They should charge them with the cost of the delay.

10/27/2014 6:47:54 PM

they should have launched anyway and dropped a stage on him.

10/27/2014 7:18:07 PM

is that seriously why they stopped? I didnt hear why just that they did. I was assuming it was related to either the conditional green or the red proceed conditions they called on the last go-nogo.

10/28/2014 11:22:49 AM

Yes, a sailboat entered the range safety area and they couldn't get it cleared to make the 10 minute window in time so that launch was scrubbed until tonight.

10/28/2014 11:36:11 AM

Uh oh

10/28/2014 6:24:58 PM

Welp

10/28/2014 6:33:24 PM

10/28/2014 6:38:43 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHMmMgdcOSU

10/28/2014 6:43:03 PM

Welp

10/28/2014 6:49:28 PM

This is huge

Glad it wasn't a manned mission.

10/28/2014 7:13:18 PM

Fuck Cygnus. Go SpaceX.

10/28/2014 8:43:23 PM

oops

So any speculation on what happened?

neodata686 thanks for the youtube!

10/28/2014 8:46:53 PM

Presser now pushed to 9:00. Give me answers. Those were my tax dollars.

10/28/2014 8:48:59 PM

We have audio. Guess they are finally going to roll at 9.

10/28/2014 8:56:13 PM

I thought about going out to check this out glad I didnt now. I am assuming you couldnt really see the flash or explosion from here (Raleigh).

10/29/2014 8:17:01 AM

nah. i had my kids all ready to go outside to see it, but then it went boom.

10/29/2014 8:49:28 AM

News conference from last night, should anyone have missed it

10/29/2014 9:08:26 AM

Nighthawk the mission was privately funded.

10/29/2014 9:11:49 AM

well it was a private company but NASA paid for the service.

10/29/2014 10:17:23 AM

Wonder if NASA bought insurance.

10/29/2014 10:33:40 AM

Orbital did have partial insurance. NASA typically "self insures"

10/29/2014 10:42:21 AM

Here is some information on the kind of engines used in this rocket: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

10/29/2014 11:13:37 AM

So why did this thing explode?

10/29/2014 11:20:09 AM

^ISIS

10/29/2014 12:03:53 PM

10/29/2014 12:24:31 PM

^^^ My wild-ass, completely uninformed guess is that it was probably destroyed by an automatic safety system. When things go wrong you want to destroy the rocket. Otherwise who knows where it could shoot off to. It probably has the potential to land in a fiery heap in just about any spot on the planet.

10/29/2014 12:55:30 PM

if you look at the exhaust, it changes color immediately before loss of thrust and explosion. looks like it was an engine problem or perhaps the fuel/oxygen ratio was thrown off by something in the 'plumbing'

10/29/2014 12:57:56 PM

Color change might indicate that a safety system cut off the supply of either fuel or oxidizer to the engine to kill the thrust.

[Edited on October 29, 2014 at 1:16 PM. Reason : it was a crappy post]

10/29/2014 1:08:11 PM

From what I've read they don't think it was a safety system that caused the explosion.

here's another video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32RCWk5ez34

10/29/2014 1:48:20 PM

Ahoy folks! Haven't had a chance to chime in yet, I've been at the Von Braun Symposium all day. This is precisely why we can't launch something when a boat happens to wander into the area. If this had happened on Monday whoever was in the boat could have been seriously injured or killed.

Anyway, lots of talks around today and most people I've talked to agree that it was an engine failure. The AJ26 engine on this vehicle was a modified Russian NK33 engine, which has had failures in the past during testing. There were warning signs, but those are always more obvious after a failure. These engines are fairly old -- originally built in the 1960s and 1970s and literally stockpiled for later use by Orbital Sciences. Orbital did modify and refurbish the engines they have used but obviously did not do as much testing as they probably should have. Regardless, any time a large rocket like this has a failure, it is always a tragic time for the industry. Fortunately the only thing that was lost here was time and money (insured though, so luckily not US taxpayer money) and sometimes failure is the best teacher. There was a lot of good scientific hardware on that vehicle though, some people had been working towards that launch for years .

Hopefully this won't make people lose faith in the commercial launch vehicle market, as we need them to handle flights to low earth orbit while NASA focuses on deep space launches. Things like this are inevitable though when you move to the private sector -- lots of people complain that NASA takes too long and spends too much on anything, and the main reason that happens is because we are government mandated to have a crazy amount of redundancies to ensure that failures like this don't happen when we are running it. Losing crew is a lot worse.

