launch we might still end up with a fireball near the ground (unlikely to be near anything inhabited, though, as there's a lot of free space around launch sites) or with a quickly disintegrating rocket because it's already at high speeds.
There will still be debris, of course, but I guess the reasoning is that it's preferable to have relatively small debris, than one large piece of exploding debris.
Size of debris is not that important: lots of small pieces will cause a similar amount of damage as the same mass in a large piece.
Two important roles of flight termination are:
1. Cause the rocket to stop thrusting (and thus prevent it from thrusting out of range safety exclusion zone).
2. Cause the propellant tanks to be destroyed. This prevents the propellants from causing a large explosion on the ground (when the tanks hit the ground) in preference to a conflagration in the air.
Very often. Air Force range safety guidelines require a million dollar flight termination system and most of that cost is testing and quality control. I don't have an authoritative list of all flight terminations but it happens at least once every few years whenever a rocket fails to follow the set flight path.
I also have to suspect things like isolated, dedicated and redundant comm links with the flight termination system are part of these guidelines. Perhaps even a "dead man's switch" that terminates the flight if this separate communication system loses signal at some point. (Even if this means a costly false positive or two~)
For the Space Shuttle, the flight termination system had two huge 10KW transmitters to send the signal. That would get through despite damaged receiving antennas, noise, or jamming.
Less than the typical TV or FM broadcast tower, and remember there's a lot of empty space around the launch sites. Even ham radio operators in the US can run at 1.5kW peak.
As an example, the strut failure in the falcon 9 a while back didn't explode from the failure, that was the flight termination system that actually caused the fireball when things started going south.
There were no self-destruct systems on the shuttle orbiter, though there were on the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. They were used only once, on the Space Shuttle Challenger after the orbiter broke up, but the SRB's were still burning in an uncontrolled manner.
Don't worry, unlike the space shuttle, rockets have escape mechanisms. In that specific case, the astronauts would probably have survived as the emergency rocket thingies would have fired and evacuated them far from the explosion before it could reach the capsule.
This discussion reminds me of the failure of the first Ariane 5 launch. The flight-termination system was activate erroneously, and the payload was not insured. Ouch.
That's not what happened - the rocket went out of control due to a software bug allowed by over-reliance on unit testing, and was quite properly deliberately destroyed.
But yes, Cluster was run on the cheap, hence the use of the Ariane 5 test flight, and didn't have insurance.
"Over-reliance on unit testing"? I have a somewhat different read from the inquiry board report, which says it was a "systematic software design error." Yes, inadequate testing, and a belief the working code for Ariane 4 meant it was validated for Ariane 5 were certainly contributory, but I think it's unfair to single out an over-reliance on unit testing.
The board argues that there was a bias towards believing the software does not have an error. Thus, any out-of-range value is interpreted as a hardware error, which means the CPU should shut down.
There was a decision to not include Ariane 5 trajectory data in the SRI requirements and specification. Thus, while tests were rigorous at the equipment ("unit") level, and there were system tests, they didn't test that case. This is test design failure.
In addition, the board says "the review process was a contributory factor in the failure."
I can see how those can be aspects of "over-reliance on unit testing", but it doesn't explain, for example, how some of the variables from Ariane 4 were protected from overflow exceptions but others were not.
You have quite fairly picked me up on a cheeky exaggeration.
Lots of things had to go wrong to cause the Ariane 5 failure - including bad handling of overflow, as you mention. But to my mind, the universal last line of defence against any kind of mistake is an integration test: put all of the parts of the system together, feed them real input, and verify that you get correct output. Arianespace did not do that.
Well, until they actually launched it. It was a test flight, right? It proved to be an essential and very effective test.
If anyone's at all interested in risk analysis or robust software, it's totally worth finding a decent writeup on the Ariane 5 failure --- it's a fascinating postmortem in just how many unexpected little things together added up to a big boom.
Everything is incredibly obvious in hindsight, of course, but making things obvious is largely what hindsight is for.
And once you've finished reading that, go look up the Therac-25...
That means there was an under-reliance on system testing, which I agree with. It doesn't imply there was an over-reliance on unit testing any more than it implies there was an over-reliance on analysis or over-reliance on the expectation of developing bug-free software.
Oops, yeah I recalled that the subsystem that caused the problem didn't need to run after launch, so I was thinking it fed incorrect data to the auto-destruct system, not that it actually went off course.
Mocking a six ton payload is actually fairly expensive, to get the cg, vibration etc. right. A lot more difficult than payload = mock(satellite);
NASA did it for the Hubble but so the ground crew could practice operations and not drop the billion dollar space observatory, not to try and save some money if something blew up during testing.
And at what frequency would it save the payload? In 85-95% of cases, payload is safely delivered to space, so the dummy just slows things down. In most of the remaining cases the payload is lost on it's actual ride into space (e.g. the last time SpaceX had a problem, CRS-7) where a dummy can't help. There have been a handful of pad accidents involving loss of payload, but they are very much the exception to the rule about the exception to the rule.
It is possible to damage the rocket and systems when mating the payload in the faring, which would not become apparent without further testing and somewhat negates the purpose of this test itself.
The payload is mated early to save time by speeding up the launch schedule [1] so a mock payload would have the opposite effect - it would need mated and then removed after the test fire.
If the organization underwriting the insurance is implicitly and explicitly insured (too big to fail) by the US govt, it might as well be magic pixie dust!
They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area. Not an impossible scenario. Lots of energy stored up in one of those rockets
This is a big plot point in the "Twin Spica" series.
Same reason anyone else does tests: Find potential and actual issues earlier than in production. The static fire they were doing is sort of a short integration / smoke (pun not intended) test whether the rocket as a whole (whether the payload is attached already depends on the customer; it reduces time between test and launch, though) works properly. Other tests are part of sort of a pre-flight checklist directly before launch and there have been launch scrubs due to issues at that point already. Every single engine is also fired for the full duration of the flight prior to installation in the rocket.
There's a lot of testing, both in isolation and in integration with other components. The risk of the rocket exploding should actually reduce with each test. Note also that in this case the malfunction was most likely with the pad equipment, not the rocket, so not doing static fires would in this case probably just have meant that you'd have an explosion at launch time one day.
EDIT: The static fire is more of a test for launch procedures, apparently:
“The goal of the static fire is to provide a dress rehearsal for the launch team, culminating in a three second firing of all nine of the first stage Merlin 1D engines to validate the health of the rocket.” (https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/09/falcon-9-explodes-am...)
Makes sense in that the rocket itself is tested quite a bit beforehand already.
Launch pads usually are not built for rockets exploding on them, but as the pad itself is mostly a concrete plane it should be mostly fine. Controlled burn of the propellant, a.k.a., a launch, is obviously fine as well ;-)
Facilities and other things on the pad may not like it, though.
They already said that their Horizontal Integration Facility (where the rocket is put together prior to erection) is intact, as are the tanks on site. But the strongback looks mangled and may well be destroyed. It's also right beside the rocket, so the most likely casualty in such an explosion. Other pads and facilities are most likely far enough away that the only concern is debris from the explosion landing there.
Unlikely, it wouldn't be much of a launch pad if it couldn't handle failure modes for rockets (aka bombs with a hole in one end). Compare to this Saturn V launch.
