Category Archives: Space

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

This Morning’s Pad Incident

42 Comments

It seems to be news, so most of you probably heard that there was an explosion on the pad at LC-40 this morning, leading up to a static test fire for the upcoming launch of the AMOS satellite.

What we know so far: No one was injured, but the bird (a $200M payload) was lost. It’s a setback for Spacecom, which was about to be purchased by China pending a successful deployment. It happened prior to ignition, and SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,” so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rocket itself. But it will be a setback in SpaceX’s aggressive fall schedule until they determine the cause and how to prevent it in the future, and repair the pad.

It’s worth noting that they won’t be launching crew from that pad, but from 39B. But Phil McAlister and Kathy Lueders will want to know if the abort system would have saved crew had they been on top of the rocket. The immediate interesting question to me is whether or not they had any warning. The rocket itself has failure onset detection systems to trigger an abort, but it’s unclear if the pad itself does, and how much warning they would have had to pull the D-ring on the Dracos. Phil and Kathy had also better brace for a very stupid Congressional hearing, and we can all expect to hear a lot of illogical nonsense about how SpaceX should forget about Mars, and how this proves that reusable rockets don’t work.

[Update a couple minutes later]

One point as follow up to that last graf: SpaceX had been requesting to fuel with crew aboard, and NASA had been considering it. That’s probably out the window now.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

There were nine more flights scheduled this year. That was always unlikely, but it’s certainly not going to happen now.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, this is timely. The OIG has released a status report on commercial crew certification.

[Update a couple minutes later]

How this will affect Spacecom. Shares are down with the news. I’d call it a buying opportunity.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Also worth noting that it’s been a bad couple days for launch. Long March had a failure yesterday, and the Chinese have been mum about it (as usual).

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust already has a story about the potential ripple effects for SpaceX, SES, and the rest of the affected industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here‘s Loren Grush’s story.

[Update a couple minutes later]

And from Miri Kramer.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Joe Pappalardo probably has the best take at this point.

[Update a while later]

Well, this is bad news.

[Update a while later]

Aaaaaand here’s the video. I’ve heard that people felt it in Orlando. It may have been the largest explosion at the Cape in history.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is great news, if true.

History, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Getting Over “Apolloism”

28 Comments

I’m heading back to California tomorrow, for the first time in about six weeks (the longest I’ve been away from home since I moved back in 2009), but meanwhile, my long-awaited piece in The New Atlantis is on line.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, that’s just a preview, unless you’re a subscriber. The full piece will be free on line in the future, but I’m not sure when.

Economics, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

“Wise Guidelines” For Space Policy

24 Comments

At first glance, these suggestions from my long-time friend Linda Billings seem sort of anodyne, but she gives away the game at the end:

Deep in my brain and in my heart I think and feel that colonizing other planets and exploiting extraterrestrial resources would be immoral at this stage of human development. I’m not at all sure that Eilene Galloway would agree with me. I wish I could talk with her about it.

I’m pretty sure that Eilene would disagree. I know for certain that I do.

Administrative, Business, Economics, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Light Blogging, And Reusability

5 Comments

Things have been kind of quiet on the blog because a) I’m still busy renovating the house in Florida and more importantly, b) my bandwidth is limited here, as there’s no Internet service to the house, and I have to rely on tethering to my phone.

I didn’t post about it at the time, but my Twitter followers know that I drove up to the Cape on Saturday afternoon, with a press pass to the SpaceX launch early Sunday morning. It was the first Falcon launch I’ve seen on the east coast (I did see one pass through the clouds at the January Vandenberg launch).

It was impressive. I don’t know what the quantity distance is for that vehicle, but we were on a causeway in the middle of the Indian River at CCAFS, and I think the pad was only a couple miles away, judging from the time that I saw the ignition and started to hear (and feel) the roar. It was sufficiently bright that it temporarily shut down the center of my retinas, but I could see it all the way downrange past staging. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rocket naked eye that far downrange. It was very impressive, but I hope it becomes routine, including the landing, if it hasn’t already. The next step is to start reflying those stages that they continue to collect (six now). I told John Taylor that SpaceX now has a bigger fleet of reusable rockets than NASA ever had.

Speaking of which, Stephanie Osborn has a guest post from a fellow former NASA colleague with thoughts on the failure of reusability of the Shuttle.

I think that whether single pour or the selected segmented design, solid rockets on a reusable crewed vehicle were a mistake. And the fact that Jim Fletcher was head of NASA (and “Barfing Jake” Garn) is also part of the explanation for building them in Utah, Florida’s environmental regulations notwithstanding.

But as I’ve noted in the past, it’s a huge fallacy of hasty generalization to attempt to draw lessons about reusability of spacecraft from that program.