I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on.
Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.
It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.
To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.
I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.
Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time.
Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.
As I've understood it, it means that the scale of your ambitions is right.
Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail.
Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always succeed at are fully mastered. Any knowledge or skills to be gained in those areas are at best minuscule improvements.
Then there's the part where you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. But each time you fail, you gain more data on how you failed, and you think about how you can fix those points. You're learning, and you're improving.
Now there are also tasks at which you'll consistently fail. Passing the BAR exam as a programmer with no preparation would be a good example. Since you have no sucesses to compare to in that area, you wouldn't learn a lot trying to retake the BAR exam, no matter how often you did it. You're lacking in knowledge and skills required, and trying to perform at that level doesn't do you any good.
Now the ratio of failures and sucesses is more of a rule of thumb, and not an ironclad model. If you do turn it into an ironclad model, tell me, because I'd love exact metrics to shoot for. The reason that the common adage is "If you're failing, you're doing something right", at least so I believe, is that "If you're failing some and succeeding some, you're closer to your optimum failure/success ratio for growth than if you are at either end of the extreme" simply doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. You can't put that on the cover of a self-help book. And since almost everyone is inclined to default to the "sucess" side of the continuum (coloquially known as your comfort zone) instead of the "failure" side (excluding select masochists), it makes a lot more sense to tell someone to fail more often. It's not a curse, it's a call for more ambitious projects. In this specific case, it's a comforting call to the fact that they're trying hard enough to fail at something. And I think that is commendable.
I think the generalization is overbroad. Risk of failure should be weighed against the consequences of failure.
If I'm writing code for robots as a hobby and my robots behave exactly as I intended all of the time, then I'm probably not learning anything, and I should try to make the robots do more sophisticated tasks. The consequences of failure are minimal, so the optimum failure rate is high.
If I'm at work writing avionics code, the cost of failure is astronomical. It's nice to push boundaries and learn things, but it's better to avoid plane crashes. The consequences of failure are high, so the optimum failure rate is low.
I think the problem with rocket science is really the tyranny of physics. All the potential and kinetic energy you give to the rocket has to be stored in chemical form on the launchpad. You have to sit right on the edge of catastrophe or you are not going to make it into space at all. We've been doing this for half a century and the safety record is, quite plainly, not very good.
When we learn how to do spaceflight safely, we'll do that.
Oh, I absolutelty agree with you, and did think about including the concept of failure costs in the above post, but decided against it since I believed it would make the post a little more convoluted. Even with hobby robotics there's a maximum failure cost you can stomach, there's only so many servos you can burn through, and you only have finite time to program, which limits the number of attempts you can make.
One great way to lower the amount of expesive failures is to hedge it with a number of cheaper failures, whether that'd be models, prototypes or testing rigs for individual components of an airplane or rocket. If you look at the early stages of avionics, there were many failures, some of them expensive, deadly or embarrasing. But over time, we did build up a repertoire of testing methods to verify a given airplane design. Does that mean our airplanes don't fail? No. Does that mean we aren't trying to develop even better airplanes because of the risk involved? No. But all in all, it's a considerable improvement. We'll get there for rockets, just like we did for cars, ships, airplanes or computers.
That's also why research, prototyping and product development should often be done in ways where failure is a lot cheaper and your optimum failure rate can be much higher, accelerating progress hugely.
For example at a smaller pilot scale or in test benches.
Yet, if your test bench is very complicated, slow, costly and introduces errors of its own, it might not be wise. Also some "flying" test configurations can be a dead end.
So in the big "Battlestar galactica" NASA missions with lots of new technology, the cost of failure is very high. That's why they analyze a lot and test stuff in test benches. But those can be dead ends. It makes everything even more costly, making failure even more expensive, requiring more tests. Schedules slip while you have zero science return to show... It's a vicious circle.
It might make more sense to just for example launch many smaller probes, each one somewhat better than the previous one in some degrees. Some might crash, but if your audience understands that, it's not a political disaster. You're going to fly the next one again in two years. This way you also don't have to wait 20 years for your technology development to pay off.
So SpaceX launched Falcon 1 quite many times, and learned a lot about technology as well as matured as an organization. They crashed quite many times as well. But those were not nearly as expensive as Falcon 9 crashes were at this point.
That's also why they were flying different versions of Grasshopper and now Falcon 9 R. Retire risk. Allow crashes - when you can afford them. This will reduce crashes later when you can not allow them.
So it is a slightly complex issue but nothing very out of the ordinary. Usually in the real world things settle into a good compromise between conflicting goals.
Actually, SpaceX only launched two successful F1s, flights 4 and 5, before moving on the the development of the F9. And there was only one demonstration flight of F9 before it flew with the first Dragon. So it's not exactly like the test flights have been that many.
I'm way late on this, but I also think considering the network effect of efforts make direct learning from mistakes more...interesting. There are individuals on the team that very clearly were not responsible for the failure, others somewhat responsible, and perhaps a few directly responsible. This would correlate nicely with your continuum above..