It would be incredibly difficult to armor a launch pad to survive an explosion on-pad, so they aren't. The real solution is to have multiple launch pads (the space shuttle had three), so that if one blows up on the pad you have backups you can use until the blown up one is rebuilt.
The energy released in the first few seconds of a controlled launch is not remotely comparable to the energy released by an entire rocket blowing up simultaneously. Also, with an explosion, the entire rocket, along with parts of the strongback and other structures it's attached to, become shrapnel. Superheated water exhaust is a lot easier to protect against.
The video points out two of the protection features, but they wouldn't do so well with a RUD.
The tower features - the hold-down arms, etc - are painted with a sacrificial paint. The idea is that it's the paint that chars and burns, rather than the tower features.
Then there's the water deluge system.
In the video, the rocket and exhaust is clear of the tower, and the fires are out, within 30 seconds. Neither the sacrificial paint nor the water deluge are designed to handle long-duration fires from a RUD.
After a 2014 Antares rocket failure, the launchpad at Wallops Flight Facility took 1 year and $15 million to repair [1].
This is a good question. There could be substantial damage. The Antares failure at Wallops knocked the pad out for months and took $15 million to repair.
The pictures of the aftermath speak for themselves. The strongback is a mangled wreck, and all of the fuel tanks blew up. The vast majority of the launch complex, expressed in economic terms, is going to need to be rebuilt.
The Apollo 1 accident[0] was during a similar test (a "plugs out test", which tests the spacecraft independent of all the support systems on earth to verify that it works correctly on its own). The rationale behind all this tests is "better have a problem on the ground, where we can fix it, than have the spacecraft fail in space".
If you get interest in this stuff, the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" has an episode about Apollo1 (and the series as a whole, though slightly dated on the FX side, is amazing).
My understanding is that it is up to the customer whether they want to integrate the payload before or after the hot fire test. Integrating before means higher chance of an incident like this, while integrating after means significantly longer turnaround between the hot fire and launch.
I think this kind of test is generally just looking at the performance of the engines. Certainly highly unusual for the rocket to explode as part of this kind of test.
As an aside, when SpaceX do reuse a rocket for the first-time (I suppose you could describe that as a test-flight), they have apparently given SES a discount [1].
That was my first reaction. I thought they could create a dummy payload with the same dimensions and weight. But, then... unless the weight distribution of the payload is important.
Loading the payload isn't a quick thing, it takes time and a lot of careful work to do. So doing it before the tests can save a lot of time and I'm guessing money.
Loading the payload also requires a load of work moving the vehicle about etc. If you want to be certain you didn't damage the vehicle in any way during all of that then you need to test again once the payload is attached.
Of course normally a failure during a test would be something like minor thrust fluctuations - not a complete loss of vehicle and payload!
Apparently one of the satellites was meant for internet connectivity in the developing world. Zuckerburg is very mad right now. Lost time is lost opportunity.
Everything about Internet.org went in a way contrary to what Mr Zuckerberg wanted.
The bourgeoisie of the developing world he wanted to help protested, the political class looked into constraining it by law, the first world hated it for misrepresenting the ideals of the Internet and going against hard-earned net neutrality laws, local Internet service providers backed off because of the negative publicity...
And the satellites he wanted to use to circumvent that went up in flames.
Not completely; person-hours involved in building satellites, which are ultimately unique things, add a whole lot of experience to people involved in the building and handling, as well as for the organization. Sure it's not as much as a successful launch, but not totally wasted.
I think it's unfair that you are getting downvotes for this statement.
All you said was that it is good to have some perspective. Yes, it sucks to lose the rocket and the satellite. But to put it into perspective, the husband of the lady sitting next to me as I type this (and a friend of mine) is currently sitting in the shelter at the launchpad. He texted her to let her know he was alive. He can't give out any more details.
I agree. You could argue it could always be worse (2 deaths vs 1, a death of a loved one vs. a stranger) but I'm sure the level of badness has a steep curve before human loss is considered.
How close is the shelter to the tower? That's gotta be terrifying. I'd have thought people would need to be pretty far away just to avoid permanent hearing damage in an event like this.
The money didn't disappear, it paid the people working on the project all the way down to the miners who dug up the minerals and the fast-food workers who made the cheeseburger that engineer bought that one time.
Not quite. The Broken Window Fallacy hinges on the fact that the son breaks the window for a reason that doesn't further any other economic cause. That is, he didn't break the window for research, so nothing new was gained from it. Resources were merely shifted from the shopkeeper to the glazier.
When it comes to innovation, however, failure is often the impetus to more efficient design. Not only was that $200m shifted from Musk/Investors to SpaceX, et al, but it also went to informing the process and improvements for the entire project, and future projects by other companies.
We wish we could learn these things more cheaply, sure. But that doesn't mean the world or company would have been better off in the long run had the incident not occurred -- it's too soon to tell, and we might never know.
You can't say that all mistakes are worthwhile just because they reach us that we shouldn't make those mistakes... We already knew that. That wasn't research, it was a prelaunch test, and it failed.
That's not what we're learning. We're learning how not to make those mistakes. That yields: 1) Lower risk launches in the future through better process and better design 2) Possibly cheaper/better hardware redesigned due to the issues uncovered today.
Yes, it is probably lower ROI than that payload getting into space, but it does mean it's not a total loss and not simply a broken window fallacy.
It's more akin to if the window maker also tried to learn/test harder to break windows with each one she installed. Then, each broken window would be an experimental outcome instead of just a lost window.
No, in this field sometimes stuff blows up unexpectedly and it's part of the cost of doing business. It's like feeling bad for a life insurance company when someone dies.
No, I said that the money was spent, not lost; it didn't just vanish. They didn't bury it in the back yard and then forget about it, or set it on fire. They've definitely lost future income though, even if they rebuild the satellite and launch it successfully a few years from now. (I know that you usually build a test version of your space hardware, for tests that might be destructive. I wonder if any of those have ever been launched insted?)
It was also spent on something they wanted to spend it on, rather than something they were forced to spend it on. It's still an interesting point though, because they spent it on something that carried significant risk. Does spending money on a glass window, which carries the risk of a broken window, work in the same way? I've not considered the broken-window fallacy from that perspective before. Perhaps it's not, for the same for the same reason that breaking a window is considered a crime and an exploding rocket generally is not.
I'm kind of skeptical about this alleged fallacy, where I have to admit that I'm not an economist. The usual formulations of it seem to be something crucial missing.
I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points, e.g. in electronics by using cheap solder or capacitors with a limited lifetime. Buttons also fail way too easily. Or think of batteries that cannot be replaced. Do they all commit this fallacy, too? Do they harm the economy and therefore indirectly also themselves?
Or is it a matter of how long the window is used before it is broken? If so, how long? You could also make nearly unbreakable glass (buttons, rockets, etc.) but at very high costs for the company and therefore also the consumer. What role do the costs play in all of this? Is it an equilibrium? When does the fallacy start and normal 'crap product' cycle end?
I've never seen any explanation of this alleged fallacy that answers any of these questions.
> I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points
There are a lot of apocryphal claims like this, but little evidence. Most manufacturers design for an expected life of the product, and making it last longer than that is a waste of money and resources.
For example, you could design a computer to last for 20 years, but what would be the point? Computers go hopelessly obsolete in about 5 years. The only people who care about longevity of it are a handful of collectors. Fashionable clothing is not made to last because people don't wear out-of-fashion clothes. It's pointless to make them to last. Cars are designed to last for 10 years. Airliners are designed to last for 65,000 flight hours.
Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
> Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
Except they rarely are nowadays either. Lightbulbs would be a common example, but so would be cheap construction tools, kitchen tools, knives, etc. all designed to last for few uses and then break, so that people buy a replacement. The argument of "waste of money and resources" only holds for a single company, but not for the economy as a whole - it doesn't factor in the costs (and energy waste) of replacement and of dealing with the garbage, nor does it factor in the ecological damage created by unnecessary manufacturing.
It all boils down to the standard short-term, greedy optimization (in algorithmic sense) of the market economy, giving you perfectly legitimately sounding reasons to keep being stuck in a crappy local minimum.
Any wrench or hammer or saw you happen to buy will easily last you a lifetime, even if you use it constantly. I've seen some really cheap silverware (stamped out of sheet metal, and practically unusable) and some shoddy knives, but spend even a few dollars more and you can easily find something that will last for many years. The inexpensive silverware I picked up at Target a few years ago is solid cast stainless steel, and I have no doubts that it will last a lifetime; I doubt I could break a tine without tools. A cheap cast-iron skillet can easily last multiple centuries.
Most furniture is actually pretty shoddy, made from MDF and glue, but even so I've managed to find some that I'm happy with. My first office chair was not very good, and failed catastrophically in a few years, which was annoying. I managed to replace it with a much nicer one that I trust to last for decades. (It was rather overpriced though; I won't break even for something like 50 years. On the other hand, I can sit in it all day without hurting my back, which is more important to me.)
I have 8 year old computers that are perfectly good (aside from a hard drive that had to be replaced a year ago, and a new power supply the year before that), a 5 year old laptop that does all I could ask, etc. Computers are no longer advancing at such a breakneck pace that they're obsolete in a year, and the operating systems no longer have a lifetime measured in years either. I expect them all to last quite a bit longer.
I'm sure my washing machine will fail in a decade or two, probably the motor will burn out or a capacitor in the digital timer will fail. Neither are impossible to fix; the only question will be whether a newer washing machine would have enough extra efficiency to make replacement a better choice than repair.
Cars routinely last 200k miles or more, and replacement parts for most cars are easily had.
I would say that most products have a pretty good lifespan. Obviously my experience isn't universal, but I would say that most things are built well enough. It is worth paying attention to what you're buying, but most products are not actually intended to be disposable, except in areas of rapid technological change.
On the other hand, you could look at something like the jet turbine or transmission in an attack helicopter or tank. Those have a very definite lifetime, and a very strict maintenance schedule, and they're measured in hours, not years. If you do all the maintenance correctly, your jet turbine might last 500 hours (or some similar number, I'm not very familiar with the specifics) of use. Once you've used it that many carefully-logged hours you take it out and replace it with a new one. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? It's certainly expensive, but in military hardware you want to extract the maximum possible combat performance from everything; lifetime is pretty far down the priority list.
My reading of it: there's a continuum in production philosophy from throw-away culture to built-to-last products, and the broken-window fallacy (which Krugman, IIRC, doesn't think is a fallacy at all) is the extreme end of throw-away culture.
Building to last means high up-front costs, little flexibility (think of the Empire State Building and how much it must have cost to install air conditioning in it), but beautiful products with low total cost of ownership; throw-away goods are low on up-front costs, and they make it easy to respond to new technology, but they have a high total cost of ownership and they tend to be pretty ugly as well. A society which focuses on quality will be wealthier and more beautiful (look at Europe's low GDP and high standard of living), but one that's constantly rebuilding junk will be more equal; every 1970s Volvo still owned by an old-money family in 2016 is a Ford assembly-line worker without a job, or thereabouts...
Broken window fallacy is talking about the total (net) economy. It's perfectly possible for one person to come out ahead while the economy as a whole goes nowhere or even down.
For instance, if you are the only window repair person in town and you go around breaking other people's windows, you will certainly profit. But the amount you profit will be completely offset by the window owners' loss. (Presuming you do not go to jail, of course.)
Even if they are (which is apparently disputed), pointing out that someone is using a fallacy does not make them automatically wrong. Next time, you should try saying something more substantive than "Fallacy!"
Fallacy means faulty reasoning, not a false statement. It is possible to use faulty reasoning to arrive at a correct statement. For example, "The sun rises each day, because if it didn't then everyone would die." That's the fallacy of an appeal to consequences, yet the conclusion (the sun rises each day) is correct.
Furthermore there are other forms of reasoning than pure deduction. If you allow probabilistic inference, which is how humans generally operate intuitively, many deductive fallacies turn into probabilistic theorems.
I would guess they lost a lot less than the $200m initial investment, which included design & development of both the satelite and ground control systems. My assumption would be that only the satellite itself was destroyed in this explosion.
From the quote below, they reference $85 to cover launch, insurance, and 1 year of operating costs. Presumably that insurance would cover some of the costs of an event like this?
Spacecom Satellite Communications' (TASE:SCC) board of director has authorized management to sign a contract with Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) (TASE: ARSP.B1) to build and buy the Amos 6 communications satellite for $200 million. IAI will build the satellite and its ground control systems, and will provide operating services. The company plans to launch the Amo6 in the first quarter of 2015, and its operating life will be at least 16 years.
Spacecom estimates that the cost of launching, insuring and one year's operation of the Amos 6 will be $85 million. The company has to pick a launch company. Spacecom said that it will seek financing for the Amos 6 from IAI and foreign sources.
I would be quite surprised if the payload was not insured. Doesn't make it any easier on the people who poured their lives into the effort, but the owner will not be out any substantial investment capitol; just potential earnings until its replacement can be pushed up.
One could also feel sad for the (possibly millions) of people in Africa who were depending on this satellite launch to give them internet service. The difference between having internet, and not having it, is huge, especially in the developing world. This has real human consequences.
On any project like that many engineers involved will have invested more than regular hours and pushed their work life balance - losing it all a couple of days from launch into space - that's harsh dude
Most of the stuff on which we engineers work ends up in the bin anyway. This is just more spectacular than some manager showing up one day to announce that this XXX M$ project, the one you and many others spent your last 2 years regularly overtiming, is cancelled because mblllmbllbllsometopmanagementfuckedupmbbllmbllblll. I just mention this case because it was the most ridiculous that happened to me but a large majority of others projects I've worked ended up in the bin a way or another, or should have because they are designed from scratch to be useless.
Knowing how smart and methodological Musk is, I wouldn't be surprised if the rule at the office is actually to leave your desk and go home at 5pm sharp.
You are prone to make more mistakes when you tired and overworked and I cannot imagine more important place not to make mistakes, than building a rocket.
We're just past the anniversary of the last mishap: http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-up...
I also get the feeling that extra sleep and recovery time encourages the kind of creative thinking that recognizes unusual ways for things to go wrong and corrects for them in advance.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least. I know Musk claims that "working at Tesla/SpaceX is like being in the special forces", but there's no way that every employee at these companies has the work capacity to stay 100% focused through 80 hour work weeks all the time.
> Not only that, it's also not really a secret that SpaceX attracts people who want to enter the space industry. You get experience there, you move on.
Which is exactly the kind of people that SpaceX does not want and who should not apply there. The turnover is high for a reason indeed.
