SpaceX's Falcon 1 Destroyed During Maiden Voyage

legolas writes "SpaceX's Falcon 1 is the world's first privately funded satellite launch vehicle. After a successful static engine test on Wednesday, it was launched today. Unfortunately, the rocket was destroyed shortly after launch."

Early days

[SteelFist]

Sounds a bit like the early days of our space program.

This isn't...

[Tackhead]

C'mon, Elon! This isn't rocket sci... oh, right. Well then, there we are.

And to add insult to injury, we'll link your web server from Slashdot.

Seriously, Elon. Good on you. SpaceX is doing something risky and interesting. Make as many mistakes as it takes to get the job done. Unlike NASA, the bulk of your funding comes from a free market, and you're therefore motivated to learn from your mistakes. The day you build something your investors are willing to let you slap a "man-rated" label on, I'll be in line with tickets to fly on it.

I am confident

[irimi_00]

I am confident that if this is a decent company whose mission is positive and positive things will come from their success, then in the long run they will succeed despite short term failure.

Re:First flight with a paying customer?!

[twostar]

insurance. It's not costing them a dime and since it was a student satellite it's not that important. Plus at $6 million it's pocket change for the DARPA and a hell of a lot cheaper then how much they put into the other rocket programs for development.

Early days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me more like three out of the last six mars probes this decade...

Re:First flight with a paying customer?!

[hitchhikerjim]

$6 Million rocket. $800,000 payload. The cost of the payload is pretty small, all things considered. It's worth the risk to go ahead and fly the payload the first time. Saves you $5 million if it works, and cost you less than $1 million if it fails. ...and when you add in that everything's going to be insured, it makes finantial sense.

Re:I had wondered...

[roystgnr]

Just as bizarre was that they had a payload on their first launch attempt.

The payload cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, true, but lifting it into orbit costs millions. As long as they had a better than 10% chance of success, it was a good risk to take.

Re:I had wondered...

[interiot]

Well, the payload was a microsatellite, so the actual hardware didn't cost a huge amount really (~$100,000?). Anybody have any idea how much the USAF Academy paid for the launch?

Also, a large part of satellite cost is in the R&D, so if there are further funds, then building a duplicate would cost a fair bit less than the first one, right?

Re:This isn't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait..you're saying private investors are more likely to have safety concerns?

*boggle*

I mean, we're talking about the same sort of folks who, in other industries, constantly push companies to release products as early as they can in order to start realizing a profit. Go look at the drug industry. As private companies have increasingly gained influence over the FDA through lobbyists, the number of things slipping through has increased. Private companies cannot be relied upon to have the best interests of anything but their own pocketbook.

Re:Early days

[susano_otter]

Sounds like the early days of any space program.

I noticed from TFA that SpaceX was touting this as the first totally new rocket design.

On that basis alone I'd expect it to be plagued with problems for several more iterations.

I'm pretty sure originality is not a desireable feature in rocket science.

Re:This isn't...

[Tackhead]

> Wait..you're saying private investors are more likely to have safety concerns?
>
> *boggle*

Yes, that is what I'm saying.

When NASA becomes "Need Another Seven Astronauts", they burn through several billion dollars in funding to fly nowhere, and to change the name to "Need Another Seven, Again".

When SpaceX, or Scaled Composities, or Armadillo, or any other startup blows up a manned spacecraft - twice - and for the same fundamental reason, they'll go out of business.

Out of curiosity -- would you prefer to fly JetBlue, or Aeroflot?

Not completely correct...

[everphilski]

Thats $6M to a paying customer, not $6M in cost to SpaceX. SpaceX is built to be a profitable entity. I think Elon jumped the gun.

The other important thing to note is the Falcon system sports a reusable first stage and a disposable second stage. However the first stage has never been tested as to its reusability. You would think a resuable system would be tested for... reusability. Maybe stick a dummy load on it and try to fire it, let the dummy upper stage ballistically reenter, recover the first stage and see how the reusability works. Long story short he was trying to check off too many points on his checklist in 1 flight and I think he paid the price. Of course its easy to say this from the armchair, and even easier in retrospect...

