Based on previous comments, the most likely failure scenario seems to be related to the new use of super-cooled LOX - and I have to ask, was the temperature at the pad, at the time of the launch, significantly higher than during previous launches involving super-cooled LOX? If so, is there a possibility that the higher temperature differential could have been a contributing factor in the cause of the failure?

(Kind of the exact opposite of the case of the Challenger, where low temperatures were a critical causal factor of the failure)

(Via Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/live/xix3m9uqd06g/updates/fcbc544a-70...)

(There was already an explosion or fire before this one given the smoke in the air).

Absolute huge bummer.

Contact (1997): "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"

I'd argue: at less than twice the price.

-> This is not the 1950's

Enough with the conspiracy theories here. Unless you have some evidence and a strong thread of logic - please leave it be.

"Only in an irrational and unknown direction can we come to wisdom again."

It is important to note that the deluge functioned to protect the launch vehicle from sound vibrational damage, not the pad.

Maybe, maybe not. A lot of things intertwined - moreover, M&A is not the most rational area of business.

Also - one side may 'cancel', huff and puff about it, then use it as a premise to come back to the table and negotiate a much better deal.

The bourgeoisie of the developing world he wanted to help protested, the political class looked into constraining it by law, the first world hated it for misrepresenting the ideals of the Internet and going against hard-earned net neutrality laws, local Internet service providers backed off because of the negative publicity...

And the satellites he wanted to use to circumvent that went up in flames.

Using the "Image = FL * Obj / distance" equation, we get:

.8 * 24mm = x * 70m/4080m

Where x is the focal length of the lens assuming a full frame camera.

This comes out to a x = 1119mm equivalent focal length. If you have a crop sensor, this isn't too hard to obtain. I'd be amused if the video was taken with a Canon EF 1200mm lens or something, but the probability of that is 0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_Full_Thrust

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ#t=1m10s

If you mean internet.org wheter it's a loss or not is debatable

It'd certainly suck to be one of the people who's slaved over the satellite for the last couple of years, to see your baby get blown to smithereens like this.

Knowing how smart and methodological Musk is, I wouldn't be surprised if the rule at the office is actually to leave your desk and go home at 5pm sharp.

You are prone to make more mistakes when you tired and overworked and I cannot imagine more important place not to make mistakes, than building a rocket.

They’re 2 million USD more expensive per launch for a mid-size satellite than the Ariane 5 is, so I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

There is no such thing a 100% chance of success, everyone has a chance of failure. I would not put ESA more than a few % more reliable. Math says your satellite would need to be really expensive for the price difference to be worth it.

The main operational consequence to date has been to limit the number of times that they can try to launch within an extended launch window. But if something goes wrong with the fuel-handling equipment, or thermal management inside the tanks, things can get bad.

https://www.reddit.com/live/xix3m9uqd06g/updates/613f262a-70...

Yeah it sucks, but it could have been a lot worse.

Though you've given me a reason to look up the etymology. Now I now: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=wont&allowed_in_fra...

PS: When dealing with rockets oxidizer is also a fuel because they need both it and something to burn.

Anyway, here's the scanner feed of Kennedy Space Center Communicationshttp://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/705

And ignoring second-order effects: People harmed because of the results of the fire.

The second group of people is not less important than the first.

But if you look at the FT version, it's 1 for 8.

1. What kind of insurance will be needed on a billion dollar NSA satellite? $100 million? $125 million? It's not so cheep anymore, and considering delays etc. It's not such a great deal anymore. 2. They probably should have a "stable" platform and a "beta" platform, with a discount offered for beta.

Unfortunately, the "move fast and break things" attitude doesn't work with rockets.

Which is exactly the kind of people that SpaceX does not want and who should not apply there. The turnover is high for a reason indeed.

Building 2 would cost more than double, or it will take twice as long.

There are huge lead times involved, subcontractors with other commitments and other bottlenecks in the pipeline. Not to mention that even if you do manage to build 2 in the same time window at only double the cost you still have the issue with the launch window, a launch accident would most likely ground the provider for a very long time which means you have to find another launch provider.

Spacecom had a launch window from spacex, spacex has a queue of 9-10 more launches already set, there will now be a huge delay and possible cancelation even if Spacecom had another unit they couldn't just launch it next month.

There have been 133 successful shuttle launches, and 2 failed ones.

There have been 27 successful Falcon launches, and 2 failed ones.

Sure, it will delay some things in Africa, but we can't easily say whether that delay will be good or bad. For all we know people will be better off due to the delay as it may be less disruptive of existing economic structures, notwithstanding their long-term inefficiency. You're assuming incorrectly that the consequences of this satellite deployment would have been all upside and no downside, but such effects are not reliably quantifiable.

