Apparently Morpheus crashed and burned in its first untethered flight. Armadillo and Masten often make this stuff look easy, but it’s not.
[Update a fewminutes later]
Here’s the video. Sounds like a tank blew up after a few seconds. Single engine, so had to be a failure of the gimbal or the controller.
That’s too bad. I hope they try again but I’m afraid they’ll probably get shut down.
According to Nasawatch, it was a “hardware component failure”.
Hope they recover quickly.
Rand,
The video you see cut out about a minute and a half of the rocket sitting there on fire before the LOX tank got warm enough to let go.
~Jon
Yeah, I watched the video wondering why there was no attempt to put out the fire. It’s a shame they let it get that destroyed.
They probably left it alone because they were afraid of just what actually happened: a mini explosion.
I would imagine that the fire isn’t gentle on the components; it may not have been salvageable.
I’m sure that’s why people didn’t approach, but it crashed on the pad. Remotely operated fire suppression systems could have helped for any fire on the pad (for which we have a long history of things like that happening on launch pads).
I understand and would agree that most likely they would have ended up with the same amount of salvagable pieces. I just think they could try to do better.
Alas, they weren’t really as a pad either, but a purpose built “hazard field”. One wonders how much money they spent making a fake boulder field and what they thought would happen if it tipped over after landing on a boulder.
How much of Morpheus is Armidillo and how much is NASA? It’s my understanding NASA did some / a lot of “tweaking” of Armadillos’ design.
Any idea if the actuator is hydraulic or electric?
I’m already seeing the usual crap that NASA can’t get anything to work on the cheap or something like that on other news channels. Couldn’t they have done the test tethered first or something?
Um. They have done like a zillion tethered tests. Bad luck day, nothing else. You learn from what failed, apply belt, suspenders and duct tape, and try again.
Yeah, they did the tether.
That thing blew up. It blew up real good.
A bad thought. NASA has taken away most traveling money for their people. The group at JSC ran multiple tethered tests with several problems, but no catastrophic ones, given the tether. By the end of that they had an experienced ground crew. Did the same people check out the vehicle for this test? Or, did KSC people do that, because of travel restrictions on the JSC group?