A Brazilian rocket blew up on the pad at Alcantara, killing an unknown number of people.

Hopefully, soon they'll have a new model to follow, and stop emulating failed strategies.

What a tragedy. May God bless the souls and the families of those killed and injured in this terrible accident.

St. Joseph of Cupertino, patron of astronauts and space travel, please pray for us.

I'm all for private space enterprise, but I'm not sure I understand why a privately financed effort is necessarily going to be less prone to accidents than a state-funded operation.

I hope the X-Prize works. I hope that there really is money to be made from 30-minute suborbital rides. I hope there's enough money to be made there that the private sector can invest in human-capable orbital flight.

But, the jury is out on that. Until the results are in, I'll take spaceflight any way we can get it. Going into space is more important than who pays for it.

Umm .. i think Rand is off base here. I know squant little about the rocket that blew up or Brazilian space efforts in general ( there's been practically zero reporting on it, up until the crash. Oh, how rare )
But..
Going by the reports, the rocket supposedly cost 6.5M, which is pocket change, compared to current US launchers. So it'd be considerable reduction in small sat mission costs ( if it has any useable payload ) If they had made it, it would have set a new hard data point for lowered launch costs, and that would be a good thing.

Well I think that they might have had the right idea with a considerable reduction in launch costs. But they went the wrong direction in using a launcher based on U.S. and Russian program/design philosophies. And building yet another cargo vessel in an already flooded market.

I'm just wondering what happened. IIRC, VLS series are multi-stage solids (ok, now I just verified that on the Encyclopedia Astronautica). I thought it really took something to cause an explosion in solids or even accidental ignition.

Oh, solids can explode. A software glitch controlling the igniter, or even a good hefty static shock in exactly the wrong place, can light up a solid. If the rocket is still in tie-down, that can send it cartwheeling. And there's a crack in the fuel or a defect in the liner, then that can *certainly* cause an explosion. I speak from firsthand experience here. :-)

Anyhow, I don't think that Rand was talking about Brazil following a failed model in terms of being a government program or spending tons of money -- because they're *not* spending tons of money, and there's nothing about being a government that makes space any more *physically* difficult to get to. Rather, the failed model is the one of launch vehicles as, essentually, ammunition: something which is flown oh-so-rarely (just twice in three years), and thrown away whether it works or not. Brazil would do much better to adopt a Burt Rutan or John Carmack philosophy -- one which uses controllable, reusable vehicles, and a gradually-expanding flight envelope. That would allow for lessons to be learned, in-flight, from small events that are less than catastrophic. That would allow for your engineers to actually gain *experience* with actual flight systems, rather than merely read about them, and only give it a whirl once every few years.

Cheers,

Nathan.

Yes, what Nathan said.

Well, 61 years back a certain rocket was first launched, which proved to be one of most successful rocket designs throughout the history. It was cheap, and relatively reliable for its time. And it was expendable by definition of its mission. So reusability alone is not that important factor IMO.
But yes, flight rate definitely is, and for small budget efforts where you cannot afford automated construction line, reusable probably just helps achieve high flight rate cheaper.
Im quite convinced minimum-cost-design ( or actually designed for manufacturing ) simple expendable boosters like Microcosm designs will provide very competitive bulk mass launches to orbit at some time in future.

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