They had not had any launch failures since their development stage. 18 successful commercial launches.
(Failures to land the Falcon first stage back on their remotely-controlled landing barge of course don't count, as they are highly experimental phases, and the primary roles of the launches did not depend on them.)
But just moments before MECO—Main Engine Cut-Off—and firing of the second stage, the craft exploded. Exploded so comprehensively that there seemed virtually nothing left to fall into the Atlantic Ocean.
Watch the launch, and at 3:15 the failure:
Another angle, with the "anomaly" occurring at 2:45:
This fits with Tweets from SpaceX owner Elon Musk:
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.The "counterintuitive cause" bit is intriguing.
This launch failure is deeply troubling for a number of reasons.
For starters, this is the third successive failure of resupply missions to the International Space Station. In the media debrief, NASA’s Bill Gerstenmaier notably said "We thought we'd lose some of the commercial resupply vessels, but we didn't think we'd lose all of them in the one year." It is rocket science, and it is hard.
First there was the Antares launch vehicle failure moments after liftoff in October 2014. This was the first commercial flight for US company Orbital Sciences of their new Cygnus unmanned spacecraft.
It was later revealed that the Antares launch vehicle was using 50-year old Russian motors.
Then in April 2015, the Russian Progress M-27M/59P spacecraft atop a Soyuz rocket (the same used for crew launches) failed to achieve correct orbit, and was left tumbling out of control, and burnt up on re-entry a few days later.
A small cloud of debris around the Progress capsule indicated there had been some sort of impact or explosion close to the capsule separation stage.
Together with today's failure, this means that supplies on board the ISS are starting to dwindle.
Ex-pat Australian Andrea Boyd, who works as an International Space Station (ISS) Flight Operations Engineer at Space Applications Services in Belgium, told me it's fine though. She said that the ISS crew is good until September, and there is another Russian Progress launch scheduled for next Friday, followed by the final launch of the Japanese HTV cargo capsule in August. There will be a lot of nervous people watching that Russian launch though!
The other deeply disturbing aspect of today's failure is the huge impact on the thousands of people around the world who have worked on different aspects of today's cargo. Dragon carried just shy of two tonnes of cargo. This included 676 kgs of crew supplies, 461 kgs of systems hardware, 529 kgs of science materials, 35 kgs of computer equipment (radiation quickly damages computers and photographic equipment), and a brand new spacesuit to replace the one that had suffered internal water leaks and almost drowned Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2014.
Critical among the systems hardware was a new docking adaptor that was one of two required to allow upcoming commercial crewed vehicles to dock at the ISS.
There was a water filtration bed that was required to augment the ISS water supplies, which a NASA representative reported would mean they would have to carefully watch water supplies.
One of the science experiments on board was the Meteor high-resolution spectrographic imager. This experiment was designed to determine the makeup of meteors by monitoring emissions from them as they burn up on entering Earth's atmosphere. This lost experiment is notable because it was the second launch attempt. The first attempt was lost in the Cygnus/Antares launch explosion! Poor guys.
Microsoft will sorely miss the huge marketing opportunity they were hoping for by sending one of their HoloLens augmented reality headsets for the astronauts to trial.
And the astronauts themselves will no doubt miss the fresh lettuce that they were going to be able to grow with the Veg-03 hydroponics unit. Unlike previous plant growth experiments that have been returned to Earth, they were going to be able to eat their product this time.
More details about the cargo are here.
It's 03:30 here, so that's it for now. I just wanted to get a post up of the information to hand so far. I'll see what else comes out over the next few days and post as warranted.
UPDATE 04:00:
Wow. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said they continued to get Dragon telemetry for some time after the explosion. The take-home message from this was that—coupled with the recently-tested pad abort mechanism—had this been a crewed launch, the crew may have survived this type of explosion. This image grabbed by Robert Deneka does indeed seem to show the Dragon capsule propelled ahead of the exploding launch vehicle:
And while it didn't look like much at all survived the explosion, this doppler radar image posted by Florida meteorologist Dan Billow shows a large debris field:
UPDATE 20150629:
More footage from a different angle. The HD video is slowed to one tenth normal speed, and really shows the multiple convulsions that preceded the final massive blast. At the very start you can see the problem started right at the top of the assembly. The Falcon second stage is actually quite short compared to the first stage, so as this footage misses the vital first couple of seconds, you can't see exactly where the venting happened first. This is more obvious from my GIF captures above.