Not if you're covered by the "white collar exemption", which any engineer-type is going to fall under. Folks working 80 hour weeks at startups don't get any overtime for it.
Then again, you also have the payload manufacturer and other involved parties, which are not managed by Musk. Either way, a lot of hard work has gone up in flames, and people will be understandably disappointed.
Tell that to the people in Africa who will soon have no internet access once AMOS-2 fails.
This payload, AMOS-6, was a replacement for the soon to fail AMOS-2 which among other things is part of a Facebook initiative to provide internet access in parts of Africa.
I am not aware of any replacement in the works for it, so that service may just shut down, and who knows if it will ever start back up.
So while this might be "nothing" to you, it has actual repercussions for people.
Not to mention the effects on the Israeli company that made the payload. Insurance may or may not pay for the satellite itself (I don't know), but even if they do, they were also relying on income generated from running it.
Actual humans working for that company may now be impacted.
Internet.org was only a part of AMOS-6's planned internet bandwidth. Per Wikipedia "36 regional spotbeams with a throughput of about 18 Gbit/s — on Amos-6 to provide service for Facebook’s Internet.org and a new Eutelsat subsidiary focusing on African businesses. Costs would be divided in approximately equal shares between Eutelsat and Facebook."
It's a real bummer, also don't forget that now that SpaceX has had two payload losses in two years will mean that their insurance is very likely to go up.
Agree. "Sad" is the PC thing to say when something like that happens. In most people's lives it's a big "who cares". [1]
The fact that you were downvoted (at least when I saw your comment) indicates people don't agree with what you are saying and is an example of trying to enforce a particular type of thinking on someone else as far as what they should think or feel.
[1] Of course I wouldn't say "who cares" directly to someone involved in the project in some way then you extend your condolences.
You wouldn't say it directly to someone involved in the project, but you'll say it in a public forum where there's a decent chance some of those people will see it?
Of course I would say it to someone directly involved in the project. I've had projects I worked on go south through unavoidable externalities, of course I felt disappointed but there' no irreversible loss as when someone dies or is permanently disabled. Save your emotions for things that actually matter, an economic/operational setback doesn't qualify.
Exactly. That is the problem with the entire PC thing. You have to walk around on eggshells being worried that you will offend someone and never say what you think. I mean seriously. Be worried that someone who worked on a rocket project for SpaceX might be offended by what I say? I am supposed to not say anything because of that?
There's nothing wrong with softening your language a bit just in case someone who happens to be involved sees what you write. If not being a jerk means you can't speak what's on your mind, then that says more about your mind than it does the world.
Why is it necessary to feel sad and to even consider all of that? That is my point. What bothers you bothers you and what doesn't is fine, less to think about. You can't go around being bothered by everything 'bad' that happens in the world to someone else. I don't think that is healthy in any way. By "bothered" I don't mean indicating in words that something is sad. I mean actual concern as if it impacts you or someone you know personally.
Sorry but I can't relate to this type of tragedy at all. I can relate to someone getting hacked and losing their business or customer information though. That pain I can imagine. And to hear someone say to me "that's sad" about the latter when knowing they don't have any idea what it is really like to me is just lip service and almost patronizing.
Hey, why are you letting this bother you so much? Don't let what bothers other people bother you, I don't think it's healthy to want so much control over other people's emotions, and surely you'd have less to think about it you stopped letting it bother you so much?
This was a major part of a charitable initiative to bring free internet access to Africa.. That's a lot of lost opportunity for business, education, health care..
From a technical perspective, the laser-based communications network being developed by FB for Africa is super cool. I'm sad to see this delayed. Even though it doesn't affect me directly, it hits my inner nerd right in the feels.
Insurance. People don't spend tens of millions of $ sticking electronics on top of giant fireworks tubes without hedging the risks involved. If this is getting you int he feelz then you need to get out a bit more, this is merely a hiccup.
Sure, it will delay some things in Africa, but we can't easily say whether that delay will be good or bad. For all we know people will be better off due to the delay as it may be less disruptive of existing economic structures, notwithstanding their long-term inefficiency. You're assuming incorrectly that the consequences of this satellite deployment would have been all upside and no downside, but such effects are not reliably quantifiable.
How stupid, to test with satalite on-board?? esp considering how expensive they are, they should use a dummy the same size and weight.
You can't test satalite functionality on the ground so a completly pointless risk to include it.
There are actually things to test in the integration between the rocket and satellite. It's not like the satellite is a dump piece of steel sitting on top of the rocket. The payload has its own computer, power systems, and propulsion. The interactions between that and the launching rocket / ground systems matter. Also mating the two is non-trivial, so you can push the static fire back closer to the launch if you are doing it with the payload on board.
A static fire without the payload on the rocket was already done in Texas several weeks ago. This is the final dress rehearsal before launch. I always thought of these tests as low risk, but I guess nothing in rocketry is low risk.
Actually they specifically plan to load astronauts before fueling begins. If they're in the capsule the launch escape system (LES)[1] can propel them away from any on-pad disaster; not so if they're still walking across the gantry.
That said, NASA has raised concerns about loading crew pre-fueling as part of the NASA-SpaceX Commercial Crew development contract (CCDev).
The payload was apparently on the rocket at the time[1]. A $200 million loss there, which sucks for the insurance company but better than losing a $2b custom government bird.
One has to wonder why it was thought to be a good idea to keep an expensive payload onboard during a live-fire test
EDIT: Did some research, it seems that those tests (without the payload) already ran successfully, and that this accident happened during the fueling stage at T-3 minutes... that's super unlucky :/
> A $200 million loss there, which sucks for the insurance company but better than losing a $2b custom government bird.
In fairness, when did the government last lose a bird? Doesn't the ULA have a '100%' success rate (where success is getting payload to space, though some payloads fail to make it to the planned orbit)
While true, NASA was able to have the shuttle program be so successful because of the things that they learned in the previous space programs. This is SpaceX's first space program. Don't compare a "senior" program to a "freshman" program.
Which is great advice - that should temper everyone's expectations of the firm (Which were sky-high a few days ago, when Musk was promoting his 'flight-tested' reused rockets.)
I know this will seem like nitpicking, but this was not a failed launch. It was during the inspection phase, which is performed to uncover flaws in the vehicle before launch. Small consolation I know because in this case the payload was lost anyway. But it's still important to note that the expectation of failure is going to be higher for inspection/static fire, and that in the case of commercial crew launches, the crew would not be near the pad at the time of static fire.
A design flaw (foam) under launch stress resulted in foam shedding and leading edge wing impacts damaging tiles and ensuring loss of the vehicle on reentry.
I'd argue the failure was in design, triggered during launch, and manifested on reentry. But Columbia was doomed from seconds into flight.
The Falcon only has to solve the problem of getting the payload into orbit. The Shuttle had to both get payload into orbit and return its crew (and the Orbiter, and any return payload) safely to Earth (the Dragon capsule has to do this as well but the statistics given are for all Falcon launches). So as far as comparing the technical challenges involved with Falcon vs. the Shuttle, the Shuttle was solving a harder problem, which I think makes the numbers for the Shuttle look even better relative to the Falcon.
