Webcast looking good -but it looks mighty windy...

Currently 25 mins into an unplanned hold. The Safety boat is apparently in the wrong place!

Count to restart at 21:15 UTC when will be T-1:15. Launch thus at 22:30 UTC.

Can't wait! :-)

Anyone recording this? Would love to have a copy of checks leading up to launch, or transcript.

WMV's are hard to record

Elon just came on the net and said that the weather is green, fuel's nearly ready to go - all just about go for launch.

Doug

I'm recording it here..

Well - the webfeed seemed to die after launch - but the onboard camera showed a few seconds of what looked like a tumbling vehicle.


Doug

Oh, bottoms.

Bob Shaw

Are you sure it wasn't just normal rotation, Doug? I think the video feed cut out for all.

Argh!

These guys seem to have inside scoop.. crossing fingers all is well

edit: they just said they lost the vehicle..bummer

Space.com says it "roared skyward", but hasn't given much more yet:

space.com coverage

TO me - it looked like it was going sideways, like the little onboard videos you see of model rockets, but after apogee.

"We did lose the vehicle," says Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f1/status.html

I just hope they find a root cause quickly and have another go - I really want this vehicle to work.

Doug

From Spaceflightnow.com:

2239 GMT (5:39 p.m. EST)

FAILURE. The maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 1 has ended in disaster moments after blasting off from Omelek Island in the Central Pacific today. No further details are available at this point.

2238 GMT (5:38 p.m. EST)

"We did lose the vehicle," says Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development.

2236 GMT (5:36 p.m. EST)

Bob Shaw

"We did lose the vehicle," says Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development.

2:42 PM

Gwynne Shotwell seems to indicate (on spaceflightnow.com) that they got a minute or two of flight.

Not exactly to orbit, but a significant step in the right direction...

I'm the same..the more time in the air the better.. Be nice to hear it got over a minute of flight in.. my fingers crossed it wasn't a engine failure but a software failure

Is there any chance that they can recover FalconSat-2 from the wreckage?

I did a video... where can i post it?

Waiting for the video of hal_9000, here is one of the last image from the onbard camera.

http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f1/images/onboard.jpg

here

Sorry Hal, where is the link? Btw, thanks for recording.

From spaceflightnow : A further look at the imagery seen from the onboard camera mounted to the Falcon 1 shows a noticeable change in the color and shape of the flame coming from the Merlin first stage main engine as the vehicle seemed to roll.

BTW, they have now a significant amount of in-flight telemetry data to work with. It could have exploded on the launch pad like many others before.

-- Rakhir

i need a host to post it... i can not post here..

How large is the file?

Things like google video will let you host it.

Doug

Good idea.. uploading

bad news in my mind... from spaceflightnow.com
"The Falcon 1 rocket apparently impacted the Pacific about 40 seconds after liftoff. The vehicle went out of control and fell back to Earth." so it was really only going "up" for less than 20 s..dam..wish it was longer

Falcon 1 video (little part)

I'm not able to load that link, Hal. Do you have the video.google url for it?

Thanks again.

When I try to download it, an extension of .avi is tacked on the end. It does not play, either with or without it, that is, as kk2.wmv or as kk2.wmv.avi. Is anyone else having this problem?

I have just tired it and it didn't work. The video player from Microsoft was called but it didn't start to play since the downloaded file seems to be corrupted.

Rodolfo

Severe bummer, and my sincere sympathies for the SpaceX team. However..."The lessons that burn are the lessons you learn". I think Falcon 2 will be better for the experience, nilhilisitically enough because of the pain. Keep your chins up, gang...and congratulations on having the chutzpah to try this at all!!!!

This is a little bit off-topic to today's launch, but is relevant to Comga's Post 35

I received an email from Dianne Molina at SpaceX. I had asked about the lack of email updates sent to SpaceX's mailing list subscribers. She had this to say:

Based on the Spaceflightnow.com article it appears that a sticking "thermal coat" may have contributed to the failed launch

here are the relevant portions and I have bolded a few sentences for emphasis:

"To keep the liquid oxygen from warming up and naturally boiling away while the rocket sat on its tropical launch pad before liftoff, a "thermal coat" had been wrapped around the first stage. Problems running out of liquid oxygen on the remote island have bedeviled SpaceX over the past few months.

