Who pays for the expense of these types of failures? Does SpaceX have some sort of 3rd party insurance from a private insurer or are they insured by NASA or another branch of the US gov?

How much is the equipment that got destroyed worth? If this happens multiple times in a short space of time as it seems to have recently does the cost of insurance go up for every launch? Does their analysis of data have any impact of the cost of insuring future launches?

I always heard that other parts of the company were far more laid back. Wish I had worked in one of those parts.

If it is so I would imagine simply improving the reliability track of the vehicle to lower insurance would have a very large effect on profitability. If they could eventually tank the insurance partially/completely in house (given a low chance of failure) that would be even better.

I was only an engineer on the sounding rocket program for a little under two years. Fortunately the two rockets I assisted with were successful, but there were payload failures while I was there that had to be investigated. The long days and nights some of my coworkers put in to investigate anomalies took a harsh toll on them.

A month or so after I left, the program had a complete launch vehicle failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL9HEYuOWDU#t33m25s). The stress of investigating that caused four of the telemetry/power engineers working on that mission to quit within the several months following.

I mean, things go wrong. It's the one universal truth of any engineering process. Finding out why the thing that went wrong went wrong, and making sure that it doesn't go wrong in the future is just part of the job.

I work on an on-call rotation --- it's not as exciting as rocket science, which is both unfortunate and fortunate --- and yes, things go wrong; and one of the biggest rules of our process for when things do go wrong is 'Is it the end of your shift? Then hand off and go home. NO THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.'

If the process itself is unable to cope smoothly with something going wrong, then the process has gone wrong. (And someone should find out why it went wrong, and make sure that it doesn't go wrong in the future.)

One of the takeaways I had from my time working with rockets was that rocket science isn't even rocket science, most of the time. But, I am very biased because my experience was overwhelmingly negative.

I agree with you on all the rest.

I read that in high school, and it's part of the reason I became an engineer.

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." --Teddy Roosevelt

"Because it's there. Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man's desire to conquer the universe." - George Mallory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kestt5BI3eg

That he was the first was a big part of it, but the reality is remove the words "never been climbed" and the sentence still works. Climbing everest, running a marathon, [insert challenging sports thing here] - each person strives within their own measure and tries to exceed their own expectations.

> The device aboard [today's launch] was actually a backup of the original meteor camera that blew up along with Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket in 2014.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/27/meteor-camera-iss/

I get the impression looking back that he worked on so many projects he didn't have time to tell us about many.

"There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause. That's all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis."

  Received telemetry from Dragon after the event - Gwynne (From Conference).

That's assuming it wasn't exposed to explosion debris.

I imagine this was literally an overpressure event, where perhaps something occurred with the 2nd stage tank mixers. (The explosion occurred close to MECO.)

What does this sentence mean?

I wonder what the specs are for the systems they're using for telemetry... must be a gazillion channels at a high rate...

How can you do a fault tree analysis before things go wrong?

Maybe fault tree analysis means something different to you.

According to Wikipedia, it is "a top down, deductive failure analysis in which an undesired state of a system is analyzed using Boolean logic to combine a series of lower-level events."

There needs to be an undesirable (and presumably unforeseen) state to be analysed before you do the fault tree analysis.

Formal fault tree analysis has been used byt the nuclear power industry for decades. You may consult the "Fault Tree Handbook" also known as NUREG-0492 which can be found here:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/s...

It has been adopted in parts of the auto industry for at least a decade (I was directly exposed to this).

You start with a preliminary hazard analysis based on what could go wrong and work backward through the system to identify things connected to the component in question that would lead to the undesired outcome. You'll build a large binary circuit where the inputs are events or problems and the output is a failure. The tools can do an analysis to determine what combinations can lead to that failure. If the simplified boolean expression contains any single terms, you have a single point of failure that will lead to the undesired outcome. You then redesign the system so that no single point failures lead to disaster.

THIS ANALYSIS HAS TO BE DONE BEFORE YOU BUILD IT TO BE ANY GOOD.

I always liked this way better than the more common "faulure modes and effects analysis" or FMEA, which makes you try to determine system-wide consequences of component failures - often down to individual resistors. These do find problems at design time, but IMHO it's too much work. With a fault tree you get to treat larger assemblies as a component.

FTA can be used either pre- or post- event.

Fair point.

OP's objection to a post-event FTA still makes no sense, though.

Fault Trees are typically used to determine the probability of a bad thing (fault) occurring. This probability is used to populate a Risk Matrix (Probability vs Consequence). The Risk Matrix is used to decide whether the risk is low enough vs the consequence within a design. It the risk is too high, then more redundancy or layers of protection are likely to be needed.