Re:First flight with a paying customer?!

[iamlucky13]

Since the satellite was a student project, most of its value comes from the education and experience they get designing and building the satellite and its experiments. Not actually getting data of a phenomenon that has no doubt been investigated in some depth before is a small loss.

Paypal has its ups and downs. I for one haven't had any problems with them, but I don't use them very much. It's also the first major service of its kind, and given the number of customers it has, a very small percentage of problems translates into a lot of total complaints...I think they're still behind Microsoft in that department though.

Re:This isn't...

[crotherm]

You obviously have no clue the lengths the NASA contractors go to make safe spacecraft. The two shuttle disaster never had anything to do with the orbiter. It was always the add on stuff. Sure it was part of the whole package, but the contractor that made the orbiter did not make the external tanks and engines.

Out of curiosity -- would you prefer to fly JetBlue, or Aeroflot?

What a horrible example. What would you rather fly, SpaceX, the Shuttle, Soyuz, an Apollo circa 1972?

Re:I had wondered...

[NitsujTPU]

Dollars and cents for a research objective though, $750,000 to put together a satellite, from research objectives to fabrication and everything between, minus the cost of the launch, is a bargain.

Re:Guidance?

[quanticle]

Take a page out of NASA's early history and just keep putting them up until you get it right.

That works when you've got essentially unlimited funding, like NASA got in the '60s. However, SpaceX, being a privately funded company has to get it right a lot faster than NASA before its contract pool dries up.

Re:This isn't...

[EnronHaliburton2004]

they burn through several billion dollars in funding to fly nowhere,

Except they flew to SPACE, didn't they. I think NASA has even made it to orbit once or twice since the Challenger disaster, and I dare say they've had a couple successful experiments while they were up there.

Can private interests do this also? Probably.

Spaceflight is dangerous. Your jokes about the Challenger & Columbia accidents are pretty fucking lame.

Privately funded?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article:

The $6.7 million cost of the launch was covered by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

That's $6.7 million taken from tax payers.

Hard/Expensive lessons

[nurb432]

Going to space is hard, and risky. To get it right will take a few brusies. Thankfully no one had to die to learn todays lesson.

Re:"partially reusable rocket"

[hyperventilate]

Finances matter. It is more reusable than the space shuttle from a cost standpoint. More of the investment is recovered.

Re:Privately funded?

[Biff Stu]

I don't see what this private funding hype is all about. As far as I can tell, I don't see a significant difference in their business model from other contractors. Perhaps we should respect the past 45 years of government funded rocket research and the government contractors in the established launch business. I know that the space shuttle has turned into a boondoggle, but the real rocket business is in satellite launches, and the space shuttle hasn't handled routine satellite launches since the 80s. In the US, rockets have traditionally been made by private companies under government contract like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Rocketdyne (now part of Pratt & Whitney). I can understand why we should be excited at the prospect of re-usable rockets at 1/10th the price, but I don't understand why we should be so excited that a bunch of dot-comers have raised some VC money and entered the game. I don't see anything wrong with the fact that the current generation of rockets have been developed under government contracts. Let's face it, government funding is responsible for a lot of cutting edge research, and if you wanted to be in the rocket business the government is going to be a big source of funding that's too big to pass up. For that matter, you can be certain that the DoD would love to launch spy satellites for 1/10 the price, and it's in the DoD's interest to invest in technology make it happen. If these guys at SpaceX are serious about getting the job done, they would be crazy not to take money from the government. So, I had a look at their web page. If you go to the customer list, under the company tab, their customers base pretty much matches the customer base of Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. The first non-test launches are US DOD--DARPA and OSD/NRL. There's another unnamed US government launch early in the schedule, and there's also mention of a $100 million USAF contract through 2010. So yes, their start-up money was private. What's the big deal about that? I don't see how they're any more private than any other contractor.