"A glaring deficiency that we had in the November and December attempts was the fact that we were basically boiling LOX at an unacceptably high rate. It is hard to get LOX on the island. So what we did was put a blanket scheme together to cover the first stage LOX tank," Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development, told reporters during Friday's countdown.

"It is held to the rocket by Velcro and we've got lanyards that hold it down to the ground. So basically the lanyards will pull a zipper as the vehicle lifts up, a Velcro zipper, and that LOX tank insulation will stay on the ground as the vehicle flies through it."

The Falcon 1 had set sail on its maiden voyage, and a video camera mounted on the rocket beamed back live footage of the booster ascending skyward. However, the launch video did not show any signs of the liquid oxygen blanket unzipping and being yanked free from the rocket by ground tethers as planned.

As the vehicle climbed higher, a white blanket presumably the cover Shotwell had mentioned could be seen flapping wildly in the onboard video. Large pieces appeared to rip away at T+plus 20 seconds due to the rocket's increasing speed.

The vehicle had a noticeable rolling motion, rocking back and forth a bit, and then at T+plus 26 seconds rapidly pitched over when its fiery engine plume became greatly distorted.

"This is the RCO, we have an active track with the radar," the Range Safety officer announced.

Just moments later the rocket impacted the ocean, apparently on its side, at about T+plus 41 seconds.

Did the blanket play a role? Was the engine damaged? Did the nozzle fail? Investigators are beginning to sift through the data collected during the brief flight to construct a full picture of the launch.

Tune in next week to find out.....

(sorry - it just sounded like it needed that )

I think getting a better Oxygen farm onto the island will now become a matter of urgency, so they can produce enough to support the boil off during tanking.

Doug

Well, I suppose if you have to choose a failure mode, it might as well be a straightforward one like this that's fairly easy to fix. Certainly better than finding out the engine failed.

I wish them a fast recovery and low LOX boil-off rate on the next launch!

Musk looked good, but those large Falcon payloads are just a fantasy and they still haven't lived up to the claim of 'Lowest Cost Rocket'
- sure the Tito tourist flights on Soyuz cost a few million but now the Russians, Chinese and others are starting to put larger payloads into space for a much cheaper price and they have much better success rates.

Spaceflight Now is now suggesting that it was a fuel leak rather than the thermal blanket that resulted in the failure. Sounds like a fixable problem (well fixable for the next one at least...)

QUOTE>>
Early insights from investigators examining Friday's failed launch of the first SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket suggest a fuel leak triggered a fire that ultimately brought down the booster, the company's founder said today.

"The good news is that all vehicle systems, including the main engine, thrust vector control, structures, avionics, software, guidance algorithm, etc. were picture perfect. Falcon's trajectory was within 0.2 degrees of nominal during powered flight," Elon Musk said in a statement this morning.

"However, at T+25s, a fuel leak of currently unknown origin caused a fire around the top of the main engine that cut into the first stage helium pneumatic system. On high resolution imagery, the fire is clearly visible within seconds after liftoff. Once the pneumatic pressure decayed below a critical value, the spring return safety function of the pre-valves forced them closed, shutting down the main engine at T+29s."
<<UNQUOTE

So..since its a leak.. my solution..
duct tape the crap out of it and give it a go again
to be honest being a leak seems to be "good news" as compared to other possibliities. I'm relieved it wasn't the insulation..be a "DUH" moment (ala homer simpson) if that was the only cause. Lets hope that the definitive cause for leak is found quickly and a easy solution is available and not.."We think this is where it leaked and so lets try again"

http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/ has an update and a couple of pictures showing the fuel leak that doomed the vehicle.

Sorry guys..
but the video is here..

http://rapidshare.de/files/16430092/falconvideo.rm.html

Guys... I hate to say it... but this shows once again that getting into orbit is *not* easy. It's actually rather difficult. And when you try to do it cheaply, you tend to fail. Spectacularly.

