Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink Scottish space startup Skyrora's first attempt to launch its Skylark L rocket ended in failure after it unexpectedly came crashing down into the Norwegian sea. The Skylark L is a sub-orbital vehicle: it's designed to blast off vertically, is said to be capable of reaching speeds more than four times the speed of sound, and is …
"but it cannot reach Earth's orbit. "
FTFY
It's a sounding rocket.
They go up (sometimes quite high) but cannot reach orbital velocity (about Mach 23)
So no not a 100% success, but a lot of stuff has been learend.
But it did give all the systems a good work out.
And it's salvagable so they should be able to find out what went wrong.
Carry on.
Every failure is a dress rehearsal for success.
Also check out the launch site.
No concrete pad. Just basically a bare field with 4 shipping containers in it.
Not bad.
Considering the speeds of Mach numbers changes with altitude (Mach 1 at sea level is about 768 mph at 30 000 feet about 670 miles per hour) it may be better to state it in a more fixed units like M/s or KM/h.
Escape velocity is the speed at which an object must travel to break free of a planet or moon's gravitational force and enter orbit. A spacecraft leaving the surface of Earth, for example, needs to be going about 11 kilometres (7 miles) per second, or over 40,000 kilometres per hour (25,000 miles per hour), to enter orbit. (from https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Escape_Velocity.html)
Wow, what an astonishing lack of comprehension. :-(
For those of you without a HS level of physics "Orbital velocity" is the velocity needed to achieve and remain in orbit around a body at a certain altitude, neglecting atmospheric drag (you could orbit the earth at 10m altitude at sufficient speed, provided you a)made up the drag losses, b) dumped all the frictional heat you were generating so you didn't melt)
For the Earth, neglecting ascent losses, that's about 7900 metre/second for around a 200Km altitude (HS level physics textbook can show you the relevant formula and constants to do the calculation). I normally work with M1=340m/s to give people a rough idea of what we're talking about.
"Escape velocity" is the speed needed to leave an orbit around that body and go to another one. For Earth it's about 1.41x bigger (IE root 2)
So 7900m/s to get and stay in orbit, 11000 m/s to go to the moon (and which you'd have to cancel on return to get back to the Earth's surface).
So he openly admits that the subsystems were not tested before for low temperature ?
That does really NOT sound like seasoned engineering. If you want a complex system to operate correctly, you better simulate the environment (hot, cold, vibrations,electromagnetics, software input vectors, A/D sensor voltages, ...) and operation of ALL subsystems before. Rocket motor, avionics, vernier rockets, GPS receiver, telemetry etc. HIL Testing of all avionics and telemetry. ArianceSpace thought they could cheat on HIL and it cost them only 500 million Dollars (Ariane V first flight).
That is costly, but probably cheaper than launching the entire system and trying to decipher what went wrong based on telemetry from the real flight. Also the reason the Russians lost the race to the moon, they were overly aggressive instead of systematic and complete ground testing.
Having said that, the V2/A4 had plenty of launch failures, before it was moderately reliable. Mr Musk had plenty of failures until his rockets became reliable. So, keep trying, rinse repeat. Before that, test all subsystems in a simulated environment on the ground.
>they were overly aggressive instead of systematic and complete ground testing.
Prior to Apollo 8, the first manned mission, there hadn't been a successful Saturn V launch.
They had planned for 2 complete successful test flights before the first manned flight but some political party chief decided that it had to be done before the next round number of years
No. they're reviving the technology devleoped for the Black Arrow launcher in the 60's.
And the only close-to-orbit rocket the Germans launched in WWII was the V2, which ran on LO2 and alcohol.
It's pumps were powered by (rather poor quality) hydrogen peroxide.
The US got hold of a supply of this stuff and found it unstable and difficult to handle (because it was cheap and nasty).
The British made their own and worked out how to do it themselves.
Sounding rockets go up and down, so it's actually supposed to land somewhere. Is it supposed to parachute somewhere near the launch pad?
Apparently it's supposed to land "downrange 27km" but there's no info on if this a relatively soft landing, and the instruments are returned, or is it just a prang into the ocean?
1) Maybe this was really planned as payback for all those Viking raids.
2) I thought most rocket launches took place near the equator to take advantage of gravity and the Earth's rotation. And ...
3) Using their glossy sales video when talking about their unplanned flight path was cold Reg - real cold.
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