Aborted second time -0:48; engines didn't start this time and someone on the live stream called "abort"
listened back to the stream
"abort abort abort - props con(?) abort"
at about 1h:58m in the stream
EDIT : announcer did say that engineering stopped it because they hadn't done their review. Maybe the "abort abort abort" wasn't as dramatic as it sounded
"We called manual abort. Better to be paranoid and wrong. Bringing rocket down to borescope engines ... Elon Musk (@elonmusk) "
10 mins before trying to launch again, Elon tweeted:
"Increasing helium spin start pressure. Probably <50%
chance of passing all aborts, but worth a try. Countdown
resuming "
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/406205240040771584
So it was unlikely they would go when they restarted the countdown.
Abort $%&#!. Aborted on time T+2 seconds. At least it is safe. Shutdown was made after ignition.
Update: Problem was the slow ramp up of the thrust of the rockets. Engineers are looking at the data. Rocket is on stand-by to launch today, but the commentator sounded skeptical.
Update: Clock was restarted with T-00:25:10, still some problems to resolve.
Update: Aborted on time T-48 seconds. Done for today. The rocket will be inspected and another launch attempt will be in a few days.
Thanks for submitting this now rather than 15 minutes from now! Moments like these are historic, and it's wonderful to experience this in realtime rather than watching a replay.
T minus 10min. Go SpaceX!
EDIT: It's impressive they were able to abort safely after ignition. That's historically rare, isn't it?
Aborting after ignition is only possible with liquid engines. The F9 in particular is designed to light and stabilize all nine engines before removing the restraints holding the rocket down - this gives them very robust abort capabilities. And since the engines are designed for multiple lights, they can even retry it without needing refurbishment.
Gemini 6A also aborted after engine ignition. The astronauts climbed out, the engineers found the problem, and they launched successfully three days later.
Liquid-fueled engines are inherently restartable. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to test an engine without throwing it away afterwards.
Sometimes manual intervention is required, though. For example, the starter cartridge on the Titan was a consumable part, and had to be replaced before restarting the engine.
> The Saturn V rocket was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a 36-story-tall building, and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed 2.8 million kilograms (6.2 million pounds), the weight of about 400 elephants. The rocket generated 34.5 million newtons (7.6 million pounds) of thrust at launch, creating more power than 85 Hoover Dams. A car that gets 48 kilometers (30 miles) to the gallon could drive around the world around 800 times with the amount of fuel the Saturn V used for a lunar landing mission. It could launch about 118,000 kilograms (130 tons) into Earth orbit. That's about as much weight as 10 school buses. The Saturn V could launch about 43,500 kilograms (50 tons) to the moon. That's about the same as four school buses.
To get some rough idea of scale, this blueprint shows a person near the engine / nozzle / thing.
Just said that they're putting a bit more fuel on in the hopes of trying again if the engineers can figure out what went wrong, their window is about an hour.
Also said that if not today, they have more or less the same window tomorrow
EDIT: someone just said starting the clock momentarily ... looks like they might be going again
At T+0, the flight computer ignites the engines, but the vehicle doesn't liftoff yet. Instead, it is held down for two seconds while the flight computer verifies that all engines are working correctly (to prevent blowing up both the vehicle and everything in its surroundings).
It seems that the checks failed here and the flight computer aborted launch at T+00:01.
A Great Education Here! Space the beginning of an infinite destination. Some day we will move beyond a geosynchronous transfer orbit because no one have measured the equator of the universe :) as of yet :)
I was eight, and it was awesome. And I don't mean the kind of "awesome" people use these days when they find out the fries don't cost extra; I mean the "inspiring actual jaw-dropping awe" kind we used back then. Scale made no sense; it was huge in ways that rockets (who hasn't fired a rocket of some kind as a kid?) shouldn't be, and your brain told you that it wasn't up to walking speed yet when it cleared the tower, so it was definitely coming back down any second now. Unfortunately, the best I could come up with at the time was "ho... ly... cow!!!"
I'm about your age and, yeah ... at this remove I'd use the word majestic, how the huge Saturn V stack would slowly start climbing and accelerating.
Compared to later programs, there's also a "wow" in that NASA was "going to put some men on the moon", vs. the "space truck" paradigm of the Shuttle and other launches which at best send probes to far off planets and such. A different scale in every way.
Let's not exaggerate. It's impressive that their self-test could abort successfully, yes. Though it's not certain yet whether there was anything wrong and it should have aborted.
listened back to the stream
"abort abort abort - props con(?) abort"
at about 1h:58m in the stream
EDIT : announcer did say that engineering stopped it because they hadn't done their review. Maybe the "abort abort abort" wasn't as dramatic as it sounded
"We called manual abort. Better to be paranoid and wrong. Bringing rocket down to borescope engines ... Elon Musk (@elonmusk) "
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/406209289494462464