For me the essence of the idea that failure is part of (and maybe even required for) eventual success is expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Failure can contribute to longer-term success, there's no doubt. But it's not a measure of success in its own right. Even re-reading OP's post today, that remains my interpretation of both what he said, and the more general sense in which the failure-related 'wisdom' is getting spread about the startup community.
If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.
I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means.
If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have an acceptable risk of zero. This means you can do very few things. Every time you get into your car, you are taking a calculated risk of severe injury or death. And that happens to many people who never do anyhing wrong.
This edges into politics, which means some people are pretty much incapable of believing it: If they believed it, they'd have to revise their political views, and that would lead to a lot of other changes in their lives.
To be specific, if the race isn't always to the swift, and if the best person can lose due to situations out of their control, maybe it isn't immoral to rely on a social support system for a while, which implies that perhaps we should fund such things.
And saying that is political suicide in some circles.
I once read this on the Internet a long time back - "The problem with most people is not that they fail trying to reach their goals, the problem is that they set their goals too low and succeed"
The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.
But in this case, as well as several others (like surgery, for example), that's not at all true. We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason: those are fields in which mistakes are not acceptable and the cost of producing as well as the cost of insuring are incredible. There is really nothing comparable between a code jockey who weaves js frameworks and SaaS services together to build apps and the engineers who wrote the assembly 30, 40, 50 years ago to power and control our space craft... or the ones who do the same thing now using more modern hardware & tools at companies like Orbital Sciences or SpaceX.
> We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery"
Fun note: a very long time ago I dated a woman who happened to be a brain surgeon. She used to joke her work was actually easy because nobody realy expecting her patients to survive.
Exactly. The development of rocket software is a very precise business. Here's a Reddit AMA from the SpaceX software development team.http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap
That's a fair point, and one I don't disagree with. Where I do disagree is the idea that failure is a measure of success or even the potential for success.
It's a potential indicator of either the difficulty of the task, the abilities of the people performing the task, or both[1]. It's also an indicator that no matter how many things were done right, one or more things were done wrong.
I feel that your original post and subsequent reply reflect the pervasive perception that failure is a requirement for doing something big successfully. I think that's a misconception that's running rampant in the startup community. Failure can happen and it can be learned from, but success is possible without it.
1. In this case I'm going with 'difficult' and 'some things not done right'. Strongly suspect incompetence was not a factor :)
Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.
The "move fast and break things" mentality is not saying that its good to break things, it's saying that breaking things is the price of moving fast. Failure is bad, but so is being over-cautious. We all already know that failure is bad. No one like to fail so we don't need to keep saying that failure is bad. People often lose perspective and think that it's not worth taking a sensible risk, so we say things like "If you're failing, you're doing something right." to encourage them.
I agree, this isn't a failure when trying something new, we have done this hundreds if not thousands of times. It should have been a routine mission, failure should not be accepted.
Since this is an unmanned operation, the calculation is fairly straightforward, balancing:
1. the cost of failure
2. the probability of failure
3. the cost of reducing the probability of failure
If these can be accurately calculated, then a certain failure rate can be quite acceptable. Of course, it's still worthwhile to determine the cause of any failures, and hence the cost of eliminating that cause and a reevaluation of points 1..3.
Not to slight your friend, but his was an unmanned launch to resupply the ISS, it's relatively common, comparatively easy, and successful (1 other failure in just under 80 missions).
No disrespect intended, but this is a disruption for the ISS, a loss (hopefully insured) for Planetary Resources, a real setback for Orbital... there's no point in sugar coating anything, it sucks. There's just no point in dwelling on it, either. RCA and move forward.
The failure rate in manned space missions is approximately 1/50 ("failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies"). (For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 failures.)
The unmanned missions have a higher failure rate, IIRC ~10%, but that number probably includes prototype and old models.
So a 2/80 failures is not so bad. It sucks when it explodes, but going to space is difficult.
That 1/50 failure rate is debatable, and depends on your definition.
For example, Soviet/Russian manned flight, "Soyuz", had 131 flights (123 Soyuz + 2 Voskhod + 6 Vostok) [1][2] and 2 accidents, resulted in death of 4 astronauts (1 + 3).[3]
However, both of these accidents occurred before 1972, and both were highly experimental flights. Komarov's was the VERY FIRST flight of Soyuz, and before Soyuz 11 accident, they were descending without space suits, as the space inside the cabin was so tiny.
So you can also say that there were 2 accidents in the first 10 Soyuz flights - they were still finalizing the technology - and no accidents in the remaining 113.
In addition, both of these accidents occurred during the landing, so there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights.
There was another unsuccessful launch, when second stage rocket hasn't properly separated from the third. Everyone survived, but they have experienced pretty high acceleration and landed just 21 minutes after the launch.
It should also be noted that Komarov died in first manned Soyuz spacecraft launched - not the first Soyuz. In other words, Komarov's Soyuz-1 - and naming system isn't obvious in Russian space school - wasn't analogous to Columbia first flight as the very first flight of any STS.
And in Soyuz they also had other pretty close calls. Diving into athmosphere hatch-forward because engine module didn't separate in Shatalov-Volynov-Eliseev-Khrunov group flight... Near premature separation of said engine module in the Intercosmos flight with Afghani cosmonaut... Several ballistic landings - with accelerations up to about 20 g's...