Root Cause Analysis builds a tree of possible causes that will look much like the Fault Tree diagram but may include more human factors (was the part inspected before use, was the equipment maintained etc).

There is a lot of overlap of techniques within the Risk Engineering discipline. Fault Trees can be mapped to Reliability Block Diagrams (AND gates are equivalent to Parallel pathways, OR gates are equivalent to Series pathways for example).

The mention of Fault Tree Analysis being required post event seems a bit odd. It may just have been a confusion of terms in the heat of the moment.

Facepalm.

In the last few minutes, over a dozen K-Nex rockets have lifted off and exploded shortly after takeoff.

Sigh.

Not the best introduction to the second Space Age for them.... ah well, we'll try again later.

At least nobody was aboard.

On my 12th birthday, I watched the Challenger explosion happen right in front of my eyes. Me and the rest of the kids from Indian Harbour Beach watched the pieces of the shuttle slowly fall out of the sky. Some speculated that one of the pieces was an escape pod, but one of the kids whose dad worked on the shuttle said there wasn't an escape pod. We just couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible that with all that focused attention on getting those 7 astronauts safely into space that such a thing could happen.

It was not the best experience for a kid who loved space and science.

However, it didn't turn me off from it, far from it. I ended up going to college for Aeronautical Engineering, before switching to Physics. I ended up as a nuclear physicist and doing a nuclear fusion startup. I still live within sight of the VAB.

If you want your kids to be interested in science, its more important that they be exposed to rockets, science, etc. than that they see it always be successful. Just showing them that it's cool goes a long way. But its much easier if you don't have to mix in questions about life and death, especially at such young ages.

"The crew cabin, made of reinforced aluminum, was a particularly robust section of the shuttle. During vehicle breakup, it detached in one piece and slowly tumbled into a ballistic arc. NASA estimated the load factor at separation to be between 12 and 20 g; within two seconds it had already dropped to below 4 g and within ten seconds the cabin was in free fall. The forces involved at this stage were likely insufficient to cause major injury."

So, in a way there was a pod...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

The shuttle wasn't intact, just the crew cabin, or the very front part.

(Protip: Only put the humans in the safer rockets, and be sure that they are going to so something useful up there, and anyway explain them that this is dangerous.)

Probably in 20, 50 or 100 years this will be as safe as current planes, but today it's a dangerous task.

This does highlight the difficulty of manufacturing a complex system in small quantities without the opportunity to do an end to end test before use.

You have no idea what parts of it are or are not cutting edge. I guarantee you many of the parts and pieces in the rocket required pushing boundaries. All the little bits of material science, modern computational analysis, and advanced manufacturing techniques are cutting edge.

They're using cutting edge stuff here and there, e.g. friction stir welding, which is a good match for the long seams in boosters, but mostly its organizational, and clean slate, not starting with a military rocket which is developed for and under different constraints. Or explicitly (Apollo) or implicitly (Space Shuttle and beyond) as a public works project, where cost is secondary to employing a lot of people.

* United Launch Alliance (Boeing and Lockheed Martin): 0 "outright failures" and 83 successful launches, ~$110 million/launch

* SpaceX: 1 failure and 18 successful launches, $60 million/launch

If you are looking for someone to launch your assets into orbit, who do you choose?

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-destroyed...

* United Launch Alliance: $110 million

* SpaceX: $63.5 million ($60 million * 18 total / 17 successful)

So SpaceX saves you $46.5 million per successful launch. If we assume that 1/18 SpaceX launches fail, then in the long run SpaceX wins as long as your typical payload cost is less than $46.5 * 18 = $837 million.

If we assume that the cost to replace the payload for a failed launch is less than the original payload (R&D costs are amortized, so it's likely that building a second payload is much cheaper than designing and building the first payload), then the break-even payload cost can be even higher.

(Not trying to be snarky here, just thinking that the 1/18 vs 0/83 comparison seems moot when you have humans on board)

That's only slightly lower than 1/18.

The shuttle had a 40% vehicular failure rate (2 out of 5) and a 1.5% flight failure rate. That's better than 1/18, but not by that much.

I don't have my original source on this, but here's a good article discussing that and the concept of "mission success": http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona...

(Of course this all assumes a replaceable payload. I am sure the analysis would be quite different for carrying people into space.)

This is an impressive reliability record, no doubt about it. However, it is fair to note that this is the "current generation" Atlas and Delta. The first Atlas was used during the Mercury program, so they've had more than 50 years of design refinement to get to that point.