Harder at least as in there are extra steps that can go wrong (re-entry + landing), I suppose it’s debatable which was really a more difficult engineering project…
Specifically referring to the cost of the orbiter vehicle itself (or the cost you'd incur building a replacement if you lost one), roughly $2 billion is a decently accurate figure. The shuttle program as a whole, yes, is drastically more expensive.
ESA’s Ariane also has a far better successrate than SpaceX’s Falcon, and if I’d send a satellite to space, unless it would be a really cheap one, I’d likely not use the Falcon as delivery vehicle.
So you would rather pay $600 million per launch with 95% chance of success vs $200 million per launch with 93% chance of success?
There is no such thing a 100% chance of success, everyone has a chance of failure. I would not put ESA more than a few % more reliable. Math says your satellite would need to be really expensive for the price difference to be worth it.
Depending on the cost of failure, however for virtually every mission the 600M$ is a winner this is a no-brainer.
That "little" difference has huge huge economic repercussions, cost of insurance, ease of financing, and many other things. Not to mention that a satellite going boom can kill an operator if it doesn't have a backup.
This isn't an insurance case where you get your money and try again the week after, building a satellite is a huge undertaking it takes years to build, years to negotiate the contracts for and you have to do it from scratch all over again if it goes boom.
Launch 2 costs $200m: you can build 2 spare satellites for the same cost (assuming you don't pay for the launches that go boom; and even if you do, that still gives you one spare satellite).
Production doesn't work like this all the time, not everyone is the US government.
Building 2 would cost more than double, or it will take twice as long.
There are huge lead times involved, subcontractors with other commitments and other bottlenecks in the pipeline.
Not to mention that even if you do manage to build 2 in the same time window at only double the cost you still have the issue with the launch window, a launch accident would most likely ground the provider for a very long time which means you have to find another launch provider.
Spacecom had a launch window from spacex, spacex has a queue of 9-10 more launches already set, there will now be a huge delay and possible cancelation even if Spacecom had another unit they couldn't just launch it next month.
The flip side is that estimating the reliability of a launch vehicle is an inexact science at best given the paucity of actual launches to provide data points (frankly, there was no real way of assessing the reliability of the Falcon 9 other than to note that launch failures or partial failures tend to occur more in the first couple of years of launches of a new rocket type is backed by a reasonable amount of evidence across the history of other launch vehicle programmes)
Given SpaceX's long manifest of scheduled missions, it seems like the people who actually pay for this stuff don't always agree with you. Going with the more expensive option is apparently not a "no-brainer."
Someone already answered about the price, regarding the success rate, there is a much bigger difference than this:
Space X has had 29 launches, 2 failures and 1 partial failure (F9-004) so a success rate of 89.6%.
Ariane on the other hand hasn't had a single failure or partial failure since 2002 so if you compare since Space X started its services it has a success rate of 100%. If you take the whole history of Ariane it has indeed a success rate of 95.2% or 95.4% for the Ariane 5 version but the fact that Ariane has flown 72 consecutive missions without failure (2002 - Present) compared to 14 for Space X (2012 - 2015) says a lot about their reliability.
Where did you take your $600 million and $200 million cost per launch? Ariane costs are around $95 million, but for bigger payloads than what the Falcon 9 can handle.
Wild-ass speculation in the absence of more information than a tweet and a photo of a pad fire:
SpaceX test-fire the first stage motors before each launch. If this was a test firing that went spectacularly wrong, it's embarrassing -- but there won't have been any human beings within blast range and it's better to fail in test than to fail in flight with a payload on top.
(If it was a catastrophic failure during fueling/de-fueling ops, that's another matter entirely, and far more serious -- and an explosive test failure is serious enough as it is.)
Test fire for the launch of a commercial satellite (AMOS-6), which had been scheduled for a few days hence (and now presumably delayed, along with the rest of their launch schedule, pending further investigation). It might conceivably have been during fueling/de-fueling around the test. It's not yet clear from public reports whether the payload was attached at the time of the test-fire; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
(Note that fueling operations for Falcon 9 got a whole lot trickier when they switched to use of super-cooled fuel and oxidizer, to increase density -- if that stuff gets warmer, its volume increases to more than that of the tank, but it's still liquid, so you can't just vent it off.)
According to wikipedia this is related to the AMOS-2 staelite leased by Facebook to provide internet coverage in part of Africa.
An interesting clause in their contract is:
"The parties have agreed to the right to terminate the contract if Amos-6 and the ground gateways in France, Italy and Israel are not ready for service by January 1, 2017"
So this fire could have wider repercussions if SpaceX doesn't get a new launch ready in time. (Unless that same contract also has a clause about SpaceX failure vs IAI failure.)
> but it's still liquid, so you can't just vent it off.
You can vent off liquid to keep the pressure down, but since it's heavier than air it will just add to the fire. Unless maybe they have some sort of piping system connected to the vent to route the extra fuel elsewhere.
Unless they happen to have a backup satellite already built, nothing SpaceX can do is going to accomplish this mission in 2016. There's no chance whatsoever that IAI is going to crank out a new satellite in just 3 months.
So does that put the rocket in a situation where its either launch or warm up and explode? I'm adventurous, but I don't want to be strapped to that thing if thats the case.
It means that if there's a launch failure, you can't just let the stuff sit there. They clearly can pump it out -- the normal sequence for this sort of test (which SpaceX generally does before every launch) involves filling the tanks and then running the engines for only a second or two, and they also obviously need procedures for last-minute launch scrubs, which can happen for a whole bunch of reasons. (One launch was recently delayed because someone steered their boat into the no-go area.)
The main operational consequence to date has been to limit the number of times that they can try to launch within an extended launch window. But if something goes wrong with the fuel-handling equipment, or thermal management inside the tanks, things can get bad.
On the contrary, venting LOX is very common and easily visible in the lead-up to nearly every Falcon 9 launch. Google "falcon 9 lox vent" for plenty of videos/photos.
The "venting" you usually see isn't LOX, it's condensed water vapor, there are small bleeder valves in the LOX tanks and the fuel line but they are not designed or used for emergency pressure relief.
The cloud is water vapor. But it's not like water vapor is onboard the Falcon and being vented. Boiled-off oxygen is vented, and it's cold enough to cause the water vapor in the surrounding air to condense.
Yes like i said through the bleeder valves in the tanks and the fuel line, but this isn't an emergency release valve, you cannot use it to drain the tanks.
Yes through the bleeder valves but a bleeder valve isn't an emergency pressure release valve.
Bleeder valves are designed to bleed gas from a system which contains a liquid. They aren't designed to be used to relieve pressure in an emergency situation, infact under high enough pressure they stop working all together.
In a more common setting you see these types of valves on breaks and on heating systems that use hot water, while they do bleed steam they bleed it in order to prevent the accumulation of gas and air bubbles within the system not to control the pressure.
Do you know of any off-the-shelf that are qualified as reliable at the temperatures of cryogenic fluids? (F9 LOX is believed to be at roughly -200 Centigrade, or around 70 Kelvin.)
I can't think of the manufacturer of the top of my head, but there are definitely off-the-shelf options. They are used on the LN2 tanks and dewars you see at a lot of electronics (and I'm sure other) manufacturers, and I'm pretty sure are standard kit for any cryogenic vessel. I think the bigger issue, as one commentor alluded to, is that you might not want to vent whatever is in the rocket straight to atmosphere.
LN2 isn't combustible. LN2 isn't stored at the high pressures that cryogenic LOX and RP-1 are.