Still nobody died. Perhaps in no small part because of overbuilding the ship and also changing the ship design along its long history, learning on mistakes. Soyuz spacecraft is the real workhorse.
Basically how cosomaunts train in Star City to how the rocket is built, take off and all the way till it is about to dock with the ISS, including how launch escape works etc.
The reliability and resilience of the system is just a marvel of engineering.
NASA's CRS contract with Orbital is for 8 flights for $1.9 Billion. Today's flight was supposed to be number 3 of 8.
It remains to be seen if they will be able to complete the rest of their contract. The cause of the accident will need to be investigated, changes to future vehicles may be necessary, and right now it appears as though they damaged their launch pad severely.
Sort of. COTS was supposed to be the development costs, CRS was supposed to be the launches. Orbital got $288 Million for development of Antares/Cygnus from COTS.
From wikipedia:
> "COTS is related but separate from the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program.[3] COTS relates to the development of the vehicles, CRS to the actual deliveries. COTS involves a number of Space Act Agreements, with NASA providing milestone-based payments. COTS does not involve binding contracts. CRS on the other hand does involve legally binding contracts, which means the suppliers would be liable if they failed to perform. Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) is a related program, aimed specifically at developing crew rotation services. It is similar to COTS-D. All three programs are managed by NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO)."
Personally, I am worried about Orbital's ability to complete the remaining flights for CRS. This is a very unfortunate setback for them.
I think it's important to realize that this is a NASA contractor, not NASA itself. Furthermore, Congress & the President have forced NASA into purchasing these transport contracts by killing off the Space Shuttle.
Then the failure wasn't free. This customer and all other customers paid for this failure. Other customers, who may have done more and more expensive work to avoid failure, are stuck paying for this failure. Insurance thus incentivizes a race to the bottom -- using other customers to finance ones own risk.
Which is understood by all those people when they purchase insurance. This isn't news. Spreading the risk around is why people buy insurance in the first place.
are only cargoes insured or is the entire launch vehicle insured? I am curious as to how an insurance company assess risk in these launches, let alone what the starting point for any insurance would be relative to the value of the rocket and cargo.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
A lot of people are trying to build mechanical perpetual motion engines, and have failed for thousands of years. Failure doesn't always signal you're doing something right.
They've erased some of the history from their website and interest hasn't been high enough for full exposure of their nonsense. Yet a decade of failure hasn't shut them down. I feel sorry for the people who poured €11 million into them. Never seeing that back.
I had followed Steorn Orbo pretty closely back then, and eagerly awaited for their demo at Kinetica Museum, UK. As expected, they chickened out at the last moment :) This website has chronicled the whole Steorn Orbo saga: http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/
Ahh somehow i missed that blog over the years. Its the kind of things Jon Ronson should do a piece on.
I found his public facebook feed recently. Whole thing is madness. People/friends/family seem to think he really is some kind of big shot. He posts pictures of T-shirts with CEO written on them etc. To me it is and always has been an investment scam.
| If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Wrong. This only goes on to emphasize the stigma associated with failures. This sentence is a cover up for the fact that someone did something wrong, or at the very least, things did not go as planned. Failures are bad and heartbreaking, and we should accept it in its entirety.
| Don't fret the failures.
Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.
A failure means you took risk, which is something you should do if you want to push the boundaries. So you did do something right. No one would suggest you did everything right.
Conversely, absence of failure may mean you took a calculated amount of risk and it paid off. But it could also mean you were overly conservative, didn't push the boundaries, and took a minimum of risk. There's no way to tell the difference purely from the absence of failure.
The worst outcome is when a failure happens and you though you were very conservative but actually had no idea what the real risks were. That's the Challenger situation.
Taking risks is good in testing/design, but not a great idea for a production rocket. You want to find all the failure points during the design phase instead of blowing up expensive payloads.
> To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.
This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.
There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them.
Note however, that this example doesn't fit in at all with the contrarian view in this thread. Feynman's report was about accurately estimating the failure rate of the shuttle and about the bureaucratic culture that popped up to protect itself and ended up making that failure rate worse by not letting engineers do their jobs.
But if during the Challenger investigation an engineer or a manager had told Feynman "There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them", he would have regarded them as completely incompetent and part of the problem.
The very nature of the enterprise is risky, and so the goal was to manage the risk of failure to an acceptable limit. Cover-your-ass culture can be improved, engineers can be allowed to do their jobs, but you aren't going to eliminate risk. The fact that we can even try to put a number like "1 in 50" or "1 in 100" on estimated space flight failure rates is exactly what blhack is talking about. We could judge that too high a rate, but if we did, we wouldn't be going to space at all, at least not anytime soon. That's the tradeoff.
Note that the engineers and especially the astronauts were well aware of that risk, and you can find almost exactly that sentiment echoed by them in interviews after the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia accidents. Many astronauts were most worried that the American public couldn't stomach the idea that failure came with any ambition in spaceflight and so would shut the program down.
