Watch SpaceX's rocket dramatically detonate, destroying a $200m Facebook satellite Elon Musk has confirmed that today's SpaceX rocket explosion – which destroyed a $200m satellite – was caused by a cockup during fueling. Footage of the disastrous static firing test shows an inferno breaking out at the top of the Falcon 9 rocket, close to the fueling point for the liquid oxygen reservoir. After the initial …
China is mightier. And also squashes "rumors". (Ok, so it wasn't a rocket, but it's a bad case of crater nevertheless)
@Destroy All Monsters: The failed launch of a Long March 3 rocket on feb 14 1996 killed an estimated 500 subjects of the People's Republic of China ....
See also a chilling eyewitness report at http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/disaster-at-xichang-2873673/?no-ist
Two weeks after the accident, Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported that the Intelsat-708 accident had left six dead and 57 injured. That, in fact, might be a realistic number for the casualties among the technical personnel involved in preparing the mission. We may never know how many local villagers died, although the numbers could easily have run into the hundreds, which would make the accident the worst disaster in launch history.
Since that day, the reliability of Long March rockets has greatly improved, although China never became a major player in the global commercial launch business. Bruce Campbell did go back to China for two successful launches of Loral-built satellites. He discovered that the village that used to border the launch center has disappeared, as if it never existed. There is no memorial to the victims, and their fate has never been mentioned in the state-controlled Chinese press.
Goddammit China. Losing face and lucky numbers. How are you guys ever gonna get ahead?
even when slowing the video down.
Explosion started just below the payload, so another dodgey O2 tank could be in the works.
On the other hand, electrical spark from somewhere ignites the O2 venting off and the fire flashes inside the tank, or even the payload seperation bolts fire, puncturing the tank and it goes boom
So until the cause is known.... lets wait and see shall we?
Or it was.......... Aliens!
O2 doesn't burn by itself, that's why it's not a big deal to vent it that way. Sure does appear that the explosion started external to the booster. I'd guess the fuel coupling blew a gasket, then blew a bunch of fine kerosine droplets out, and then some relay on the gantry gave a spark to set it off, and then all that pure O2 floating around definitely would be a problem.
I don't believe it was a payload engine misfire since the payload stage fell pretty much straight down and looked largely intact before it hit the pad and detonated (that's presumably the hydrazine contamination source that SpaceX referred to, since the Falcon9 itself runs off the kerosene derivative RP-1 and LOX).
Note the initial small fireball close to the top of the stage, the fireball expansion, and the burning streamers cascading down under the fireball. That's burning RP-1. I would speculate a leak in the fuel stage mixed with venting oxygen- at which point a tiny static charge would have been enough to set it off- and a flashback into the fuel tank, which ruptured into the larger fireball and streamers.
The brighter flash when the payload hits the pad seems to be the hydrazine/oxidizer tanks rupturing and the hypergolic contents suddenly finding themselves in massive contact. Probably a much faster reaction than the RP-1 tank rupture and combustion, but the sheer speed of detonation would tend to fling a lot of hydrazine away from the reaction size without oxidization, hence the contamination hazard.
Mainly I'm glad no one got killed. Satellites and rockets can be rebuilt.
@boris .... definitely not caused by payload bolts firing as they are captive pneumatics not pyrotechnic. A flash electric fire fed by venting oxygen seems more likely. Though it could even have been something as bizarre as the wrong type of grease being used on the oxygen vent system. LOX is a very unforgiving substance.
"It was obviously an ISIS sniper trained in rocketry by North Korea and smuggled near the facility by the molepeople firing a prototype rifle provided by aliens!"
I knew it! That's exactly the sort of claim a lizard person would make to cover his tracks!
[Dons Q metal cap to reinforce the aluminium one]
[edit] Big John beat me to it.
On the other hand, electrical spark from somewhere ignites the O2 venting off and the fire flashes inside the tank, or even the payload seperation bolts fire, puncturing the tank and it goes boom
O2 doesn't ignite; O2 ignites you. Pure oxygen doesn't support combustion alone and sea level air isn't flammable. So, if there was fire outside initially there'd have to be fuel to go with the oxidizer.
Maybe I'm reading too much into the grainy zoomed-in video, but it does look like the flash started by the second stage umbilical connection. That's a reasonable spot to expect second stage kerosene and oxidizer to get cuddly.
"or even the payload seperation bolts fire"
Spacex don't use explosive bolts (they're unreliable and they leave extra debris in orbit). The separation is done penumatically.
Nothing's going to "ignite" venting LOX. You need a fuel source and there's nothing in midair to provide that.
On the other hand, in an oxygen-rich atmosphere just about anything will burn, given an ignition source. (In Apollo 1 it was compounded by being pure oxygen at Atmosphere+5psi, which made the polyester threads in the velcro almost explosive and there was far too much velcro in the capsule), so if LOX was venting _inside_ the fairings it would explain a lot.
It's going to be interesting to see how the pad and support structures fared (and if things can be designed to minimise damage in such events).
"Facebook were only leasing capacity on the comsat to provide free Internet access to parts of Africa."
Free? Just like www.facebook.com is free if you don't mind malware ads and apps or having your personal information sold to the highest bidder.
"Facebook isn't the loser here."
Right, but they are everywhere else on the internet.
This vehicle is run on kerosene and liquid oxygen... bring those two together and you light them, it's a fairly combustible mix, reports Jonathan Amos
If only they'd adopted my inherently safe and much cheaper proposal: lightly wetted beach sand (high quality: all the big bits of shell screened out and no goggle-eyed sea critters). 100% natural, contains no GMO, and very little chance of Zuckerberg ogling your arse crack from above.
