Well, another satellite gets tossed into the drink instead of into orbit:
Brunschwyler said the first sign of trouble during today’s failed launch occurred about three minutes after liftoff, when the Taurus XL rocket’s telemetry showed no sign it had shed its clamshell-like payload fairing.
The fairing is a nose-mounted shroud that protects the spacecraft inside from the Earth’s atmosphere until the booster reaches space. Once it separates, launch controllers expected to see OCO and its upper stage accelerate faster since it would have shed the excess weight. But that speed boost never occurred.
“As a direct result of carrying that extra weight, we could not make orbit,” Brunschwyler said, adding that the failure ultimately sent OCO crashing into the ocean near Antarctica. “We’re fairly certain that it did not fly over any land and it landed short of Antarctica.”
Failure to separate cleanly, or at all, is one of the most common causes of a launch failure of an expendable vehicle. And because it’s expendable, like every other aspect of a launch, each fairing separation is a first one. There’s no way to test it to ensure that it will separate properly when it is supposed to.
Had this been a reusable space transport, it would have had a payload bay door that had been operated successfully many times in the past (and the vehicle would have had the performance capability to take it all the way to orbit). And if for some reason it couldn’t be opened on orbit, the mission would have been aborted, and the payload returned safely to earth to await another attempt, and a three-hundred-million-dollar satellite would have been preserved.
But instead, we continue to put up satellites on unreliable throwaway rockets that generally have much less value than the cargo, but often destroy it. And we plan to continue to do so on steroids, with the abominable plans for Constellation.
The proverbial Martian, looking at how we do spaceflight, would scratch his head at the antics of these crazy earthlings, but wouldn’t be at all surprised that we’d made so little progress in conquering his homeworld. And all because we were in such a hurry half a century ago that we decided to put up satellites with munitions.
[Update a few minutes later]
That satellite cost almost three hundred thousand dollars a pound.
There’s got to be a better way.
Could it be a plot by Hanson, et al to avoid proof that AGW is BS?
If anyone caught Tony Elias’s trash-talking of SpaceX vs. Orbital’s ‘record of launch success’ in a letter to Space News this week, this is sweet counterpoint.
Too bad about the OCO however. It might actually have helped bring some more reality to the global warming debate.
Of course in Obamaworld, policy and government orders are the solution to everything. Reality must bend in the face of those…just as it did so well in the USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and so on.
Rand,
Considering your interest in reusable rockets, I’m surprised a Google search of your site turns up no hits on “Liberty Ship” or the “nuclear lightbulb” concept.
Description link
The model described would be a reusable, very-heavy lift VTVL SSTO. Of course I don’t think you’d need to build it that big; it’s just an example. But other than the political challenges it would face, what do you think of this concept? Or nuclear power as a heat source in general for rockets …
I don’t think that rockets need be either “heavy lift” or nuclear. Nuclear is fine for space vehicles, but I can’t imagine that we’d ever be able to operate one in the atmosphere for launch. The ship described would have humungous development costs, and it’s not clear that it would be sufficiently low cost to drive sufficient demand to give it a high flight rate, which is key to reducing costs. When it comes to space launch, at the current market size, small (and often) is beautiful.
Rand,
Bravo. The “space is hard” folks either don’t get it, or don’t want to get it. “It” being that rocket and spacecraft physics and engineering design basics are no harder than they are for designing a washing machine…what’s hard or more properly, potentially unforgiving, are the consequences of simple human errors and engineering mistakes when you have minimal design margins and no chances for a “do-over.” Was it “spaceflight” that made it painfully hard and therefore excusable that some Russian technician left a rag in a fuel or oxidizer line a few years ago, and excusable that the sensors in the cosmic dust return package were installed upside down, or excusable that Lockheed made a units conversion error on a Mars probe trajectory? I’ll bet that the root cause or most probable of the OCO fairing failure turns out to be a design or manufacturing error that is not in any way due to any “special difficulties” associated with “spaceflight.”
It’s almost as if rocket and spacecraft designers and project managers have a masochistic-streak that makes them make things hard, to self-justify their point that spaceflight is hard! Why else do they routinely seem to scrimp on testing to save a few bucks now, the potential risk of many more bucks later? Steve Stich and John Shannon would love to be able to travel back in time fifteen years, tomorrow, to give their predecessors 3 million bucks to do multi-mission life testing of the Orbiter’s current GH2 Flow Control Valves!
End rant.
“The proverbial Martian, looking at how we do spaceflight, would scratch his head at the antics of these crazy earthlings, ”
The proverbial Martian would think to themselves, that
it’s much easier designing spaceships in a lower G Environment.
The proverbial Martian would think to themselves, that it’s much easier designing spaceships in a lower G Environment.
He might think that, but it wouldn’t really be relevant to the problem (as is the case with most of “jack lee’s” posts). He would then think what I said he would think, in the context of earth’s gravity. And he wouldn’t think at all about idiots like “jack lee.”
All agreed on Rand’s post.
And I wonder, if the per flight cost would be lower, it might make sense to retrieve expensive LEO science satellites that have malfunctions early in their life.
And if you can plan for maintenance (albeit expensive), you might be able to reduce redundancy and complexity and hence cost a lot in the design.
For example one valve failure redundancy requires four valves (since one can stick open or shut, one needs both parallel and serial backups). This drives up complexity, mass and cost.
Another viewpoint supporting the idea of a virtuous cycle once launch costs go down with reusable vehicles.
Of course the same applies to a lesser amount even if you can’t retrieve one, when it’s just cheaper to launch a new one.
Takeaway lessons:
Always build a spare satellite
Launch vehicle failure causes are 1) propulsion failure 2) avionics failure 3) staging failure
And in my opinion a lot more investment needs to be sunk into spaceflight for it to become more reliable.
I would like to see not just one RLV design adopted and used by government and civilian spaceflight organizations, but dozens. Have enough diverisity that we can have actual rapid evolution of design, and lots of failures to learn from.
Rand,
I agree with many of your comments relative to our space program, but I am a little bit frustrated. You have made it clear that you do not agree with NASA’s approach to crew and cargo, but I haven’t seen you clearly lay out an alternative plan. I know that you believe that reusable, smaller vehicles are the right direction coupled with on-orbit assembly, but what about details?
SSTO? Glider? Turn-around time? Airframe life? Reliability? Unit cost targets? Liquid vs solid vs hybrid?
I have been reading your blog for several years, and maybe I have missed it. But if you want alternatives to what we have today, then you should put forward your alternative.
I know that you believe that reusable, smaller vehicles are the right direction coupled with on-orbit assembly, but what about details?
SSTO? Glider? Turn-around time? Airframe life? Reliability? Unit cost targets? Liquid vs solid vs hybrid?
How would I know? No one does.
The only way to find out what’s best is to try different things and let them compete against each other in the market. I’m a policy analyst, not a vehicle designer.
Our current policy is not designed to give us low-cost access to space. When the politicians decide that that’s an important goal, and change the policy, then we’ll get cheap launch. What the successful vehicles end up looking like and how they operate is a second-order issue.