The word "failure" is used to mean two distinct things: 1) bad outcome, 2) made the wrong choices given the available information at the time.
They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.
blhack's comment was ambiguous. Under some interpretations it is ridiculous, but under others it is sensible. By interpreting charitably, we can avoid a fair bit of two of the worst things on HN: abrasiveness and nitpicking.
(Edit: and protracted disputes. So, three of the worst things on HN.)
Your understanding of what I said is also clearly ridiculous.
In context, what I am saying is pretty obviously meant to be taken as:
Failure is part of taking risk. Risk is part of doing things that are difficult. Doing things that are difficult is part of progress. Progress is something that I consider "right".
And then put further into context, with regards to spectacular failures like the one today: Don't beat yourself up [engineers who worked on orbital] because the very difficult thing that you were doing failed. That is what makes that very difficult thing noteworthy.
Failures are inevitable. I am sure the team has learnt more from it than it would if it had worked. When you have failed once you don't leave any stone unturned and in the process improve on tens of more things.
Almost certainly. The solid fuel would be bonded to the casing of the stage, so little fragments of burning fuel and casing would likely result in generation of thrust, which could causing spiraling fragments.
There wouldn't have been much point in a self destruct. The rocket launched, then it looked like there was an explosion in or near the boosters (which apparently caused a loss of thrust), then it fell back onto the pad and exploded. Blowing it up at a higher altitude just would have spread the debris a little farther.
According to the press conference just now, the range safety officer apparently did send a destruct signal. The signal probably would have been sent very close to the time the rocket hit the ground. In my relatively ignorant opinion, it was going to blow up one way or another. We'll probably get more details later.
Each rocket contains conventional explosives which are used to destroy the vehicle if attitude control is lost during flight. It's to prevent the rocket from causing more damage by possibly crashing into a populated area.
Usually it's a rope of explosives running up the barrel of the rocket. The goal is to quickly remove structural integrity, and the rocket takes care of blowing itself up immediately.
I'd say it was to close to the ground to self destruct. And there would have been a call from the Range Safety Officer in the event he ordered a destruct or the computer called a destruct.
While it probably wouldn't need to be destroyed, the last thing you want is for part of it to lay down on the ground still producing thrust. Better to be certain.
I don't think Antares can command itself to destruct. The destruct has to be commanded by the range. There isn't any point to issuing the destruct command unless the impact point is dangerously far from the flight path, and that wasn't the case here.
"The launcher started to disintegrate at about H0 + 39 seconds because of high aerodynamic loads due to an angle of attack of more than 20 degrees that led to separation of the boosters from the main stage, in turn triggering the self-destruct system of the launcher"
"At this point, the northern-most Solid Rocket Motor (SRM #1) separated from the core booster, initiating the Inadvertent Separation Destruct System. At 45.529 seconds, approximately 3 seconds after the automatic destruct sequence, Mission Flight Control Officers sent command destruct signals to the vehicle."
Up until a few months ago, I was an engineer for OSC. We used the same Flight Termination Logic Unit (FTLU) as Antares. I can confirm that it can provide for automatic destruct should the engineers desire it. I have no knowledge of the specifics of its use in Antares (I did not work on the Antares program), but given the constraints of operating from Wallops, I would not be surprised if automatic destruct is enabled for all Antares launches.
Using 50 year old Russian engines was a risky move on Orbital's part, but in fairness the NK-33's are a pretty amazing piece of technology. The US has still yet to build anything matching its performance:
297 seconds of Isp is huge. The Saturn V's F1 engine only had 263 seconds. And the closest we've come since to that level of performance in a Lox/RP-1 engine is the Merlin 1D which will have 282.
They did it by using an oxygen-rich, fully staged combustion cycle. Which means that most of the fluid flowing around the engine and through the turbines of the pumps is super hot pure oxygen at 2000 psi. That's crazy. The US has brought over NK-33's and taken them apart and we still don't quite know how the Russians got it to work.
Of course, performance is only one consideration. All the other things you'd expect like integration costs, reliability of your suppliers, etc. made the Antares a pretty risky bet. But given Orbital's choices of developing their own engine from scratch, buying a hyper-expensive engine from Rocketdyne, or buying a wonder of engineering for cheap from the Russians, buying a bunch of surplus NK-33's wasn't totally crazy.
> but in fairness the NK-33's are a pretty amazing piece of technology
And we wouldn't have any at all if Kuznetsov hadn't ignored a direct order from Moscow to destroy all the engines and tooling, as part of the erasure of the N-1 launcher from official history.
IIRC the OKB knocked them off their inventory as them as 'surplus components' and stored them in a warehouse under plastic sheeting.
Closed cycle has another advantage over open cycle for kerosene - namely, the vibrations in the chamber are more manageable. Which paradoxically can make the engine more reliable.
A suspicion is that the engines didn't quite survive the long storage... indeed they weren't quite designed for that. But we'll wait for results of analysis of the explosion.
I should have been clear on the propellant - the SSME is a hydrogen engine. For a lot of reasons, comparing engines of different propellants by using a single performance number alone doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you want to talk about hydrogen engines, the Russians built the RD-0120, which reportedly had a higher Isp and chamber pressure than the SSME...
