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

[djellison]

The engine pointing was going around and around in increasing circles, and the whole stage appeared to be getting a little wild in response - like a pilot induced occilation.

From SFN
0115 GMT (9:15 p.m. EDT Tues.)

T+plus 5 minutes, 5 seconds. Telemetry has been lost, SpaceX spokeswoman tells reporters. The webcast provided by the company has stopped too.

Perhaps it threw itself into a full on tumble?

Doug

[Cugel]

At separation I thought the first stage actually hit the nozzle of the second stage. Not sure though.

[dvandorn]

I saw the engine bell start to describe small circles against the Earth below, and then my feed died, too. Can't get it back, either.

The expansion nozzle was really glowing bright red, wasn't it? I hope she didn't start to tumble because of nozzle leakage -- that thing looked like it was going to burn through the side at any moment, as irregular as the bright red glow appeared...

-the other Doug

[djellison]

I saw that 'nudge' Cugel - the nozzle got quite a nudge during seperation, pitching the whole upper stage quite a bit - but it corrected itself quite quickly I thought. The nozzle glow didn't seem that different to similar I've seen on Delta II/IV footage really, but with an impact like that during S1/2 sep..who knows.

I also saw a ring, almost like the very bottom part of the Kestrel nozzle, come off about the same time as fairing seperation - perhaps dislodged during that recontact during stage seperation? One hell of a ride while it lasted...but it looked like it was turning into a bad session using the Orbiter sim towards the end.

Doug

[Rakhir]

I saw this ring falling too.

[Rakhir]

At least, they opened the champagne :

"I just wanted everybody to know that we in the Washington, D.C., office are celebrating with champagne. We don't have any information yet from the launch control center, but the Falcon clearly got to space with a successful liftoff, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation," says Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development.

However, what happened during the second stage burn is not clear.

"Regardless, we're thrilled here." (from SFN)

[helvick]

I also saw the knock and the "ring" fall away right after stage 1 separation - it rectified itself so well that I didn't think it was a problem especially since we were getting the "stage 2 engine nominal" commentary. Just before the feed was lost it was glowing very red and oscillating very badly, considering how stable the camera (and the actual upper stage itself by inference) was against the backdrop of the earth it really did not look healthy.

[helvick]

Did they post any success criteria for the demoflight anywhere? By my reckoning she was about 30% of the way through the stage 2 burn when contact was lost.

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

Maybe the mission will be declared as a partial success. They should at least be able to recover the first stage.

[djellison]

The First Stage seemed great ( apart from trying to beat up the second stage on seperation ) - so hopefully they should be able to sign that off as flight worthy and see how well it does post-recovery.


That's got to have been quite a sub-orbital lob as well - Maybe they will get some telemetry back from the upper stage at some point, even if only briefly, before it gets it's swimming shorts on into the Pacific.

Doug

[helvick]

I'd be giving that effort a strong B+ as a demo.
They got to really prove out their hold-before-release system and show off quite a rapid abort recycle, then they had what seems to have been a 100% by the numbers launch and first stage flight. The 1st stage separation appears to have been ropey (to us total amateurs admittedly) but the 2nd stage lit bang on the money and appeared to be doing the job well until telemetry was lost. That's a good 7/10 anfd pretty damn good for a second attempt surely.

So they don't get the whole cookie just yet but they are a lot closer now than they were yesterday in my book.

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

Musk confirmed the "roll control anomaly" according to SFN.

[dvandorn]

This launch, while impressive, illustrates why launching things into orbit is both risky and expensive. SpaceX is going to have to fly a lot of rockets, and study a fair number of failures, before they figure out all of the little, almost unnoticeable things that will jump out from the shadows and destroy their equipment (and the equipment of their paying customers).

For example, if first stage recontact with the second stage occurred after sep, or if the fairing struck the second stage engine when it was let go, they'll have to revisit all of their simulations and modeling, and add systems to keep these things from happening again. Then they'll have to fly those systems and validate their effectiveness. All of this requires actual test flights -- you obviously can't just rely on your paper models or your computer simulations.

Each test flight is a few million $'s worth of rocket, and you *have* to spend that money to get the bugs out of the hardware, or else you'll lose customer payloads. And soon you won't have any customers. At that point, it doesn't matter how brilliant your designers are or how well funded you were -- you're going to go out of business.

As I said, the whole thing points to some very good reasons why getting into orbit is hard, and why it's expensive. By the time SpaceX spends all of the money needed to have a reliable fleet of boosters, the costs they'll have already incurred will have to be amortized through the price of their services. So, while they may still offer the cheapest way to orbit, it ain't gonna be all *that* cheap, and certainly far more expensive than current estimates...

-the other Doug

[djellison]

Or - from another perspective, from SFN

Musk says 90 percent of the Falcon 1 rocket's technical challenges were proven out with this launch. He doesn't foresee needing another test flight before launching the first operational mission in late summer carrying the U.S. military's TacSat 1 spacecraft.

[um3k]

I recorded the web feed of the launch, but it's a fairly large file, so I'm not sure how best to deliver it. I'll start by uploading it to Google video. If anyone has suggestions for sending the full-res file, I'm wide open to them.