Harder at least as in there are extra steps that can go wrong (re-entry + landing), I suppose it’s debatable which was really a more difficult engineering project…

Basically once the cryogenic fuel starts to warm up you have to launch or to empty the tanks, the tanks are pumped out into reservoir tanks which are usually below the launch pad and fueling or emptying the rocket is in general the most dangerous part of the launch/abort sequence. Temperature and pressure variance, vibrations, leaks, and a lot of moving parts if anything goes wrong it can result in a pretty big explosion.

Overall they do have ways to empty the tanks, but this is a controlled pump out of the fuel at pressures and rates that would be as safe as one can get when dealing with supercooled liquid oxygen and kerosene, uncontrolled venting is a big no no.

You can similarly see this on larger tanks of both inert and reactive gases, a small propane tank could have a PRV because a flame out is likely to be less dangerous than an explosion in a BBQ setting, a tanker won't have a PRV because if it vents several tons of propane the result would be as bad or worse than a potential or an actual explosion. LN2 tanks also have PRV's as long as they are small enough to be safely vented but as soon as you go into a large enough volume where venting it is no longer safe whatever fail safe you implement has to be controllable.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston

I wonder if there is a surgeon who's that skilled.

In that case the rocket has a flight-termination system, though, which should activate as soon as it veers too far outside the planned/expected parameters of the flight.

This is a big plot point in the "Twin Spica" series.

Think of it like this if you total your McLaren P1-GTR there isn't an easy way to get a new one ;)

Sometimes it's wise to stop, read what you just wrote, then hit "back" rather than post a comment.

* The Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, during a training session, using a 100% pressurised oxygen atomosphere. Three dead. Grissom, White, and Chaffee. I can list them from memory.

* Apollo 11 suffered a lunar lander computer crash in the final seconds before landing, was programmed to land on what would have been unsurvivable terrain, and had fewer than 30 seconds of fuel left when it finally touched down.

* Apollo 12 was struck by lightning as it left the launch pad, knocking out much of the electrical system, which had to be reset. Fortunately they built things robustly.

* Apollo 13 had an oxygen tank explode as it was en route to the moon. The mission was aborted, though orbital mechanics meant that the astronauts still had to orbit the Moon, then return to Earth.

Any of 11, 12, or 13 could have ended with fatalities. One scenario for the command module pilot (Michael Collins in Apollo 11) was, if needs be, to leave his two crew members on the lunar surface and to return to Earth alone.

There will still be debris, of course, but I guess the reasoning is that it's preferable to have relatively small debris, than one large piece of exploding debris.

The board argues that there was a bias towards believing the software does not have an error. Thus, any out-of-range value is interpreted as a hardware error, which means the CPU should shut down.

There was a decision to not include Ariane 5 trajectory data in the SRI requirements and specification. Thus, while tests were rigorous at the equipment ("unit") level, and there were system tests, they didn't test that case. This is test design failure.

In addition, the board says "the review process was a contributory factor in the failure."

I can see how those can be aspects of "over-reliance on unit testing", but it doesn't explain, for example, how some of the variables from Ariane 4 were protected from overflow exceptions but others were not.

Yeah, they were really outsize personalities in every way (in a good way). Very unique time in American history.

> Like Russian vehicles, there is no flight termination system that receives ground commands onboard Chinese launch vehicles. Only US and ESA launch sites have such a system. Correction, Falcon 1 did not have such a system for launching on Kwaj.

When it comes to innovation, however, failure is often the impetus to more efficient design. Not only was that $200m shifted from Musk/Investors to SpaceX, et al, but it also went to informing the process and improvements for the entire project, and future projects by other companies.

We wish we could learn these things more cheaply, sure. But that doesn't mean the world or company would have been better off in the long run had the incident not occurred -- it's too soon to tell, and we might never know.

It was also spent on something they wanted to spend it on, rather than something they were forced to spend it on. It's still an interesting point though, because they spent it on something that carried significant risk. Does spending money on a glass window, which carries the risk of a broken window, work in the same way? I've not considered the broken-window fallacy from that perspective before. Perhaps it's not, for the same for the same reason that breaking a window is considered a crime and an exploding rocket generally is not.

I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points, e.g. in electronics by using cheap solder or capacitors with a limited lifetime. Buttons also fail way too easily. Or think of batteries that cannot be replaced. Do they all commit this fallacy, too? Do they harm the economy and therefore indirectly also themselves?

Or is it a matter of how long the window is used before it is broken? If so, how long? You could also make nearly unbreakable glass (buttons, rockets, etc.) but at very high costs for the company and therefore also the consumer. What role do the costs play in all of this? Is it an equilibrium? When does the fallacy start and normal 'crap product' cycle end?