One last thing though, I've seen lots of incorrect headlines listing this as a NASA rocket. Completely incorrect. It was only a NASA payload. It is essentially like blaming you for a car accident if you were riding in a taxi. If you happen to hear people refer to this as a NASA vehicle, please let them know the truth.

10/29/2014 4:16:09 PM

You are welcome for the rocket engines

10/29/2014 4:56:27 PM

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-29/orbital-antares-had-soviet-rocket-engines-slated-for-retirement

Quote :

"“One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.”"

-Musk

10/29/2014 5:43:55 PM

^Although true, he didn't need to be a so condescending about it. Although I've heard he's like that a lot. Being respectful of your competition says a lot about your character.

10/29/2014 6:05:43 PM

I think i saw that Musk did tweet a message wishing for the best for Orbital. (and it's in his best interest for them to recover quickly... if the government loses confidence in commercial cargo (and crew) in general... and we know how much political types overreact... it could be bad for SpaceX.)

10/29/2014 8:52:53 PM

Thank you Wraith for chiming in and good point on speaking about the competition. The failure helps nobody in the market in terms of developing confidence in the private space industry, and I guess you are kind of saying you want the rising tide to lift all boats. It is a reminder that space travel is difficult and never routine and most importantly nobody was hurt or killed. I am sure plenty will be learned from this and it will work out in the end.

10/29/2014 9:42:39 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jCystkiIBs

2.2 miles away video.

10/29/2014 10:37:27 PM

So, question from a non-Rocket Scientist: Why would we be using 50+ y/o refurbished Russian rocket engines? Did the Soviets just build a shit ton of these and then decide to hauk them to pay their bills with the Union collapsed? Are they significantly cheaper than domestically built engines?

10/30/2014 8:50:35 AM

designed and built for the soviet moon program.

moon program never got off the ground so instant engine stockpile

this company bought, disassembled, replaced worn parts (seals, etc), reassembled, and now has a stockpile of usable engines.

10/30/2014 9:17:59 AM

It is cheaper and easier to just buy engines that already exist. Designing and building a new engine is one of the most difficult parts of launch vehicle design. That is why the first iterations of SLS will be using RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engines. With these things it is waaaaay easier to say "We will have X amount of these engines. They weigh this much, require this much fuel, and will produce this much thrust so that is our starting point". Typically refurbishing them is no problem provided they were kept in decent condition and tested properly -- the metals and stuff within them are built to withstand crazy amount of load and extreme conditions of both heat and cold so typically they age well.

10/30/2014 9:42:02 AM

What happens when they run out of pre-built engines? There is a finite supply, right? They don't make these anymore? Won't Orbital be up the creek? I imagine you can't just slap different engines on a launch vehicle and light the fuse.

10/31/2014 11:29:57 AM

i believe they are working on an upgraded design for other engines.

of course the same is true for NASA's SLS... they will be using leftover Space Shuttle main engines for the first few flights, although they did just put in an order for several new engines to be built. down the line they want to make a newer upgraded version of the space shuttle engine.

10/31/2014 11:57:19 AM

Don't know Orbital's plans but you are right, different engines have different performance capabilities so you can't just throw anything on there. SLS Block I has a defined set of missions using already existing RS-25D SSME's. By the time they have been used up, a newer/cheaper/more expendable engine, the RS-25E will be used.

10/31/2014 12:34:38 PM

From Virgin Galactic's twitter:

Quote :

"#SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly. Additional info and statement forthcoming."

10/31/2014 2:14:32 PM

not a good week for space flight

10/31/2014 2:25:46 PM

All of the other Bond villains are having a good laugh at Richard Branson right now.

10/31/2014 3:00:41 PM

More here: http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/31/us/spaceshiptwo-incident/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Another big blow to commercial space flight.

10/31/2014 3:08:53 PM

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/one-feared-dead-as-virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo-destroyed-in-test-flight/

Different news link.

Quote :

"not a good week for space flight"

Thought exactly the same thing when I heard about this.

[Edited on October 31, 2014 at 3:16 PM. Reason : .]

10/31/2014 3:15:05 PM

10/31/2014 3:16:03 PM

The takeaway from that article is they changed the fuel they were using.

10/31/2014 3:34:37 PM

http://youtu.be/zxsJeND_D-k

10/31/2014 4:26:28 PM