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.