RP-1 has a flashpoint of 110f, liquid oxygen would turn pretty much every spark into a party including turning a lot of materials which are not normally combustible under atmospheric levels of oxygen highly combustible.
Basically once the cryogenic fuel starts to warm up you have to launch or to empty the tanks, the tanks are pumped out into reservoir tanks which are usually below the launch pad and fueling or emptying the rocket is in general the most dangerous part of the launch/abort sequence. Temperature and pressure variance, vibrations, leaks, and a lot of moving parts if anything goes wrong it can result in a pretty big explosion.
Overall they do have ways to empty the tanks, but this is a controlled pump out of the fuel at pressures and rates that would be as safe as one can get when dealing with supercooled liquid oxygen and kerosene, uncontrolled venting is a big no no.
You can similarly see this on larger tanks of both inert and reactive gases, a small propane tank could have a PRV because a flame out is likely to be less dangerous than an explosion in a BBQ setting, a tanker won't have a PRV because if it vents several tons of propane the result would be as bad or worse than a potential or an actual explosion.
LN2 tanks also have PRV's as long as they are small enough to be safely vented but as soon as you go into a large enough volume where venting it is no longer safe whatever fail safe you implement has to be controllable.
Thanks for the info! My experience in the past was mainly with large LN2 dewars, with liquid helium refrigerators added to re-condense the N2 gas back to a liquid, limiting the pressure (and limiting how often you needed and LN2 refill!). We had blow-off valves as a fail safe if pressures got too high if the cooling head ever failed. I'm sure working with cryogenic fuels is a whole different world.
As I commented, it's not that there aren't cryogenic temperature pressure relief valves, just that they may not be what you want!
>As I commented, it's not that there aren't cryogenic temperature pressure relief valves, just that they may not be what you want!
Yeah for sure, if you think about it even if the rocket was filled with inert gas venting it might be very tricky.
You have an erect rocket on a launch pad, you have to vent evenly as a pressure relief valve is effectively a "rocket engine" at high enough pressures.
If one of them freezes and you don't have even distribution it can topple over.
You also have to vent the tanks in order and at a certain rate I would assume for example you want to vent to top tanks first to prevent the rocket from becoming too top heavy, and you also want to vent it at a certain rate to prevent quick shifts in the balance and weight distribution of the rocket.
liquid oxygen would turn pretty much every spark into a party including turning a lot of materials which are not normally combustible under atmospheric levels of oxygen highly combustible.
Nickel and steel would combust during tests of the SSMEs. (Space Shuttle Main Engines) Even increasing the fraction of gaseous oxygen in the atmosphere can turn all sorts of surprising things combustible. (Like living human flesh!)
Interested to know more about the fuels... when I searched for info about Falcon-9 fueling a week or two ago (having briefly conceived of a semi-idle interest in rocket propellants) I read it was RP-1 plus oxidiser - so basically "just" high-spec kerosene. That doesn't jibe with supercooling in my mind... Please enlighten us further.
As far as I know that was one of the defining changes of the Falcon 9 Full-Thrust, which flew first in December 2015 with Orbcomm OG2 M2. So, every Falcon 9 this year, plus one.
Liquid O2 aka oxygen is a common and cryogenic oxidizer. Loading cold liquid fuels also has benefits like lower volume, but few things stay liquid at cryogenic temperatures.
PS: When dealing with rockets oxidizer is also a fuel because they need both it and something to burn.
SpaceX frequently conducts these static fire tests with the payload on board. So unfortunately it's entirely possible that AMOS-6 is lost too. Very sad. Hopefully no one is hurt.
This article has some information on the new characteristics:
- Although considered to be an iterative upgrade from the Falcon 9 v1.1 that preceded it, the modifications to the Full Thrust version have increased the vehicle’s published liftoff capabilities by as much as 30 percent.
- A key component of this performance increase is the use of “densified” propellant. By chilling the liquid oxygen to minus 340 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 207 degrees Celsius) and the RP-1, a highly-refined form of kerosene used as rocket fuel, to 20 degrees Fahrenheit ( minus 7 degrees Celsius), SpaceX has demonstrated the capability to store more oxidizer and fuel in a given volume, as well as increase the flow of propellant through the turbopumps on the first stage’s nine Merlin 1D powerplants and on the upper stage’s lone MVac.
Interesting on the fuel. Oxygen's boiling point is at -297F (turned into liquid) and its freezing point is at -362F (turned into solid). Lowering the temperature to -340F would be solidifying the liquid oxygen but not quite yet. I guess at that point the volume has reduced, enabling the packing of more LO into the container.
Having an additional phase change doubles the risk factor along the whole pipeline that it flows through, the container, the valves, the pipes, the chambers, whatever. Liquid to gas can be dissipated quickly. How bad can uncontrolled solid to liquid expansion be?
Edit: uncontrolled liquid to gas venting is equally volatile and dangerous.
I initially started this comment saying "I doubt that there's that much cash-flow between SpaceX and Tesla/Solar City", then thought I should at least google it first.
What do you know? Turns out SpaceX invested $165M in Solar City last year [1].
Looks like it was in 2015 on a 1-year term. So it would already be paid off. However, the linked article is from Aug 2015, so they may have bought even more bonds after that point.
About the same as you debug an issue from having just a tracelog. The rocket and pad equipment have quite a few sensors that record information, so you have quite a lot of data afterwards to spot anomalies (you could also compare to previous successful launches / static fires to spot them). Admittedly, that doesn't really explain how they figure out some stuff, e.g. with CRS-7 the problem was with a strut holding a high-pressure helium vessel in the second stage. They likely would have seen the overpressurization of the tank and there are not many sources for that pressure, but pinpointing it to a piece that doesn't even exist anymore ... beats me.
I don't recall the source, but they identified the CRS-7 strut by using several mechanical vibration sensors placed on various parts of the rocket.
The deflection / explosion reaches the sensors at different times, and with precision timing, it enables you to reverse pinpoint where it must have originated: the failing strut.
They probably brainstorm through all the possible scenarios that could have caused a particular condition and then see if the data matches and they can prove it as best they can.
Not a rocket scientist; just an electrical engineer with plenty of failure analysis experience. Here is generally how I would translate my process to this case.
As a sibling mentioned, there will be lots of telemetry about what was going on with various systems during the incident. That data may indicate a few specific points to start, but it will mostly be useful for putting other facts into context. In parallel would be an effort to comb over the pad, recover as much as possible of what remains of the rocket, and try to identify what parts are what. There may be some obvious forensic evidence of parts to concentrate on, but in all likelihood the analysis will be guided by a combination of analyzing the telemetry and the damage patterns on the remaining pieces. Hopefully the combination will narrow the probable causes down enough to concentrate analysis on a couple-three theories.
Once plausible and probable theories are identified, teams will start to drill down into what event chains could cause them and look for evidence to confirm or reject those. Some of that will involve destructive analysis of the wreckage; you can glean a surprising amount of information from high-magnification images, x-rays, and sections of what otherwise looks like a twisted hunk of scrap metal. Some will involve modeling; no doubt the engineers who designed the engines have some sort of model they used to test it, and the parameters on that model can be varied to create various out-of-spec conditions. Some will be design analysis, to see if some previously-unseen corner case could have caused an otherwise-conformant system to fail catastrophically. Test data on the involved systems will be analyzed to look for any anomalies that might have been passed off at the time but that might be significant on hindsight.
