SpaceX rocket takes flight, loses touch

The private space company founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk looks to have been dealt a bit of setback this week, with The New York Times reporting that the team lost contact with its Falcon 1 rocket (seen above in its Earthbound days) just minutes after launch on Tuesday. The company seems to be doing its best to keep upbeat about it however, declaring the launch "not perfect, but certainly pretty good." On the upside, the rocket apparently did make it all the way into space, and went through with its stage separation and second stage ignition. That said, it fell well short of its goal of an orbit of 425 miles, and is presumed to have fell back into the Earth's atmosphere before reaching a full orbit. Eventually, the company hopes to use the rockets to cheaply deliver satellites into orbit (at least as far as spaceflights go), although we're guessing that they're going to have to get some more of the kinks worked out before anyone entrusts them with their precious payloads.

[Via The New York Times]

[Unis @ Mar 21st 2007 3:17PM]

That is a nice looking rocket. I'm glad all those Pay Pal fees I pay go to such good use.

[Electromodo @ Mar 21st 2007 4:31PM]

2Unis: ...the PayPal fees you paid until 2002, since Elon Musk sold it to eBay in 2002, as far as I know.

[Jon Acheson @ Mar 21st 2007 3:47PM]

SpaceX is calling this a 95% successful test flight, and people who are actually in the business seem to agree. The important things that needed to work did, and the wobbling that caused the rocket to eventually lose telemetry is most likely due to a known type of problem that a) only shows up in actual test flights, and b) should be straightforward to fix. Fuel sloshing is one possible culprit, and there are known ways to deal with it.

Given that it was a test flight, I would call it a success.

[aeo @ Mar 21st 2007 4:45PM]

"is presumed to have fell back into the Earth's atmosphere"?? Presumed? Maybe it's just me but I would really like to know where my 85,0000 lb rocket fell to Earth. Seems kind of important to whomever, whatever, it falls on.

[MikeN @ Mar 21st 2007 4:50PM]

Yeah... that's the thing... see it burned up in Earth's atmosphere, so the only parts you're likely to recover are some shiny pebbles, assuming they didn't land somewhere in the indian ocean, mmkay?

[the vette makes them wet @ Mar 21st 2007 5:09PM]

Not sure why the press is calling this a failure.

The thing made it to space, just not in the orbit they wanted.

I think reading comprehension skills are lacking.

[Nathan M @ Mar 21st 2007 5:34PM]

I watched the webcast of this, and it was pretty cool. The rocket did make it through what needed to be done, until it lost something and began spinning. All in all, it was actually rather successful, despite missing the altitude goals.

PS. For anyone that cares, I have a recording of the webcast of the launch on Youtube, short version coming soon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvQsmLv44o

[ryan @ Mar 21st 2007 7:55PM]

Failure simply means the rocket can't perform what it's intended to do. you know what they say, a near miss is a good as a mile. also the article says they lost contact with the rocket, now an 85,000 lb rocket loaded with fuel, out of control and wobbling off into the distance... 'success' is not the first word to spring into my mind

[Mickey Jones @ Mar 21st 2007 8:11PM]

Given the difficulties of rocketry (yes, it takes a rocket scientist), I would say that anything that doesn't explode on the launch pad is in part a success. I would be pretty happy if I lobbed something into a partial orbit as the product of a privately funded venture.

[ryan @ Mar 21st 2007 8:20PM]

I would be proud too, but imagine NASA had that rational. "we don't know if they astronauts are ok because we lost radio contact, they're also on the wrong orbit and we have no idea where they will land, we can only hope it'll be in the ocean, but all in all the flight was successful, because at least they didn't explode here on the launch pad"

[Mickey Jones @ Mar 21st 2007 9:53PM]

Well, there were no astronauts on board (not even a dog or monkey) and these guys are not NASA. Besides, you don't think NASA crashed a few rockets? Von Braun? Goddard?

Why do you put down their efforts when they accomplished so much, if not everything they wanted? If we follow your rationale, we should just quit when everything doesn't work as expected.

BTW, considering they launched in an unpopulated area, the Earth is 3/4 water, most of the surface of the land is not occupied, and things tend to burn in the upper atmosphere, there wasn't much chance this would fall on anyone.