It's all a matter of the amount of energy required to get into orbit -- and the time frame in which you have to release that energy. A fully fueled 747, for example, carries enough energy to place the entire airplane into orbit. But it cannot release that energy quickly enough to achieve the necessary acceleration.

You not only have to provide enough energy to accelerate you to orbital velocity, you have to have a motor (or motors) that can release that energy fast enough to actually achieve the acceleration you need. If you try to do that with cheaply built or mass-produced parts, or with assemblies that have not been fault-tested to within an inch of their lives, you tend to get the results we just saw Falcon 1 achieve. And the manufacturing standards and fault testing required to assure success -- they just ain't cheap.

-the other Doug

The Heretic Jeffrey Bell E-mailed me on just that point last night:

"The problem with all these libertarian alt.space guys is that they grossly underestimate the real cost of developing aerospace hardware. If you try to explain it to them, they claim that all gummint projects are grossly bloated and most of the costs are unnecessary: 'We'll be able to do this for a fraction of what NASA would spend.' Then they actually try it and find out that only massive engineering, massive quality control, massive testing, and massive attention to detail can bring the failure rate down to a tolerable level. [Sounds kind of like Colin Pillinger -- Moomaw.]

"Even SpaceX suffers from a Silicon Valley variation of this delusion: 'We need a Moore's Law of space, similar to that of the semiconductor arena, where the cost per pound cost of access to space is constantly improving,' Musk told SPACE.com. 'Only if that happens, will we become a true spacefaring civilization where ordinary people have the opportunity to travel in space.'

"Musk just doesn't understand the massive differences between the chip industry and space. I had hoped he would have learned by now, but apparently not."
_____________________________

In my own experience, anyone who accuses socialists of being hopeless political/economic romantics has never talked to libertarians, who at a minimum fully equal the socialists in wishful political thinking. I despise P.J. O'Rourke, but he did come up with a good line recently: "Any libertarian anarchists who want to see their ideas in action should visit current-day Albania."

This was only the first launch, and from what I've read most of the systems on the rocket were doing pretty well, and the failure may be due to one single fault. The implication is that if that one failure hadn't occurred, the satellite might well be in orbit now. Granted, they didn't get to staging, second stage ignition, and first stage recovery, so we don't yet know how that will go, but there doesn't seem to be much wrong with the first stage as far as flying.

I'm willing to give them another couple of tries, or even three or four, before writing off their approach.

Well, that's the problem -- the fact that they didn't get to any of those other flight milestones means that God knows what flaws are lurking in those as well. (Remember how just that happened with the first flights of Ariane 5 and Delta 3 -- after they redesigned them to get past the FIRST disastrous flaw, a second one was lurking further on. Also remember my description of how the same thing happened through four straight Soviet lunar soft-landing attempts in a row in 1965, until they finally managed to get past ALL the bugs on the fifth try.)

All points well taken.

What really is irksome is that modeling & simulation technology is so good now that most of these types of failures should be avoidable during the design phase...provided that all the possible failure modes of all the components (and combinations thereof) can be identified. I am not convinced that doing that is possible in the real world...

To paraphrase a tired old chestnut, chaos theory isn't just a good idea, it seems to be the law!

"What really is irksome is that modeling & simulation technology is so good now that most of these types of failures should be avoidable during the design phase......."

Uh... that's part of the problem. There are a hell of a lot of engineers out there who have more CAD and simulation experience than shop-floor bending-metal experience.

It's sort of like the recent Geico auto insurence ads with the Geico Gecko. The animated gecko looks pretty realistic, though naturally a bit anthropomorphised.... till you look at the REAL gecko lying near it on the branch.. and see all the infinite level of real-world detail that the simulation just doesn't have.

I look forward to Musk getting it right on the 2nd or 3rd attempt and proving Bell wrong.

Doug

I normally can't stand the rants of Jeff Bell but he makes a good point here, not enough inspection, not much quality control managers, and they said it would be a success with low cost to Space and some even talked about sample returns from Mars or compared his rockets to the power of Titans or Protons. Its too early to praise or dismiss the whole venture so lets wait for the 2nd or 3rd one, next launch is supposed to be in a few months