Comments on: Falcon 1, take 3: today at 4:00 Pacific time!

By: Michael L

Michael L — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:58:29 +0000

Undoubtedly, Space X will release the video of this launch, as they did their first 2 attempts. Give them time to figure out what went wrong.

By: MaDeR

MaDeR — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:36:38 +0000

Xavier Onassis is troll, pure and simple.

And about rumors… this is deleted (because of unverifiability) fragment that was some time on Wikipedia:

“The webcast documenting the launch showed, via the aft facing onboard camera, the first stage violently recontacting the second stage seconds after separation.[citation needed] Several seconds later, major portions of the second stage were torn away with the first stage. The second stage was observed to tumble and propellant covered the camera lens.[citation needed] Shortly thereafter a major explosion was observed and the video signal was lost. Telemetry data continued as the second stage re-entered on a trajectory slightly north of the first stage. The second stage appeared to never ignite.”

Nice, eh? Note that it is rumour to take with grain of salt.

And this is easy to explain, why feed is clean cut. Simply it is not quite live, but about 30 seconds late. This is used for, guess what, cutting feed when something goes wrong on real live screen. Really, this is not hard to guess that it will be latency in webcast.

By: Tom Hill

Tom Hill — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 15:04:43 +0000

According to a message from Elon (linked from my web page…click on my name to go to my page, then follow the link under the imbedded YouTube in the first entry…posting the link here would put my comment into moderation), he just secured an investment (no details given) and stated that he won’t be giving up.

Michelle – yep, the rocket just fell back down to the water. I’ll be curious to hear if their 1st stage recovery system worked. That would yield some interesting information.

On the video cutting off discussed earlier in the comments: while I find it frustrating, I think it’s the way to go. Video of an out-of-control rocket is less of a confidence builder, in my opinion, than having the last images being a good flight, then coming out with the whole story once you know what happened. Search YouTube for “Sea Launch Explosion” to see how other commercial entities dealt with similar (yet much more spectacular) circumstances. In the early moments of an anomaly, there just isn’t that much to say.

By: DrFlimmer

DrFlimmer — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:53:45 +0000

Staging problem… reminds me of the Soyuz capsules, which “failed” more or less the same way lately.

Anyway: Good luck next time, Space X.
And when we remembered how the first russian and american (and surely the german V2 at first, too) failed due to “anomalys” (kaboom is quite a good explanation ), I think it’s a pity that it happend, but go on – once it will work and hopefully it will work on after that.
The Ariane-5 also had some failiures and is working properly, now.

By: Tom Hill

Tom Hill — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:53:35 +0000

My bet is that something they did to fix part the problem that took place in flight 2 (stage 1 recontacting stage 2 after separation) led to this problem.

I’ll be seeing Elon at The Mars Society Conference in a couple weeks. He should have an answer by then.

By: Michelle

Michelle — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:44:06 +0000

So… if the stages held together, what happened to the rocket? Did it fall back down?

By: ThePorkMeister

ThePorkMeister — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:29:24 +0000

Boy – I guess the only difference between living now and in the 50s is that back then there was optimism that the next one would work out! Also the fact that NASA had a huge budget and could afford to have a bunch of rockets blow up… when is Musk going to run out of capital to provide us with these ultra-expensive fireworks shows?