Thanks for the link to the vid Nathan. If you watch the clip you can see that launching a liquid fuel rocket is a considerable task requiring the skills of a lot of engineers and tech people.

And, none of the people who have funding this have expressed an interest in withdrawing so I guess they thankfully have more optimism than you.

Here's a shorter youtube link of just the flight portion and you can see what they accomplished. Check out how high they get and how the engine nozzle gets red hot at the end of the flight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LpKCVrUJNg&mode=related&search=

[ryan @ Mar 21st 2007 11:29PM]

I'm not putting down their efforts, and i definitely don't think they should call it quits, and what they achieved is impressive. just saying it's a little bit early to call it a 'success', it'll only be successful when it does what they intend it to do, reliably.

[cjameshuff @ Mar 22nd 2007 9:33AM]

It was not a total success, but it was an extremely successful flight. This is their second launch ever, and the first stage went off perfectly, parachuting to a safe ocean landing to be recovered and reused...a first in the industry, to my knowledge. It delivered the second stage to the proper trajectory and separated, then the second stage ignited and performed as expected...at this point, they had demonstrated success at all the most difficult parts of launching a payload into orbit, and had a rocket in the air with sufficient fuel and a properly working engine capable of reaching orbit.

There was a control issue after the second stage had burned for some time, but it was due to some simple problem like fuel swirling around the tank...the vehicle performed very well until the fuel tanks started to empty. It's a matter of something like increasing the size of the anti-slosh baffles in the LOX tank or tweaking the software to recognize the effect and compensate, not a rework of any major part of the design. They have effectively proven that they've built a rocket capable of reaching orbit.

They also demonstrated (though they did not intend to) very short recycle times on the pad, aborting once and trying again 24 hours later, then aborting again after actual main engine ignition, then refueling and launching an hour later. They were attempting a great many things, and achieved nearly all of them...saying they failed because they didn't reach orbit ignores the great number of successes in this launch.

[Michelle Readman @ Mar 22nd 2007 11:54AM]

The New York Times seems to be the only major publication running the story about loosing contact with the rocket. The BBC ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6474021.stm ) makes no mention at all of it, and none can be found on the SpaceX website.

The nature of orbital mechanics means that terms such as "well short" are perhaps missleading, implying greater issues than simply misaligned thrust. Infact, the cause of this failed altitude had nothing to do with the loss of any telemetry. It rolled late in the burn, altering the direction of the thrust, and for safety reasons the engines were stopped. But despite this, it had almost reached the altitude of the International Space Station!

I normally find engadget reporting to be quite comprehensive, but in this case you have failed to read the SpaceX website. If you had, you would have seen that they have already have several commercial launches planned, and that this latest test flight is being viewed as an a-ok to these more financially risky launches, due to start in the autumn.

The story here isn't any loss of telemetry. It's that the Falcon 1 will cost around $7 million to launch, about 20% of the cost of a traditional commercial launch. In but a few years, SpaceX has managed to significantly improve access to space for commercial projects, and the cost to launch can only go down over time. We should be cheering this as a success for mankind, not laughing at a supposed problem that ultimately shouldn't matter anyway to a properly resiliant system.

[Pete Zaitcev @ Mar 23rd 2007 1:30AM]

NYT was the only major publication to put the negative spin on otherwise solid test flight (that is, unless you count Slapdork as a major news outlet). We have to credit Engadget staff for discerning the truth between the lines.

We should keep in mind, that the main SpaceX's rocket is Falcon 9 (F9). That is the one which won a half of the COTS contract from NASA. The Falcon 1 is a test vehicle for F9. It's far smaller and cheaper, so it saves a ton of money to work out problems on it. F9 uses same structures, engines, and avionics.

The other half of the COTS contract was won by Kistler with their K-1. The K-1 is ambitious design and it would advance the state of the art quite a bit if it succeeds. However, Kistler has no precursor vehicle like Falcon 1. If anything goes bad with K-1 and it crashes, it's going to be the end of the program. I am frankly amazed that they are so confident that it's not going to happen. Test airframes crash all the time (e.g. remember Sino-Swearingen SE-30 crash? Two pilots dead. And it's not like the first ever commercial jet airplane.) Not to mention that this launch of Falcon 1 was the second test flight, not the first.

Seen in this light, SpaceX is in much better shape than its nearest competitor.