This perspective surprises me. From my perspective, I wonder why it matters to me how long SpaceX has had to design their rocket? Wouldn't I prefer the one with 50 years of refinements?

Someone else posted a similar comment. It implies a 'my team is better than yours' competition, rather than a competition over which rocket functions better.

But then again, I am partial.

Atlas and Delta are certainly good platforms for high reliability but they are expensive and they aren't making much effort to bring the costs down. Bringing the costs down would require design revisions that might undo that 50 years of design stability.

If SpaceX or someone else comes up with a reliable design at a dramatically lower price point ULA wont be able to sell their launchers unless its to a money is no object customer like the U.S. military.

Recovery and rapid turnaround of the first stage could make space access cheap enough many things would become possible and affordable that are not currently, due to high launch costs, like expeditions to Mars or large space structures.

They're not just viable competitors, they're the current market leader. SpaceX is the peppy young upstart here (and still, failures like this are stepping stones to future reliability, if they're spending the time learning from their mistakes like they should be).

At least it was unmanned.

Antares CRS-3 turbopump failure, vehicle FTS was activated and launch vehicle impacted very close to the launch pad. $200 million vehicle lost, approximately $30 million in damage to launch facility.

Loss of the $424 million Glory satellite due to payload fairing separation failure.

*Loss of the $273 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite due to payload fairing separation failure.

And I don't think the comparison between ULA and SpaceX is necessarily a fair one. ULA is the beneficiary of inheriting solid engineering teams and practices from very mature programs run by large defense corporations. SpaceX is comparatively very young (I feel this makes their overall record even more impressive).

Another commenter said something similar. If I am awarding merit badges, then I agree it's unfair. Otherwise, if I'm looking for someone to launch my satellite, the comparison is perfectly fair (not that 'fair' has anything to do with it).

It heavily depends on the cost of the asset. If a satellite costs close to 1bn, it worth to use $110/launch but more reliable rocket.

Many organizations don't have the spare time and capacity to afford all of that; they or their project may simply be done.

E.g. Curiosity has such a spare (I'm not sure if it's the same as the flight hardware or close enough) which will be sent in a future mission (I think 2017, though I don't have any sources at hand) with (some) different experiments on board.

The first thing you do is be very glad that you have a choice. Then you can start price shopping. If there is only one domestic option, then you either pay what the sole-source wants, or you pursue international options if those are available to you, many times they will not be.

edit: If I had read down further, I would have seen a discussion about this very question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793697

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/pizzahut-00b.html

There are probably other minor differences (I want to say there were some electrical interface issues), but that was the part that impacted my work.

There is almost no question that had there been people aboard this particular launch, and they were using the newer Dragon that has that capability, no loss of life would have occurred. Unless (of course) there were OTHER malfunctions, too. Never know. Space is indeed hard.

1. Something went wrong.

2. The onboard automation tried to compensate and kept going in the hope that it wasn't a fatal problem.

3. As soon as it realised it was a fatal problem and the vehicle was lost, it triggered range safety (aka the self destruct system).

If the vehicle had started to topple and broken up due to being pushed sideways through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, then I would expect to see much bigger pieces and a slower breakup. As it is it turns from a single vehicle that's obviously in trouble to a cloud of shrapnel very, very quickly. This suggests deliberate destruction (which is the right thing to do).

Although it does seem to take a long time before this happens, and you can see a piece fall off about six or seven seconds before the engines stop. This strikes me as being a lot. Maybe it's not as automated as I thought.

I hope the postmortem is made public once it's done. It'd be fascinating reading.

Edit: I hear a rumour that the bit which fell off was, in fact, the Dragon capsule being ejected. I wonder if it made it down all right? Probably not or we'd have heard about it by now...

Edit edit: According to the press briefing they had Dragon telemetry for 'some period' after the event. So chances are it worked fine until it hit the water. I bet they have boats out looking right now in the hope it survived.

Gwynne stated in the press conference that, to her knowledge, the range safety system had not been activated.

e: On the upside, happy birthday Elon, I hope you enjoyed your really awesome fireworks!

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3beu7w/rspacex_crs7...

Update: Looks like the explosion was triggered by Range Control in response to non nominal flight

Edit: Falcon Launch Control on "We are trying to correlate timelines and compare data with what they were able to see with down range cameras and put together what happened. We stopped receiving data at 2 min 19 sec from the vehicle. It is still not clear exactly what happened and why... At this point we don't have additional information we can provide on NASA Television until the contingency Press Conference, no earlier than 12:30? ET."

A literal command of "don't quote me because I'm telling you something I shouldn't" would be something like, "Off the record, this is what happened." And yeah, that would be silly to say on the internet.