Although I don't believe we ever tested it on our own test stands, so it's impossible to know for sure.
By the way you are conflating vacuum Isp with sea level Isp (what I was using). The Sea level Isp of the SSME is 366 s.
The SSME is also a fuel-rich staged combustion cycle. The point I was making above is that the Russians were able to get an ox-rich staged combustion cycle working reliably. That's the key technology breakthrough that we have never duplicated.
Was anything about cromwellian's statement inaccurate, such that it should have been downvoted? I'm pretty sure I understand everything being discussed here but I don't understand THAT.
I didn't down vote it, but the difference between RP1 and Liquid Hydrogen engine performance is WELL known. Thus his assertion that SSME's are better, although true as comparison of rocket engines in general, is false when comparing LOX/RP1 engines specifically (since the SSME are NOT LOX/RP1), which the grandparent was clearly doing.
Similarly, citing the 850 ISP of the experimental NERVA engines is equally out of context.
I didn't see the LOX/RP1 qualifier when I replied (I was responding to the quoted sentence).
Let me qualify the SSME claim as "highest Isp/Thrust of any widely used engine". Prototypes or engines that haven't flown much IMHO aren't able to make this claim.
The NK-33 may beat a Merlin 1D, but what much do they cost to make and what is the reliability? If you make 100 NK-33s and 100 Merlin 1Ds, what's your total budget, and how many NK-33s will fail compared to the Merlin 1D?
One thing I get with SpaceX, is that their engines are not designed to push the performance envelope. They want them to be cheap and reliable.
The first stage engines that exploded were AJ-26 engines. These are remanufactured NK-33 or NK-43 engines built in the Soviet Union in the late-60s or early-70s for the N-1 moon rocket, but never used.
In May, an AJ-26 exploded on the test stand at Stennis space center in Mississippi, severely damaging the test stand.
Even in the computer field, picking up a 30-year-old unmaintained project is very hard, original designers gone, everything around it retired, use case changed and maybe some tricks may never be known.
As for these engines, they're currently retrofitted with new kind of fuel, new electronics and some modifications, after 30 years, by a totally different team.
I really don't think this kind of thing would work.
Pure speculation but I wonder if they rushed to test the engines that just flew. AeroJet's parent company claims they have lost over $31MM on the AJ-26 YTD[1]. There may be pressure from higher-ups to push through the issue seen at Stennis in May.
I wonder if this is going to be a pressing problem, given the Russian's lack of enthusiasm for supplying more rocket gear while under sanctions and the dwindling stock in the US.
AeroJet owns pretty much all of the existing NK-33 inventory and a license to manufacture them. The work for integrating the NK-33 into the Antares rocket was actually done by a Ukrainian firm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares_%28rocket%29#Design
It seems so bizarre that we're using 40 year old, Russian-made engines. I'm sure there are plenty of smart folks who will say not too worry, but I wonder.
It is a fascinating case of uneven technological development.
The Soviet Union went so far with staged combustion engines in the sixties that that level of technology has not yet been reached elsewhere.
USA, Europe and Japan went with hydrogen staged combustion but that's quite different.
The ULA/Blue Origin decision about new indigenous US first stage engine development gets a huge boost from this problem.
It's just what can be reached when you put resources into it. Coming from the IT world it might seem strange that the investment has not lost its value, but it has not. It might be quite a lot easier to duplicate nowadays, but not child's play at all.
Sometimes it's chilling to think what kind of still secret projects were funded by the huge US defense budgets during the cold war. There are some public sides and declassified parts on things like very good glide ratio hypersonic vehicles, but officially they never went far and the space shuttle was the thing.
( http://www.456fis.org/THE%20B-52/FS-011-DFRC_popup6.jpg )
I'm sure the core rocket technology is sound but I've gotta think the sensors and computational capabilities are literally decades out of date. Which is really where SpaceX has a commanding advantage, for example, being able to abort a launch at T-0 and reschedule for later that day having identified and corrected an anomaly.
Right before the explosion you can hear launch control saying something like "Got engines at 108%".
I was curious about it, but from Reddit discussion, apparently this is totally normal; "Yes, the engines have been upgraded many times. To avoid having to recalibrate the software each time engines are upgraded, they are simply rated at over 100 percent thrust over the first engine's thrust."
Another interesting fact. The pad is NASA's. So you can imagine the crew that maintained it are pretty disappointed.... "Look at what you did to my pad!?!" The fireball was enormous. The view from the Cessna incredible.
That must have been just about a worst case scenario for the pad to sustain such a direct hit. Hopefully it was the strict safety protocols and not just dumb luck which kept everyone safe. That's another aspect of this event which can be studied and reported, so at least we maximize the take-aways. Track the entire response from T-6.
Apparently the rocket is designed to do that little lateral kick that you can see in the video and initially seems odd. 'Why is the rocket not going straight up' causes a little unease at first but apparently is nominal. If that's the case, then the time of the explosion may correspond to a point where they kick up engine output. It also may have been a heavier payload than usual requiring higher engine output? (Unconfirmed)
If I remember correctly, the cause of this accident was that one of the nozzles had been wired in reverse, causing it to move differently from what the rocket ordered it to.
