Falcon 1, The World's Lowest Cost Rocket to Orbit Options

[ugordan]

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

[hal_9000]

Sorry guys..
but the video is here..

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

[dvandorn]

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

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

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

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

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

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

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

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

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

[Holder of the Tw...]

Guys... I hate to say it... but this shows once again that getting into orbit is *not* easy. It's actually rather difficult. And when you try to do it cheaply, you tend to fail. Spectacularly.
If you try to do that with cheaply built or mass-produced parts, or with assemblies that have not been fault-tested to within an inch of their lives, you tend to get the results we just saw Falcon 1 achieve. And the manufacturing standards and fault testing required to assure success -- they just ain't cheap.
-the other Doug

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

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

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

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

[nprev]

All points well taken.

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

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

[edstrick]

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

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

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

[djellison]

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

Doug

[GravityWaves]

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

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

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

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

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

[djellison]

Its too early to praise or dismiss the whole venture so lets wait for the 2nd or 3rd one, next launch is supposed to be in a few months

Quite. Doesnt stop Bell though.

Doug

[edstrick]

It's worth noting their idea of designing to try to avoid the most common launch killers still has merit.

A first launch is always at the mercy of design bugs. Even when something flies perfectly and surprises everybody on the first try, like Saturn 501 and Surveyor 1, marginal design can bite you on the <deleted> on the Second flight... Saturn 502 failed major flight test objectives when it didn't lob the CSM into a high elliptical orbit for a Lunar-return like heatshield test. Surveyor 2 was killed by fuel contamination.

Musk himself kept pointing out the 50/50 record of first flights.

Since this flight only got 25'ish seconds of useful flight data, unfortunately, it didn't prove a good fraction of the total vehicle design, so flight #2 will be nearly as "at risk" of first flight defects as this was.

After a successful flight, you know you have a vehicle that can work. Then you're trying to catch marginal design elements before they catch you, and prevent random manufacturing errors (quality control) from nailing you.

[Guest_RGClark_*]

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

The static test on the ground only lasted 3 seconds. Anyone know if they ever performed a static test lasting the full 3 minutes?


Bob Clark

[Rakhir]

From http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/

The satellite was thrown high into the air when the rocket impacted and came crashing down through the roof of our machine shop, landing mostly intact on the floor!

It's incredible !

[dvandorn]

I'd like to point out one or two things...

First, one reason SpaceX is having a really hard time getting these test flights in the air and proving out their engineering is they keep having to kludge together fixes and workarounds based on the lack of liquid oxygen on their base island. If part of "cheap access to LEO" is based on choosing not to develop *required* elements of infrastructure (like an oxygen liquification plant on the same land mass as your launch site), then that element of "savings" is not really valid. It's just a *deferred* expense.

Second, from what little detail can be seen in the RealPlayer version of the launch video, I'll bet you any money that the thing failed because the jerry-rigged insulation blanket (that was supposed to be ripped off the rocket at launch, but wasn't) flew back against the motor housing (and into the engine plume) and ruptured a fuel line. If a NASA rocket had suffered a failure because some similar kludged-up fix had backfired, most of the people here urging patience with SpaceX's travails would be calling for the heads of the NASA managers who "ought to know better." What makes it OK for SpaceX *not* to know better? Is it because they're promising "cheap" access to space, so it's OK to cut corners?

Hey, I want SpaceX to succeed as much as anyone here. But I've seen this many times before -- people loudly proclaiming that *they* know how to provide cheap access to space, only to utterly fail to deliver. Those who have succeeded to even a small degree have done so only by using second-hand military hardware that has already been proven to function and already been fault-tested by its manufacturers.

I will call Scaled Composite's contributions to the field a success when they put something into orbit. It's one heck of a lot easier to do a stunt pop-up out of the sensible atmosphere, going relatively slowly, than it is to achieve orbit. So far, neither they nor SpaceX has shown me an ability to get anything as far as LEO, and the history of the industry tells me that no one has yet lived up to the vaporware they've tried to sell us.

I guess this has just been a really long-winded way of saying I'll believe it when I see it, and not a moment before...

-the other Doug