Re:Crash and Burn Testing

[O2H2]

As a designer of very successful rockts I can tell you why making a rocket fly is much harder than making darn near any other machine function properly...you are trying to harness enormous energies which do more than just push the rocket upward. The vibration and shock environments are beyond anything you probably have experienced. A simple connector can see upwards of 300 Grms without even trying. You can reduce polymeric materials to a puddle just with hysteretic heating from vibration. And you cannot simulate and predict everything. Weird system interactions are par for the course. You can only get first flight success with a lot of painful experience. SpaceX do not have this level of experience.

That is why demonstrated reliability cannot be replaced by calculation. Spacex bragged about their high reliability but it is all on paper. Successful rockets have tens of thousands of hours of debugging of problems built into them. You just never see it. Nothing can replace hours in the air. And they come slowly and at great expense.

Elon is now going to learn firsthand why spaceflight is so damn expensive. It is not the lack of innovation or intelligence at Lockheed Martin or Boeing- it is the brutal reality that nature imposes on lack of attention to detail and ignorance. It ain't the metal in the rocket - its the know-how in the people. We have to dig down to root cause on even the most innocuous anomaly - hence we know a lot more about flaws in parts than damn near anybody on the planet. But this knowledge is pricey.

Re:here's a hint

[timeOday]

Therefore... what? Everything is possible? It doesn't follow.

Re:I had wondered...

[timeOday]

Pretty much the same way NASA knows the true risk of a shuttle mission... they don't.

Re:I had wondered...

[Ed Avis]

I suppose that if they thought the chance of success was less than 10% they wouldn't have flown the mission at all.

(It's not necessary to know anything about past missions in order to estimate a chance of success. A bookmaker can offer odds on a horse that has never raced before.)

Re:here's a hint

[Kjella]

For manned interplanetary and interstellar travel, it's not so much that we can make a reasoned argument against it, we don't even have a hint of the physics needed to make it work; current reactor, propulsion, and shielding technologies are many orders of magnitude away from what they would need to be for manned travel.

Say again? Interplanetary travel is quite well understood. It'd take some months but hardly out of reach. Now interstellar is a completely different ballgame. The solar system (diameter of Pluto's orbit) is about 80 AU wide, the nearest sun is 272000 AU away.

It's a different thing for unmanned interstellar travel: technologically, if we devote enough resources to it, we can probably send a small interstellar probe to a neighboring star system within the next century--it would be hugely expensive, but feasible.

As in arrive in the next century? Nope. With current tech we're talking about 75000 years or so. Even the most theoretical scenarios I've seen using ungodly amounts of antimatter as fuel takes about 20 years.

Actually, I think the most likely path to manned space exploration is to reengineer people: radiation hardening, hibernation, vacuum resistance, and changes to the skeletal system, among others. If you do that well, you could send people in small pods and they might be able to work when they arrive. But I give it a century before people overcome their squeamishness to permit genetic engineering with people, and another century to do it. But you and I are never going to set foot on another planet.

Interplanetary I don't see any reason why we couldn't do today. As for interstellar, I think it's far more likely we'll not actually send humans per se. Even with all the genetric modifications you suggest, sending humans is horribly inefficient. I think we'd send fertilized eggs and artificial wombs, or even just a DNA sequencer to do it on-site.

Re:here's a hint

[penguin-collective]

Interplanetary travel is quite well understood. It'd take some months but hardly out of reach. [...] Even the most theoretical scenarios I've seen [for interstellar probes] using ungodly amounts of antimatter as fuel takes about 20 years.

You're still thinking about moving chunks of mass around, not "travel".

Yes, with an enormous effort, you can move a small habitation module and a couple of occupants to Mars (might as well make it a one-way trip, since they're going to be sick anyway). But that's not the same as "interplanetary travel" in the sense that Star Trek fans are thinking of. With current technology, every single manned interplanetary trip is going to be a huge, multi-nation effort; unlike Game Boys or PCs, it doesn't get much cheaper because you make more of it. In order to have anything resembling manned travel requires new physics: new power, new shielding, etc.

Sending a small interstellar probe is also going to be a huge multi-nation effort. The antimatter generation would be hugely expensive, and there would still be a lot of engineering to be done. But such an effort wouldn't claim to be anything other than a one-time expensive science experiment--it's not about travel, mining, or colonization, it's about knowledge.