Look carefully and you'll see a small black object fly up and to the right from 0:33. Almost certainly the Dragon capsule. Look even closer at around 0:36 and you can see what look like the soft landing boosters firing from the bottom of the capsule (left side in this view) and at 0:38 even a swirl out the right side—could that be the re-entry parachutes deploying and torn away?
It was later revealed that the Antares launch vehicle was using 50-year old Russian motors.
Then in April 2015, the Russian Progress M-27M/59P spacecraft atop a Soyuz rocket (the same used for crew launches) failed to achieve correct orbit, and was left tumbling out of control, and burnt up on re-entry a few days later.
A small cloud of debris around the Progress capsule indicated there had been some sort of impact or explosion close to the capsule separation stage.
Together with today's failure, this means that supplies on board the ISS are starting to dwindle.
Ex-pat Australian Andrea Boyd, who works as an International Space Station (ISS) Flight Operations Engineer at Space Applications Services in Belgium, told me it's fine though. She said that the ISS crew is good until September, and there is another Russian Progress launch scheduled for next Friday, followed by the final launch of the Japanese HTV cargo capsule in August. There will be a lot of nervous people watching that Russian launch though!
The other deeply disturbing aspect of today's failure is the huge impact on the thousands of people around the world who have worked on different aspects of today's cargo. Dragon carried just shy of two tonnes of cargo. This included 676 kgs of crew supplies, 461 kgs of systems hardware, 529 kgs of science materials, 35 kgs of computer equipment (radiation quickly damages computers and photographic equipment), and a brand new spacesuit to replace the one that had suffered internal water leaks and almost drowned Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2014.
Critical among the systems hardware was a new docking adaptor that was one of two required to allow upcoming commercial crewed vehicles to dock at the ISS.
 |
| International Docking Adapter destroyed in today's launch failure |
One of the science experiments on board was the Meteor high-resolution spectrographic imager. This experiment was designed to determine the makeup of meteors by monitoring emissions from them as they burn up on entering Earth's atmosphere. This lost experiment is notable because it was the second launch attempt. The first attempt was lost in the Cygnus/Antares launch explosion! Poor guys.
Microsoft will sorely miss the huge marketing opportunity they were hoping for by sending one of their HoloLens augmented reality headsets for the astronauts to trial.
And the astronauts themselves will no doubt miss the fresh lettuce that they were going to be able to grow with the Veg-03 hydroponics unit. Unlike previous plant growth experiments that have been returned to Earth, they were going to be able to eat their product this time.
More details about the cargo are here.
It's 03:30 here, so that's it for now. I just wanted to get a post up of the information to hand so far. I'll see what else comes out over the next few days and post as warranted.
UPDATE 04:00:
Wow. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said they continued to get Dragon telemetry for some time after the explosion. The take-home message from this was that—coupled with the recently-tested pad abort mechanism—had this been a crewed launch, the crew may have survived this type of explosion. This image grabbed by Robert Deneka does indeed seem to show the Dragon capsule propelled ahead of the exploding launch vehicle:
And while it didn't look like much at all survived the explosion, this doppler radar image posted by Florida meteorologist Dan Billow shows a large debris field:
UPDATE 20150629:
More footage from a different angle. The HD video is slowed to one tenth normal speed, and really shows the multiple convulsions that preceded the final massive blast. At the very start you can see the problem started right at the top of the assembly. The Falcon second stage is actually quite short compared to the first stage, so as this footage misses the vital first couple of seconds, you can't see exactly where the venting happened first. This is more obvious from my GIF captures above.
Look carefully and you'll see a small black object fly up and to the right from 0:33. Almost certainly the Dragon capsule. Look even closer at around 0:36 and you can see what look like the soft landing boosters firing from the bottom of the capsule (left side in this view) and at 0:38 even a swirl out the right side—could that be the re-entry parachutes deploying and torn away?
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