A perfectly safe propellant. Unless you use a chlorine trifluoride oxidizer (fluoridizer?).
Fluorine and chlorine are still referred to as oxidizers (oxidizing agents, oxidants) because they act chemically the same way: they cause other elements to lose electrons. Oxygen was just noted first and is more common in its free form, so it gets all the glory despite being the less energetic, less aggressive cousin.
"A perfectly safe propellant. Unless you use a chlorine trifluoride oxidizer "
Quite true.
Few people think of concrete as an effective solid rocket fuel but with enough CTF it can be quite effective. Naturally you need to observe certain safety precautions.
Like standing about 1 county to the side of the flight path
Few people think of concrete as an effective solid rocket fuel but with enough CTF it can be quite effective.
Excellent point. And that got me thinking. As noted by John Clark in "Ignition" (book of the hour), chlorine trifluoride will also burn with water (and water-rich substances like people). The resulting combustion products - various unpleasant combinations of Cl, H, F, and O - will have lower molecular masses than the products of combustion with calcium carbonate and silicate mixtures. The products are also uniformly gaseous, unlike some of the concrete combustion products. It'd be interesting trying to sell that environmental impact statement:
"The rocket with the safest fuel ever: water!"
"What about the oxidizer?"
"Er...cough...[mumble chlorine mumble]..."
Yep. BBC's Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos must have banged his head recently. It wasn't that long ago that he was reasonably sharp, but recently he's written some bone-headed nonsense.
A few weeks ago, he wrote that somebody had 3D Printed "a car". Implying that after "the car" had emerged from the printer, somebody got in and drove away. It wasn't even the headline, it was in the body.
Nutz.
Yes, but it will inevitably cast some doubt on that policy: no good having cheap launchers if expensive satellites get lost.
I really admire Musk's ambition, and I wish Space X all the best, but I'm not yet convinced that Silicon Valley's approach will transfer well to space.
Because $bn rockets built by giant defence companies from re-purposed ICBM designs and launched by national space agencies don't go kaboom
So you mean not like Ariane?
Rockets from the Ariane family have accumulated 230 launches since 1979, 219 of which were successful, yielding a 95.2% success rate. Between April 2003 and June 2016, Ariane 5 has flown 72 consecutive missions without failure.
And that has involved doing some seriously revolutionary rocket science.
It doesn't matter a gnat's dick if the launch only costs $ 10 million if your $ 200 million satellite goes up in flames. Expect insurance premiums for Falcon launches to have gone up significantly this week.
Easy, turn retrograde and burn just enough to get the periapsis (lowest point of orbit) is just below 70k meters and wait. when you are below the re entry burning jettison everything you dont want to make it down, then wait till around 6-4k up, no less then that, at this point you should be slow enough to activate a drogue chute, once that has deployed do the main.
I like KSP.
EDIT: Actually once you are below the heat effects you could fire off the remaining fuel you have, the only thing is to make sure that you are far enough down for the chute to work and slow enough.
"The problem is that I have no fuel to do that. Every, single, time."
Ok...assuming you've tried adding some fuel (mebbe some SRBs?), then my next question would be at what altitude are you starting your gravity turn. A mistake a lot of new players make is to fire their rocket straight 'up' and then roll over to 90 degrees once they reach ~100k; it's much better to start a gravity turn at lower altitudes (around 10-20 at most, as low as 6k if your launch vehicle is stable) and slowly lower the angle (~3 degree steps) every few thousand metres. This should keep your fuel usage efficient enough to reach orbit.
I strongly recommend watching a chap called "scott manley" on youtube. He does a cracking series for new players.
i'd have thought that cleanup and decontamination is going to be a bitch.
Firstly, Hydrazine is rather unpleasant stuff. It's other use is dissolving/etching glass IIRC. Secondly, (covering this as I guess a few people may not know) it's use in a rocket is attractive because you just have two chemicals that you inject together and they ignite on contact.
Now imagine that you've got unignited pools of both chemicals sitting splashed over the pad. Mopping it up could be somewhat... interesting.
Parts covered in Hydrazine stay covered in hydrazine no matter how much cleanup you do.
A few metres away from me, there are a couple of bits which fell off the 1st Ariane 5 launch (recovered from under about 6 feet of Guianan swamp mud by members of the French Foreign Legion)
They're in a glass case and unlike all the other glass cases there's a safety seal on it to prevent anyone opening it.
Hey Zuck ,"I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite" it was a test of your satellite systems as well as the launch vehicle, who's to say a fault in your satellite didn't destroy the launcher? Be thankful that no one was hurt and wait for the investigation to come out, you <redacted>.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer company (Facebook)
I laughed when I saw the tip falling down and exploding on a second explosion.
And I laughed because all these things represent is money and not loss of life, so yes, it is the moral thing to laugh.
The payload was a satellite for Farcebook to bring internet to remote regions of Africa, the same regions where people does not have electricity much less a computer, and smartphones are used as torches to illuminate the hut at night, so yeah liberal progressive logic blew with the rocket, hence why I'm enjoying myself.
If anything I'm sorry for Musk and not "Farceberg", I'm a fan of Space X and I wish they produce the best space rockets ever.
I was in the launch blockhouse when this Titan exploded at Vandenberg AFB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-aAp9hhNQQ
It totally destroyed the launch pad, a support building, and fuel transfer lines. It tooks us six months to repair everything. There was a deep smoking crater left where the support building formerly was.
Looks like the SpaceX damage here is a lot less than we had.
But I don't understand how an oxygen line can explode like that, you need a lot of fuel mixed with the oxygen to get an explosion that big. It reminds me of when the destruct charge of a Titan I accidentally went off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoXoVEYoo5A
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