It’s looking like there was a second-stage problem, either separation, or ignition (or both, since one could cause the other).

As I said last night, this is obviously a disappointment to the SpaceX team. Particularly since they had previously had a flight where this wasn’t a problem, so in a sense it was two steps forward, one step back. I think that at this point, almost anyone is going to be pretty leery of putting a payload on the vehicle until it’s had at least one successful flight. Is it the end? Despite what Elon said a long time ago about three strikes, it’s hard to see it now. He’s fully invested now, both financially and (I would imagine) emotionally, and he’s not going to come this far just to give up, particularly when tantalized by his previous almost-success on the second flight.

They’ll go through the telemetry, figure out as best they can what happened, and try again, and hopefully soon. In a sense, as someone noted in comments in the earlier post, Falcon 1 is really a test program for the bigger vehicles, though they should get an operational small launcher out of it as well.

As always, this points up the problem with expendable vehicles. They are very expensive to flight test, so you can’t afford to do very many, and every flight is a first flight, so you can’t wring bugs out of a vehicle with incremental testing. And it’s a lot harder to figure out what went wrong because you generally don’t get much debris to analyze (the first flight that failed off the pad was a rare exception)–you have to dig through electronic entrails. And NASA, of course, in its cargo-cult determination to redo Apollo, is taking exactly the same expensive and unreliable approach.

And just checking now, I see that Clark is having similar thoughts to mine.

Once the problem that caused this failure is determined, I would suggest that SpaceX just bite the bullet and allocate 2 or 3 Falcon I vehicles for test flights and fly them within a relatively short period, say six months.

This would represent a $20M-$30M investment but until the Falcon I is flying reliably, SpaceX will find it very difficult to get any more commercial or government payload contracts and it won’t have any chance of getting COTS D (ISS crew transport) funding. The Falcon 9 is a completely different vehicle but the Falcon I is what currently defines the company’s ability, or inability, to deliver what it says it can.

Anyway, best of luck to them in the future, but they know that they need more than just luck.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I see that Elon has a statement, which confirms my suspicion above:

There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.

That’s the kind of attitude you have to have, even if eventually, you do in fact have to give up. I hope he won’t have to.

Also note Clark’s comment at the end of the post, that SpaceX is following in the tradition of all expendable staged launch vehicles in its failure modes, though they do seem to be getting the avionics right.

Falcon 1 goes up at 4 PM Pacific Time. That’s 7 PM for me, and we already have tickets purchased for Dark Knight, so I guess we’ll miss it, if it goes on schedule. I’ll have to watch the replay.

[Update at 10:30 PM EDT]

Back from the movie, which was very good. Ledger can certainly expect a posthumous Oscar nomination.

There have been launch delays, but they’re currently reloading fuel after having drained it (there was apparently concern that it was getting too cold during other delays) and are now expecting a launch at 11 PM EDT (8 PM Pacific), in almost exactly half an hour.

[Update a couple minutes later]

They must plan for an 8:05 liftoff, based on the count I just heard. T-32 and counting at 7:33. Weather is green, though there’s some cloud cover.

[Update about ten till the hour]

There must be a delay or something on the web feed, because they’re still saying it will be an 8 PM PDT launch, even though their count makes it come out three or four minutes after that. I wonder if there will be a transmission delay on the launch itself of a couple minutes? If so it won’t quite be live, but it will be close enough.

[Update shortly after scheduled launch time]

They had a (literally) last-minute abort. The window closes in an hour, and I doubt they can turn it around that fast, since they still have to look at the data to figure out what happened. Better luck tomorrow.

[Update a couple minutes later]

That was fast. Now they’re saying they think they may be able to recycle from T-10, so it still may be on tonight.

[10:30 EDT update]

Now they’re at T-7 and counting again.

[Update shortly after launch]

Uh oh. Sounds like strike three. The picture was lost at about 35 km altitude and a thousand meters/sec. They announced an “anomaly.” That doesn’t sound good. The last update on the site was that it was about to enter inertial guidance (not clear what they were doing prior to that). Did something go wrong with an IMU, or some other part of the GN&C?

Fortunately, you’re allowed more than three strikes in this game. It has to be a huge disappointment, though, unless the anomaly was merely a loss of signal, and the vehicle’s doing all right. The webcast is over, though. I think that I’d assume that the news is bad.

They did a full nine-engine static test of the Falcon 9 yesterday. No mention of burn duration, but I assume that it wasn’t a simulation of a full ascent. I also assume that they have run individual engines at full duration. If they launch Falcon 1 this weekend or early next week, it will have been a pretty momentous week for New Space, with the WK2 rollout, the rocket racer debut, and the SpaceX achievements.