In that one the gyroscopes (all 3 of them) were installed upside-down, and what's truly facepalm-worthy was that the guy who did that decided to force them into place:
investigators simulated the improper installation of the DUS angular velocity sensors on the actual hardware. As it turned out, it would be very difficult to do but not impossible. To achieve that personnel would need to use procedures and instruments not certified either by the design documentation or the installation instructions. As a result, the plate holding the sensors sustained damage.
My entire physics lab watched this happen live. It started going up and everyone was cheering. Seconds later just caught fire, and fell to the ground and exploded.
"That's what happens when you set 'a' to negative." a good lesson from my TA
Too bad your TA didn't work on that Russian rocket that crashed a year or two ago... IIRC the accelerometers were installed upside down so as soon as it took off it incorrectly thought it was pointed straight down. The rocket flipped around until it thought it was "up" and slammed into the ground.
>> My entire physics lab watched this happen live.
Now imagine how people felt back in '86 when the challenger exploded with 7 people on board including a teacher. Shuttle launches were common by then but a lot of people were watching live due to the teacher on board aspect. It brings a whole different set of emotions to the event. Nobody made a joke that day.
Of course they didn't. We all knew this flight was unmanned, so it was easy to laugh off such an event. Like other posters have said: 1) A shame for the scientists and engineers who worked many hours to put this together. 2) An unfortunate loss of tens of millions of dollars. BUT 3) We're human and make mistakes, just in the case of aerospace the smallest error is make or break. Aviation wouldn't have made progress to the point we're at now without learning lessons.
This is a bummer, I hate to see stuff like this happen. The payload in this rocket was the heaviest that has been included in an Antares launch, I doubt this had anything to do with the failure, but hopefully we'll find out.
Rocket science is hard, after all.
In the video, there are several pieces of debris that fly off and spin in a helical motion, I wonder what those bits are!
There aren't many blogs covering this right now, but there are no personnel injured (according to the launch loop) -- just "significant property damage and significant vehicle damage".
Under Orbital's license for this launch, LLO 14-091, they were required to take out more than $110 million in insurance for liability and government property. The portion of the insurance specific to U.S. government property is $45 million.
And going the other direction, euphemistically-wise, the U.S. military's official designation for things* that fall off aircraft is TFOA: Things Falling Off Aircraft.
*Anything from loose nuts or fasteners up to improperly-attached fuel tanks or bombs.
"Property" meaning, presumably, their infrastructure (e.g., the tower that holds the rocket up before it launches, etc.); and "vehicle" is the rocket itself... Don't worry, they didn't launch this and blow-up over suburbia!
I imagine that the "property" that was damaged is to the launch facility itself. The launch was on Wallops Island, VA which is largely (if not entirely) uninhabited. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallops_Island
The town of Chincoteague is a few miles away from the pad. I'm guessing the worst impact there was some windows got rattled by the shockwave from the destruction of the 2nd stage.
And to be clear, the debris field is over the Atlantic Ocean. The launch was scheduled for last night but had to be scrubbed because a boater had entered the restricted area.
The debris field would have been over the Atlantic, had the rocket made it that far. However it failed while it was still over the launchpad, fell out of the sky, and exploded when it fell onto the launchpad.
Well, that's good. Property damage is insurable - let's hope that's the only loss.
Listening to the audio feed for a few minutes, I always find it a bit sad how people resort to 'officialese' bullshit when they're embarrassed or stressed, eg 'we're going to triage the data'?!
Having been an engineer in control room environments for both rocket launches and fighter jet flight operations -- it's not really "officialese bullshit". Aerospace has a definite jargon and there are preferred ways of saying things on comms to reduce ambiguities. "Triage the data" is actually a good way of describing what you do in an anomaly investigation. You figure out what the most likely thing that went wrong is, then the next most likely thing, etc. and look at data regarding those things in order.
I don't think that's just officialese. They are going to be under enormous pressure to find out what went wrong as quickly as possible. Orbital Science's future may be significantly affected by how well (and quickly) they deal with the aftermath.
Very sad that this has happened. I can only imagine what it must feel like to those who worked on the rocket and its payload. It can really happen to anyone, even the best. At least we can all be thankful no one was hurt.
In addition to the COTS resupply provisions for the ISS, this craft was also carrying the Arkyd-3 satellite (basically the whole Arkyd space telescope minus the optics, to serve as a test platform). While this is always sad, no lives were lost and that's what insurance is there for. Kudos to Orbital Sciences for pushing the boundaries of space flight, even if these losses are anything but fun.
I happened upon this website as a result of a Google search re. yesterday's failed launch of the Orbital Sciences venture to resupply the ISS, and this URL appeared as the first search result. I've read your site guidelines, as well as the many comments on this news page, and as a lay person I humbly offer this question, which I hope someone will answer: Why was there no escape rocket atop the rocket's payload module? Was it considered cost-prohibitive? Thanks for your time. Cordially, Steve Logsdon.