Assuming possibilities still exist and are not sufficiently firm, or even just to be extra thorough, a few possibilities may be tested in practical (and possibly destructive) tests. In other words, try to blow up (or simulate blowing up) another engine in a controlled manner. That may or may not be possible, depending on what the root cause is; a parts tolerance issue, for example, would be practically impossible to recreate unless it were possible to manually change affected parts to match the suspected tolerances that caused the failure.
I'm sure an actual rocket scientist will come along and provide more detail. My work was limited to exploding caps and FETs.
If you're interested in this, you would enjoy reading the analysis of the breakup of the shuttle Columbia (not the earlier Challenger analysis, which is in itself interesting). Give yourself an hour.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned whether or not this failure is related to SpaceX's first time reusing a rocket. If so, hopefully this isn't too much of a setback!
Question is whether they will have a launch pad at that time and how long investigations will last and until a fix is deployed. May well be that there are no more launches this year.
It was just yesterday we read about SpaceX launching their first reused rocket. However, after searching for the news article, it's now clear to me that this was scheduled to happen "late this year".
"This rocket was scheduled to launch the Amos-6 communication satellite, which among other functions included the capabilities for Facebook to spot-beam broadband for Facebook’s Internet.org initiative"
It's hard to imagine that this sort of scheme is the best way to provide broadband to most parts of Africa. Why can't they just put microwave links on their cell towers? This is some sort of speculative play by FB to bypass local influences.
"SpaceX can confirm that in preparation for today's static fire, there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload. Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries."[0]
He's a space news reporter at Ars Technica. It makes sense they'd be one of the first to get the SpaceX news release. It has too many characters to fit in a tweet, and even if it could fit, embedding an image of the text sets it apart from the tweeter's introduction and makes it more readable. It's standard practice on twitter to use images for blocks of text.
For all developers of anything. Repeat this mantra.
This is why we test, this is why we test, this is why we test.
It is especially important to repeat this mantra around management types who want last minute builds before going in front of important customers, because the light blue button looks SO much better then the dark blue button...
I mean, it's not like SpaceX doesn't test. They missed something, and unfortunately this time it caused a total loss that they're going to have to answer to. But yes, you're right; we recently implemented a two-week demo lockout policy at my office. No changes are allowed being committed closer than two weeks from a demo date, and two or three guys are dedicated to just testing and shaking down the system. They're the only ones allowed to call for a bug fix, and they're only allowed to call for a bug fix. It seems as though management has finally realized that missing one requirement during a demo is much, much better than having the whole enchilada crash spectacularly.
The problem is that software works the same every time, hardware doesn't have to (for example, if there was some kind of wear in the umbilical, for example).
What happens when payload is lost at such an event due to SpaceX related failure? Obviously they have to reschedule but does SpaceX cover partial losses etc?
Aon International Space Brokers (http://www.aon.com/singapore/risk-services/products-services...) covers liability for the payloads to be delivered, however, SpaceX shoulders the financial burden of losing the rocket itself, as only the contents are insured.
It will also likely increase the cost of insuring SpaceX launches. I'm sure it's like car insurance. Of course SpaceX is so much cheaper than their competition that it may not matter, and reuse is about to make them cheaper still.
Short term setback, but probably not so awful long term. Also glad nobody got hurt. It's just money.
No they aren't; SpaceX is charging around $62m and Arianespace charges $100-$130m for the same launch.
The first few Falcon 9 launches were a lot cheaper, around $40m I think. I'm sure SpaceX would still be massively profitable at that price, but they're already over-booked so might as well raise prices to generate more capital since building rockets is an ahem <i>capital intensive</i> business.
If SpaceX can re-use rocket engines for 10 launches that will change everything yet again. Let's be extremely generous and say $5 million for fuel, personnel, range rental, etc. Amortize the vehicle across 10 launches and you're talking $10m.
For the mid-size launches that SpaceX is billing 62m$ for, Ariane bills 60m$ for.
What Arianespace offers at 130m$ is instead something SpaceX isn’t even offering currently, as their second stage is far inferior to Ariane’s.
(Ariane always bundles a 130m$ and 60m$ contract per launch together).
If SpaceX can relaunch the rockets multiple times, that might reduce the cost indeed, but they also have far increased labor costs up ahead, as they can’t keep everyone working overtime for free forever.
$5M is rather low, and 10 launches rather high, for the time being. First-stage reuse would likely cut prices by 33-75% for the first decade; More than that is going to require a significant expansion of the satellite market, which takes time.
The best market prospect for cheap launch is probably the re-advent of LEO communication constellations, which will each require hundreds to thousands of satellites along tens of orbital planes (adding tens of launches to the global manifest per network).
Last accident, Falcon Heavy had a big delay. Apparently SpaceX pulled engineering resources off of FH to work on F9. Given that the 2018 launch window is narrow, it's quite likely that Red Dragon won't launch until the 2020 launch window.
p.s. are you involved with Metaculus in some way? All of your recent postings appear to mention metaculus.com.
Not to be paranoid or anything, but with the Russians in the news with hacking, could this be the equivalent of a Stuxnet industrial sabotage? It would seem to be in their foreign ministry's interest to reduce the one successful American domestic manufacturer of rocket motors...
In looking at failures, asking "What changed (was different)" in this case, is one generally useful approach...
Based on previous comments, the most likely failure scenario seems to be related to the new use of super-cooled LOX - and I have to ask, was the temperature at the pad, at the time of the launch, significantly higher than during previous launches involving super-cooled LOX? If so, is there a possibility that the higher temperature differential could have been a contributing factor in the cause of the failure?
(Kind of the exact opposite of the case of the Challenger, where low temperatures were a critical causal factor of the failure)
The smoke looks fairly white and uniform. That suggests it's coming from the rocket fuels, not a burning building or other facility. To me, that means the safety protocols held, limiting the spread/damage. Hopefully nobody was hurt.
This type of hardware failure makes me glad to do software where the most damage that can happen is an unhappy customer, not a huge explosion. Also why I was glad to give up a chemistry career after nearly poisoning everyone in the building when the hood system failed.
What makes you think this couldn't be a software bug? Studying about bugs like Therac-25 [1] were standard practice at my school to show what it takes to make software an engineering discipline.
How do you even extinguish that kind of fire? Is there any value in salvaging parts before they completely burn out? Anybody who can chime in the protocol for such fires?
The Israeli government has approved the deal with China, if they didn't want it to go through they would have blocked it, their MOD has oversight on virtually all exports and international dealings.
Israel needed AMOS-6 more than anyone else because communication satellites are important for national security and are used by military and national defense agencies.
Even if somehow your crackpot theory had merit delaying the launch would have been an easier and cheaper way of tanking the deal than sabotaging a rocket.
This wasn't an Iranian spy satellite, Israel has no interests in hurting it national security, economy, and reputation by blowing their own shit up, I don't even understand why people would think they blew it up.
Its a difficult distinction to make. I don't think it unreasonable to expect some nuance on the part of moderators. My personal suggestion would be to remove subjective comments more readily in threads related to highly technical topics where there is MUCH to discuss related to the science or engineering of the piece but show some discretion in threads regarding topics which are inherently political or more subjective. So, here, I would actually say moderation is warranted. But if this were a piece on Edward Snowden, perhaps less demand for utter tact.