23:44

23:52

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m38s

Hopefully Musk is learning some humility.

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3082067/Russi...

Perhaps he's gained some humility since then; I'm still very inspired by him regardless...

[0] http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m38s

Nobody said solid.

Good luck to everyone involved however; very exciting.

I wish the best SpaceX and hope they will make space flight affordable for many commercial and consumer applications.

Growing up in the 80s, I became quite bitter about the pace of technological change. Sure, personal computers were nifty, but the heroic age of spaceflight was really what the future should've been about. That age had ended with Apollo 17, three years before I was born. Everything since then looked like a shambolic shuffle into a new dark age.

One insane coincidence in the late 80s gave me some remarkable perspective on this. I was taking the train down the coast of California, around the horn of Vandenberg Airforce Base. The train was the only place from which civilians could see the Vandenberg Launch Complex, including the SLC-6 Shuttle launch site[1]. Nasa had spent over $4 Billion preparing it for shuttle launches which would never come. The Challenger disaster had ended all hopes for that; the complex had been mothballed and was already starting to rust. Seeing this made my 13-year-old-self angry. I started ranting to the poor gentleman sitting next to me about how my grandmother hand grown up with horses and buggies yet got to see men walking on the moon; my generation, on the other hand, had seen nothing but decline.

As I ranted, the gentleman slumped in his seat. At the end of my rant, he gave a long sigh and said "tell me about it." Then he introduced himself. He was Deke Slayton, a Mercury and Apollo astronaut[2]. He'd retired from NASA in 1982, frustrated with its bureaucracy, and tried to start a private space-launch company. It hadn't gone well.[3] I wish I could say that our conversation gave me hope for the future, but it didn't.

Later, my hopes were raised by the DC-X[4], then dashed by the subsequent (insanely corrupt) X-33 fiasco, and the failure of Beal Aerospace[5]. Raised again when I stood on the flight line at Mojave and watched SpaceShipOne take its first space shot[6], then dashed again when that program seemed to fly into molasses. Throughout, there was the sense that the future was possible, but by no means inevitable. There was no guarantee that it would arrive in my lifetime.

But now here it is. This time it's real, this time it'll work, and nobody will have to get nailed to anything. I couldn't be happier!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Co...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deke_Slayton

3: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevefrancis/sets/721576293246...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne_flight_15P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_(rocket)

Dragon 2 would be able to escape just fine, though. Cargo dragon could _technically_ survive if didn't get blown up too much.

It appears to be intact after the explosion. You can see it detach and drift back in the video at about 2:35. https://twitter.com/nextlaunch/status/615191061636481024

Unfortunately, parachutes on the cargo version aren't armed during launch (would be bad if they accidentally deployed) so it'll have smashed into the ocean and broken up.

Also, I thought the whole point of the Dragon v2 launch escape system was it uses the engines and fuel already in Dragon for orbital manoeuvring and landing; even the unmanned version is going to be using that. So it shouldn't be that heavy.

As for having a chance to test the systems: That's what the recent pad abort test (and subsequent in-flight tests) are for. Plus, the engines, being liquid engines, are each tested prior to installing them on the spacecraft. You'll need to do that anyway, and you are always hoping that you'll never need to use that system (does not fully apply to Dragon v2 since they intend to use the LAS system for landing the capsule with the rockets some time in the future).

I still say it does not make sense to equip a cargo mission with LAS capability. (Disclosure: I'm an aerospace engineering student, M.S., so it's an educated guess rather than a theory on my part)

Sidenote: Solid LAS systems, as used on most other capsule systems, cannot be tested like liquid systems. You'll need a comparative test with built-alike motors but cannot test the same system that will be installed in the spacecraft.

I hope they get everything figured out and get back on track soon. Best wished.

Just saw this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24cZYMsdrq0) video. It looks like trouble started near the top of the rocket. Also, heard the Air Force Terminated the flight.

Anyway, we will see.

So that's the second in a row ISS resupply mission that failed, isn't it? First was with the Progress in late April. How does this affect the ISS plans, does anyone now?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-destroyed...

Will their customers agree for them to add landing legs to their future missions? Will their manned flights be delayed? How about their certification to launch for the USAF.

Also I'm not sure but, did I see the Dragon spacecraft eject?

2) The legs have nothing to do with it, based on what we know (and it's very unlikely, too). Manned flight certification could be impacted, e.g. assessment period will be extended, but insignificantly (assuming they find a cause and the next launches go well). USAF certification will probably not be impacted since they reached the minimum amount of successful flights (assuming there are no other rules like "no launch failure in last X flights").

