SpaceX Falcon 9 Explodes in Test Flight Over Texas

Falcon Test flight termination August 22, 2014

On Friday August 22 a Falcon F9R exploded with the on board computer detected a problem during a test flight. In a statement SpaceX said “flight termination system automatically terminated the mission,” …”There were no injuries or near injuries.” It is not yet known what actually caused the system to abort the flight.

This version of the Falcon is the three engine model which they hope to be able to launch as a single stage to orbit and then soft land using the engines to touch down. SpaceX has demonstrated soft landings several times using its Grasshopper test bed but these flights only attained an altitude of about a thousand feet.

By and large SpaceX has been highly successful, their rocket program being one of the few new private ventures to provide cheap reliable methods to insert payloads into Earth Orbit. Normally the tried and true parachute has been the preferred method to return equipment safely from space. SpaceX is attempting to go where no rocket has gone before and use the engines to return the vehicle safely to Earth. Thus far that is only been done in the realm of science fiction.

To be honest I still don’t see the real value added in this method, other than the cool factor. The fuel you use to land is carried at the expense of additional payload. The math for this has never really worked, the cost of carrying the mass of the larger entire vehicle into space and soft landing using engines never really made sense. Until there is a much more efficient propulsion method the fuel mass to thrust equation just does not support this concept in my humble opinion. Taking into account the resources needed to refurbish the rocket even if it does land safely are you really saving enough money/resources to make it worth while? I think not.

Maybe SpaceX has unlocked some formula or concept that makes sense we don’t see but I remember back in the early days of the Space Shuttle when the Russians were caught off guard at the design of the shuttle. They did not understanding why America would design a vehicle astronauts could not escape from, they looked at the math and also did not see how it could make economic sense. Russia wondered what America was up to, what were they missing. Did America know something they did not. It was a design that just did not add up. Russia even went as far as to build their own clone of the shuttle to see if they could learn something, had they missed some basic premise..Well they had not, and ultimately the Space Shuttle proved costly in both terms of lives and money. America ultimately wound up contracting Russia to use their rockets to deliver payloads to space. The Shuttle was a technical marvel, but just not the best, safest way to get the job done.

The same thought applies to the soft landing rocket design SpaceX is using. It just does not pass the sniff test for something that is feasible. It is neat no doubt to see a rocket landing like that, but a parachute seems much more efficient, reliable, and cost effective. Something that would work is a space plane concept. A vehicle that takes off and lands on a runway. Virgin Galactic is doing something like this to put tourists in space, and the Orbital Pegasus used a similar concept where the rocket is carried to altitude and dropped from a plane. This method is okay for smaller payloads but I will start to get excited when we have a large plane that goes into space and then returns. Image if we could put something the size of a 747 in space and return it. Now THAT is a reusable spacecraft. Once we do something like that spaceflight will be as safe and routine as an airplane flight.

The Engineers at SpaceX will no doubt figure out what happened an fix it, every failure is a lesson learned. Failures are exactly why we test. When your pushing the envelope of new technology there are bound to be bumps in the road. So I would not think if this as a failure but rather a success in finding an issue with the systems. We will see how it all ultimately plays out, maybe Buck Rogers is in our future after all.

Dan Mantel - KnowledgeOrb Contributor

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Everett L.(Rett) Williams II says:

September 15, 2014 at 11:10 pm

Dan,

You have stepped off the precipice created by faulty assumptions. The residual mass in most rockets has been greater than 10% at a minimum, creating an insurmountable hole in the rocket equation. The F9 has a residual mass of around 3%, leaving a whole lot more "space" for return and landing fuel. In fact, most modern rockets have an empty weight of substantially more than 10%, meaning that, without complete redesign, none of the current generations of rockets have any chance of entering into competition with the F9R should it succeed.

You are also assuming that the rocket will require extensive refurbishment before reuse, while SpaceX has indicated that the F9R is already designed with significant margin in all aspects. I am sure that there will be significant testing to insure that the rocket will fire safely, but that does not mean that refurbishment of any variety will be needed. Now if they would go with NOFBX for fuel, I believe they could have a rocket that might go on past 20 cycles. Whatever that number should be will be determined over time as records accumulate. If we were to set up an on orbit refueling facility for mass lift, such loads would be expendable. Maybe in the case of an expensive satellite, a new unit should be used, but experience may dictate that the 2nd or 3rd or other flight is safer than the first, and I find much logic in such an approach.

To further discuss the space shuttle, lack of escape means for the astronauts has only peripheral application to the problems of the shuttle. You cannot win in an equation where approximately 250,000 lbs. is boosted into space, only to return at least 200,000 of those lbs. without much benefit. On only a very few occasions did the shuttle return significant cargo other than crew and trash from orbit. The Russians weren't puzzled at all. They understood the difficulty, but felt they had to match the U.S. rocket for rocket after the loss of prestige in the race to the Moon. As the Soviet Union was heading towards collapse, they could not sustain the expense and cancelled the project, even the the Buran was a much better bird than the shuttle in many respects. The shuttle was not a technical marvel, but a technical disaster. There was little technology used in the shuttle that could not have been better developed in a more efficient system that would have cost far less. As the SLS is now, the shuttle was a vote getter in Congress by distributing the largess over so many districts while employing several multiples of the number of people who should have been needed to handle and launch it. Can any rational person believe that the tiles on the shuttle had to be individually unique or that the SSME's were of a rational cost or that the grossly inefficient and dangerous SRB's were a reasonable way to provide the extra thrust needed to put the shuttle or any manned rocket into orbit. With the magical PR of the Moon missions, NASA decided that they needed large, complex and showy projects to maintain the funding stream that came from Apollo and that was so drastically cut off by the needs of VietNam. We are still there.

Your "sniff" test is more a measure of your sense of smell than and evaluation of the F9R. How does one determine where a parachute will deposit your rocket, and how long will it take to retrieve that rocket and repair the damage done by the not-so-soft landings and unpredictable stresses offered by chute landings. And, space planes are bad jokes at this point in time, especially the Skylon. Hauling the weight of wings, landing gear, hybrid engines, and multiple fuels (not to mention grabbing LOX from the atmosphere while accelerating towards Mach 11) around makes the penalty of VTVL fuel seem trivial. And, most of that technology is still in someone's dreams while rocket landings have been proven on the Moon, Mars, and Earth itself. And why in the world would we want to throw something the size of a 747 into orbit when only a few tons of that is payload and almost all of it has to come back down...didn't we learn anything from the shuttle.

In any case, the SLS/Orion are sucking up almost all available funds while promising at best to create a rocket system that will not appear soon, but will never reach a launch rate that will justify the vast work force required to design, build, launch, and explain what use it is, when SpaceX can launch more than twice the payload for the NASA stated price (not counting the actual price if the development costs are included) while requiring a fraction of the support crews and facilities.

The arguments here are getting tired.