I've never seen any explanation of this alleged fallacy that answers any of these questions.

> During the braking phase, up to the time the landing radar locked onto the surface, the duty-cycle margin was over 15%. After the radar acquired, the extra computations involved in converting the body-referenced radar data to the navigation coordinate system lowered the margin to perhaps 13%. When a monitor display such as Verb 16 Noun 68 was added, the margin shrank again, to 10% or less. Buzz Aldrin was perceptive when he said after the second 1202 alarm, "It appears to come up when we have a 1668 up"[16].

> With a 10% margin and a 13% drain, the LGC simply did not have enough CPU time to perform all the functions that were required. Thanks to the flexibility of the Executive design — and quite unlike what would have happened with a boxcar structure — there was no collapse.

[...]

> Having a relatively low priority because of its size, SERVICER got last crack at the available computation time. With a negative time margin it was SERVICER that had not yet reached its conclusion when the next READACCS, running punctually, scheduled SERVICER again. Because it had not reached its end, the earlier SERVICER had not released its core set and VAC area — so the next time READACCS called FINDVAC to schedule SERVICER the Executive assigned a new core set and VAC area. That SERVICER also did not finish. After a short span of such operation the Executive exhausted its supply of core sets and/or VAC areas. When the next request was made the Executive, unable to comply, called BAILOUT with a 1201 or 1202 alarm code.

[...]

> The interesting effect of this train of events, during P63, was that the problem fixed itself. The software restart reconstructed only the most recent incarnation of the SERVICER job, and flushed the uncompleted SERVICER "stubs" that had accumulated. In addition, it terminated functions that had not been restart protected because they were not deemed critical — including the DELTAH monitor Verb 16 Noun 68. This is why, following the two alarms in P63, the display returned from Noun 68 to Noun 63.

[...]

> During P64 the situation was different. Added to the regular guidance equations was new processing that provided the capability to redesignate the landing site. With this addition, the essential software by itself left a duty-cycle margin of less than 10%. The alarms kept coming. There were three 1201 and 1202 alarms within 40 seconds. Each time, the software restart flushed the Executive queue but could not shed load.

> At MET 102:43:08, forestalling the next alarm, Armstrong switched the autopilot from AUTO to ATT HOLD mode, easing the computational burden, and then entered semi-manual mode P66, where the burden was still lighter. After 2 minutes and 20 seconds spent maneuvering in P66 without alarms, the LM landed.

They very seldom do, at least for non-constellation projects. Cheaper just to pay the insurance premiums for loss of hardware and loss of earnings.

Unless you're a Raman. Then you'll build three.

Most furniture is actually pretty shoddy, made from MDF and glue, but even so I've managed to find some that I'm happy with. My first office chair was not very good, and failed catastrophically in a few years, which was annoying. I managed to replace it with a much nicer one that I trust to last for decades. (It was rather overpriced though; I won't break even for something like 50 years. On the other hand, I can sit in it all day without hurting my back, which is more important to me.)

I have 8 year old computers that are perfectly good (aside from a hard drive that had to be replaced a year ago, and a new power supply the year before that), a 5 year old laptop that does all I could ask, etc. Computers are no longer advancing at such a breakneck pace that they're obsolete in a year, and the operating systems no longer have a lifetime measured in years either. I expect them all to last quite a bit longer.

I'm sure my washing machine will fail in a decade or two, probably the motor will burn out or a capacitor in the digital timer will fail. Neither are impossible to fix; the only question will be whether a newer washing machine would have enough extra efficiency to make replacement a better choice than repair.

Cars routinely last 200k miles or more, and replacement parts for most cars are easily had.

I would say that most products have a pretty good lifespan. Obviously my experience isn't universal, but I would say that most things are built well enough. It is worth paying attention to what you're buying, but most products are not actually intended to be disposable, except in areas of rapid technological change.

On the other hand, you could look at something like the jet turbine or transmission in an attack helicopter or tank. Those have a very definite lifetime, and a very strict maintenance schedule, and they're measured in hours, not years. If you do all the maintenance correctly, your jet turbine might last 500 hours (or some similar number, I'm not very familiar with the specifics) of use. Once you've used it that many carefully-logged hours you take it out and replace it with a new one. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? It's certainly expensive, but in military hardware you want to extract the maximum possible combat performance from everything; lifetime is pretty far down the priority list.

The text I quoted implies there is an onboard flight termination system, even if there is no Range Safety Officer who can send external commands.

FWIW, a part from an exploded rocket, like the engine, could still destroy a school bus filled with children. The odds are very hard to estimate, and made more complicated in that there are few failure modes where a rocket failure halfway across a continent, at supersonic speeds, would reach the ground without breaking long before.