3) No, the rocket was probably terminated, i.e. explosives fired to break up the malfunctioning rocket. So you probably saw the debris.

http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3b27hk/rspacex_crs7_...

that reminds me that Elon Musk said that Antares rockets are junk, so now his own spacecrafts are exploding. Space tech has its problems. Maybe that will teach him to be a bit more humble.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/10/iss-bound-gear-...

When a failure does happen, nobody goes around celebrating it, whether they're competitors or not, and honestly I believe that includes Elon Musk. I believe that on a human level, but even on a business level it's bad, because it reduces public faith in space transportation generally. Nobody likes to see this happen.

:(

My only pessimistic thought in all this is that companies like Space X simply do not have the funds necessary to keep absorbing catastrophic loss and will just give up.

Point being, if Sony had kept going with that incredibly sophisticated robotics tech (for the time) they would be an industry leader right now at a time when robotics is about to explode. Did Sony run out of funds? No. They abandoned the project because of fear for stockholder repercussions. That's what I meant by that comment. Sometimes stockholder flash back is enough to abandon a really great idea.

And the NasaTV stream is still going with updates: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

Several interesting questions came to mind though, especially given the successful test of the Dragon 2's thrusters, which is whether or not an inflight abort could have saved the cargo. I understand that isn't practical in the general case but in the specific case of a Dragon cargo capsule, I'm wondering if they can fly one with the super draco thrusters. And have that one do the in flight abort sequence at some point in the future.

And given a rocket at mach 1+ what is the velocity of the explosion wavefront? In particular if you know that the back end of the rocket has just exploded, how many milliseconds do you have before the shockwave catches up to the front of the rocket? Could you perform a disconnect and burn of the super draco package to put the Dragon capsule far enough ahead of the shock wave to survive it?

I'm very much pro-space exploration, and I thought it was funny. It's just a tongue-in-cheek joking reference as if this was a huge game of lawn-darts.

Lighten up, and stop 'guessing' about what 'camp' people are a part of as part of public discourse. It makes you look rude, presumptive, and (possibly worst of all) wrong.

Are they looking to relight and land today? They usually do for geo or ISS missions.

https://igcdn-photos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/t51.28...

Edit: Go it...

  Post-Launch Booster Recovery

  Okay, that's the routine stuff dealt with. I know we're all here 
  to see what happens to the first stage! Following stage separation 
  approximately 3 minutes into the launch, the first stage 
  will manoeuvre and orient itself to conduct a post-mission 
  landing test attempt on an autonomous drone ship named 
  "Of Course I Still Love You".

Initial thoughts are that the main difference is now we have HD video and for some reason the controllers remain silent after the explosion... Why the silence? There used to be at least some reaction from the controllers. From an "oh no" to "obviously a major malfunction"... no sh*t Sherlock...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6qJh9upqW8

When something like this happens, all the conversations about what happened are being held on comm nets that aren't broadcast. Believe me, the controllers are talking to each other, gathering and sequestering data, etc. But they aren't doing it on the net that's broadcast to the public.

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiBFtkrZEw&t=23m38s Thanks xur17!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuNymhcTtSQ

But nevertheless its just guessing from me and im no expert.

Edit: They just called it, they had an "anomaly."

There are several ways of supplying the ISS, though the very reliable Russian Progress (which also did have a failure recently – not a good year for cargo shipments to the ISS) is certainly the workhorse in terms of cargo shipments. (Though there is also the Japanese HTV and the – also recently failed – Cygnus.)

Any one or even couple failures of cargo vehicles in a row can’t do much to the supply situation. There are multiple redundancies built into the process. However, since really no one wants to abandon the ISS (just deserting it and coming back a couple months later is always risky with something as complex as the ISS that does require constant upkeep) that better be the case.

There will probably be quite some rescheduling and changing of plans happening. (I know that after the last cargo failure three people actually got to stay up in space a couple days longer, for whatever complicated scheduling related changes in plans.)

Edit: One exploded in May: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/05/soyuz-2-1a-third-stag... It seems like they are going to launch again with supplies to ISS in July

The Progress vehicle did actually enter an orbit (it reached space and was circling the Earth for a couple days), just the wrong one and after that it spun out of control and was no longer controllable from the ground. Since there is still some atmosphere and some drag in low Earth orbit it eventually was slowed down enough to burn up.

Basically, it failed because it couldn't be controlled anymore, no explosions involved. (Had it been launched to an higher orbit it may well have stayed up for a long, long time, no explosions or anything else interesting going on, just spinning round and round and being uncontrollable.)