"Only in an irrational and unknown direction can we come to wisdom again."
The HN moderation staff has a difficult job which they do exceedingly well, and in a thoroughly nuanced fashion. Were this otherwise, discourse here would differ little in quality from what, for example, Reddit provides in such abundance.
I appreciate you feel strongly that you can tell HN's moderators how to do their jobs even better. Consider the possibility that this may not be the case.
I kind of am too. I mean, it sounded as though you were likening someone saying "please don't be rude" to someone telling someone else what to think, but that doesn't even make sense, so...
Short answer: If this was a french payload no one would be talking about this, even tho the french intelligence services have considerably more resources and a longer operational history than the Israeli ones.
Long Answer: How was that not racist?
Anyone who cannot see the quite blatant racism (and just to be clear, racism does not universally entail malice) in this "idea" does not understand what racism, cultural bias are and more specifically what is anti semitism.
Anti semitism and the overall cultural bias towards the Jewish people isn't distilled into saying "Jews are greedy".
The level of attention that the state of Israel receives today is rooted heavily in the cultural bias or European origin that surrounded the Jewish people for centuries especially since the 15th Century onwards.
A good parallel would be to explore the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; regardless of what was the original intent of the author (there is quite strong evidence today that it was intended to be a parody) you can't ignore the fact that it was mostly accepted as "true even if they are fake", even the most liberal intellectuals at the time could not dismiss them offhand as utter hogwash.
And that is because they were based on centuries of subtle but ever more growing cultural attribution that made the Jews easy to portray as a cabal of scheming, greedy, backstabbing individuals that are not only aiming for world domination but have already attained it and got their hands in every government and enterprise.
These "Protocols" were so powerful that they were accepted by many as a historical fact, in Japan they were so sure they were a true historical document that senior Japanese officers were saving European Jews during the holocaust both out of respect and to gain their assistance in the war effort against the Americans.
The "Protocols" today and their more modern updates are still circulated in very large numbers in Latin America, Africa, the Arab world and Asia, and they are mostly accepted as "real even if fake" and even taught at schools.
In the near East and N. and W. Africa they are so sure that Israel is all capable that they attribute it almost magical powers, the catching birds and various other animals with Israeli trackers or identification implants as Israeli spies isn't an uncommon occurrence even in more "modern" countries like Egypt and Lebanon.
Since these animals are usually executed as spies for public display the Israeli Nature Authority actually stopped marking the country on the more rare species that are tracked by it and by the Israeli chapters of the WWF in order to prevent further degradation in their numbers.
Overall the idea of the all powerful, greedy backstabbing Jewish Cabal is still very much alive and kicking, today it's just the all powerful, greedy, backstabbing Zionist Entity, but the root of much of it is the same.
Now this isn't to say that every legitimate criticism of Israel like every other nation is due to anti semitism but a lot of it is, the disproportionate level of attention that Israel receives in regards to ever action and event is simply cannot be explained by any other reasoning.
Even if we only isolate the conflict in the large scheme of things it's meaningless the amount of casualties is laughably low, lower than every other conflict that has been going on since it was founded by multiple orders of magnitude (70 years of the Israeli Arab conflict at large have seen less casualties than one year of the Syrian civil war, and as far as civil wars go the Syrian one isn't very bloody).
Every event and incident involving Israel somehow turns into a conspiracy theory in a heartbeat even tho the Israeli intelligence services are not remarkable in any real way, have considerably less resources than most western agencies, and compared to the comblock/eastern ones are considerably less "aggressive".
The funny thing is that if you do look at this from a conspiratorial point of view the only country that had the reason and the ability to both sabotage the rocket and get away with it is the United States.
The US always goes out of it's way to block every potential technology transfer from Israel to China [0], while Israel was building the relationship with China for decades.
The US has the ability to do w/e it wants with the rocket while Israel not only loses close to half a billion of dollars in the event but actually risks of starting a war with the US if discovered, I'm pretty sure the US invaded countries for less than blowing up a US made rocket on a US military base after infiltrating it with operatives and sabotaging it.
But as I've said if this was a French satellite no one would have even be thinking about all of this.
Belief that the Israeli intelligence services are, in the modern era, more likely to engage in certain types of action against particular targets than, say, their French counterparts need not be based in any anti-Jewish sentiment.
It can be based, e.g., on the degree to which Israeli intelligence services have been found to be doing certain things (e.g., carrying out operations targeting the US) compared to others.
While I think in this particular case, from the available evidence with which I am familiar, that would probably be flawed analysis, I can certainly see it being made without any racism.
One can have an especial distrust of the Israeli government -- on reasonable or unreasonable grounds -- without being anti-Semitic, just as one can have an especial distrust of the US government without that being grounded in antipathy against the dominant racial group in the US.
>Belief that the Israeli intelligence services are, in the modern era, more likely to engage in certain types of action against particular targets than, say, their French counterparts need not be based in any anti-Jewish sentiment.
You are either giving too much credit to the Israelis, or nearly not enough to the French.
>It can be based, e.g., on the degree to which Israeli intelligence services have been found to be doing certain things (e.g., carrying out operations targeting the US) compared to others.
This is a very flawed estimate, everyone spies.
>One can have an especial distrust of the Israeli government -- on reasonable or unreasonable grounds -- without being anti-Semitic, just as one can have an especial distrust of the US government without that being grounded in antipathy against the dominant racial group in the US.
Then again you do not understand what "anti semitism" is it is the cultural bias the fact that it has a name doesn't make it into something special.
The cultural bias towards constantly distrusting the Israeli government like there is some intrinsic reason to not trust them because they always have a hidden agenda (like every other government) is tied quite strongly to the cultural bias of distrusting the Jewish people at large.
The constant distrust of the US government is also heavily influenced in the cultural bias, much of it american in origin which was exported to the rest of the world via popular culture in the form of TV, movies, books and stories.
You can't just make-up new definitions for words to fit your narrative.
Distrust of a government does not correlate to racism against the people under it. And since there's no basis for comparison you have no way of knowing the level of distrust one has for any or all governments. Therefore you can't gauge if there is any bias in the level of mistrust for the Israeli government.
By your logic, anything other than blind acceptance of any and all actions by the Israeli government is likely racist in nature.
The OP asked if it was possible that the government sabotaged the launch because the national company behind the payload was in the process of selling itself to a foreign company and rival power.
There was no hint or insinuation of racism, you chose to see what wasn't there. You talk about paranoid rationale of countries killing birds thought to be Israeli spies as absurd, your rant trumps that paranoia.
The question itself is quite valid because, on the international stage, Israel is known for playing hardball and not above making attacks against allies or on foreign soil. However it's clear that other countries, particularly the US, have a far greater interest in that deal falling through. In any case it's not unreasonable to suspect sabotage though Israel isn't the most likely suspect.
That doesn't make sense in this context. Presumably, in your example, the Israelis knew the answer would have been "no." In this case, the Israelis could've just themselves said "no" -- which would've been the result they wanted.
The comment was essentially stating that Facebook should have built two of the satellites, as a contingency plan. Rocket science is hard. Having a backup is easier.
There is no insurance for SpaceX here. The payload is insured, but the loss of the launch vehicle and any damage to the launch facilities will be born SpaceX directly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ#t=1m10s