Post Script: I hope you won't think it patronizing of me to observe that I found the apparent erudition and literacy of the contributors to this web page to be most impressive.
Antares has a maximum payload of 6000kg. This is roughly the same as the launch mass of the Apollo command module, which weighed 5500kg. To rescue the command module in an emergency, Apollo missions had a 4200kg launch escape system. So we might expect a escape rocket to cost Antares almost half of its payload capacity.
Furthermore, adding a launch escape system would mean adding parachutes and flotation to a payload which otherwise doesn't need it.
Terrible situation, but the radio chatter on the live feed is a wonderful way to learn about handling crises in a calm, collected manner. Impressive considering what's going on.
That was the most impressive part for me. It's like listening to Air Traffic control--Some of the most professional conversation even in the face of tragedy.
In the videos you can see the quality of the rocket flame changes suddenly about half a second before the obvious explosion in the engine area. The jet becomes more orange and less convergent.
At 1:03 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo
So, as a general comment, something bad happened with the gear that pumps fuel into the engines in the right proportion. Maybe involving a major leak of fuel into the structures around the engine. Leaked fuel explodes. Complete loss of thrust, rocket falls back to earth.
I wonder if the Russians would consider it a good or a bad thing for them, if the West decides to stop using those Russian-built engines? Specifically, who benefits if there's a series of failures of AJ-26 engines?
Considering the current imposition of economic sanctions against Russia, based on quite untrue accusations related to Ukraine and MH17. The Russians are feeling considerably put out over that, and rightly so.
> I wonder if the Russians would consider it a good or a bad thing for them, if the West decides to stop using those Russian-built engines?
Definitely bad. Of course, that depends on whom you ask :) and which Russian we're talking about.
NK-33 is used on a recently created Soyuz-2.1v rocket (one engine on first stage). There is no production of NK-33 today in Samara - but the ability to sell engines to the West would oh so much improve economic situation for Samara's industrial space cluster. Among other things, NK-33 is a matter of pride in Samara. It's the only engine maker for first stages in Russia (if you don't count Voronezh'es LH2 engines, used on the second stage of Energiya) other than Energomash, its arch-rival. Since recently works are underway to restart the production of NK-33... and Orbital going away from using them, for whatever reason, is sad news.
Still NK-33 is a great piece of technology, in some aspects still unsurpassed. It's too early to consider it's over for NK-33.
As for politics and sanctions against Russia - this is quite different subject, almost completely unrelated. Leaders come and go... and people stop wars at some point, yet the aspiration of going to the stars remains.
The NK-33/AJ-26 is no longer manufactured, and most of the stockpile is owned by Aerojet-Rocketdyne or Orbital (something like 50 engines). Considering that those engines have already been bought and paid for, there's no real benefit either way to them failing just a downside to Aerojet-Rocketdyne and OSC.
Probably way too early to tell even that. There will be hundreds of possible causes that will have to be narrowed down; no one will know anything concrete for a good while most likely, even inside Orbital Sciences.
In crashes like this there often isn't enough wreckage to reassemble to tell one thing or another. But there will be lots of data to comb through which will probably lead to the cause.
Wow, I've somehow lived through 40 years of math/science/space-geekdom without learning that the pointy thing on top of the Saturn V is a part of an escape system.
Ouch. A lot of rocket fuel burning all at once. I would be less concerned if this was the first or second flight but as the fifth flight one has to wonder what part of the process didn't work. This was apparently the first flight with the Castor 30XL which is the second stage, I suppose if it started its burn prematurely that would certainly be an issue.
As a testing problem, rockets have always fascinated me. At some level you have to trust in first principles but being so thorough so that you know will either fly or fail safe. That has got to keep folks up at night.
It seemed like from the press conference that Orbital will be footing most of the bill. The best Frank from OS could say was that "some of the rocket" was insured. Someone below cited $110 million minimum insurance, but that's not even close to the number OS gave out in the conference at $200m for just the rocket (which I think included neither the manifest nor the damage to the pad/environment and any necessary repair/cleanup)
Just wanted to confirm that Orbital's mention of insurance does not help the customers at all. It is up to the various companies to insure their own payload.
Also, it might be fun to note that no one on that launch gets a refund. Generally you pay for something like 90% before the launch (in different milestones leading up to the launch) and only 10% after safe delivery to orbit.
Heartwarming to see how positive and forward-looking the responses here are. Certainly more positive than the responses towards India's (successful) Mars mission.
To decide is this is a success or a failure one need to determine exactly where was the error. If this new knowledge contributes to the design of better systems then this is a success, if the actual error provides us with nothing to learn then this is a very big failure. So there is an amortized cost of success/failure in long term enterprises.
Well, part of the investigation is to find as many of those pieces as possible and examine them. For instance in airplane crash investigations the NTSB will sometimes secure a huge hangar, draw out an outline of the aircraft, and place every single bit they find in its approximate location on the airframe. The plane reconstruction was a big part of figuring out how TWA 800 crashed.
Then there is all the video and film footage. I bet some of it was high speed (so the resulting film will be slow motion). Slo-mo film helps show the exact sequence of failures and was a big part of the Challenger investigation.
Finally, there will be a ton of data that was collected from the rocket in its brief flight.
Wondering the same thing. In addition to incidents like this, every once in a while, a story pops up that describes how programming error was the cause of rocket crash that happened TWENTY years ago... How? Just how can people be sure that it was programming error? It's not like you can debug a burnt piece of a microcontroller, can you?
Guess we've come a long way from a magnifying glass investigations :)
I entered an engineering school 5 years after Ariane V.
Each single professor explained us why their subject was the reason for Ariane V to explode. The physics one went about how the imperial/metric discrepancy was the cause, the mechanics one went about how error margin management wad the cause, the CS one about integer overflow... Each of them made it clear that their course was the center of the world, but altogether it didn't look smart.
The students from Houston and New Jersey must have been so disappointed. I really hope that they get another chance to send their projects to space before they graduate, and that some of them will eventually take up a career in rocket science despite this minor setback.
Or different in the other way - where had they launched with the boat there and it still had exploded. Then ORB/NASA would have to deal with a lot more than simply economic consequences.
A good reminder that no matter how bad your day goes at your job, things can always be much, much worse. My thoughts go out to the the Orbital Sciences team.
> I know the Shuttle carried DOD Secure comm equipment in addition to it's in the clear UHF and VHF Radios. I'm assuming that ISS has something similar.
There's some obvious reasons why the International Space Station might be less likely to carry sensitive US military communications gear than the NASA Space Shuttles.
I don't think it is anything like that. It's for cases where they need to discuss something that they don't want every person with a HAM radio to hear. A discussion between an astronaut and the flight surgeon/spouse/clergy member. I'm sure the Russians have a system on ISS as well. Just having the hardware is not enough to crack into an enemies comms. It's more that they don't want stuff like that falling into the hands of a rouge state like Iran or North Korea, or a non-state actor that might have schemes of reverse engineering it to build their own system. I'd bet there is a Russian Transceiver racked up in JSC, and a DOD system racked up at Russian Space Control.
I don't get why you would need secret hardware for that -- all the encryption can happen in software, and there are plenty of public known encryption algorithms that are secure. Maybe the need for secure storage of a private key?
So glad no one was hurt! I'm not a rocket scientist but it looks like fuel was coming out the side of the rocked as it lifted off (kind of a puff) then it got worse and ignited from the nozzle at the bottom.
Looks like one of the engines blew up as they went to full throttle. Since this was the first XL launch, I wonder if they are trying to push the AJ-26's too hard with the increased payload.
I was planning to watch it the night before, but it was cancelled because of a sailboat or something nearby. How silly, I thought. It's not like it's going to explode...
That the SpaceX engine failure was non-catastrophic doesn't mean all failure modes are like that. I'd imagine it's still possible for a SpaceX engine to go ka-boom in certain situations. Modern tech or otherwise, they're still working with what's in essence a large bomb.
Truly unfortunate that it failed. Here's Elon Musk's comment about the Antares rock two years ago:
Musk: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.
Which is now good for an 80% success rate. And from the video it certainly seems like an engine failure is the most likely scenario. I think if anything Musk is looking pretty vindicated now.
No comment on the unprofessionalism bit. I don't disagree, but then it's hardly uncommon in high tech either.
And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years :) . It's not milk, they aren't that easily spoiled. Elon just used this time reference to make the decision look good - for somebody who doesn't know better.
So factually he's right - but also misses the point. Here I should admit that Elon says more than he does - but he does quite a bit too, so kudos to his successes - Merlin-1D is a great engine.
> And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years
I took his comment to be more in the "that's your business model? buying and selling old Russian hardware?" vein. It's not that the hardware is bad, per se.
Although the hardware might be bad. I imagine they're looking into that...
It's not that they've been sitting in a hangar for decades so much as that we've gotten a lot better at building engines. Presumably modern designs have a lot lower catastrophic fault probability.
I think technically engines were manufactured in early '70s - like, in 1974? Definitely weren't stored in Siberia - Russia has quite sizable European part, no need to go to Siberia if you want to hide about 70 engines from nemesis Glushko's eye...
Well, if you can take 80% as a success rate at a quarter the cost per launch due to re-using old parts, and build that into your business model somehow (insurance, assurance, whatever and however it might be done), then maybe it can be viable as opposed to using new materials and expensive innovation to get a more reliable result at a higher cost.
I'm not arguing for that business strategy; I think it would not be successful. I also don't think that re-using old rocket parts actually reduces cost to orbit significantly (I haven't looked at the numbers). I also don't think that what I think matters a whole lot.
However, it's worth a discussion beyond simply rejecting the model at face value.
It's not only a cost issue - those old engines have performance characteristics that (in some areas) outperform anything that they could buy today off-shelf (as much as "off-shelf" exists for rocket engines), and developing a completely new model would likely be even less reliable than the current situation.
It was also part of a larger conversation about how little rocket and aerospace technology has advanced since the 60's because they're afraid of trying anything new.
Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.
It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.
To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.
Don't fret the failures.