Looks like they had a payload go with it. Sad.
> "SpaceX confirm Amos-6 was aboard the Falcon 9 and was lost in the explosion."
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/77135388623807283...
> "SpaceX confirm Amos-6 was aboard the Falcon 9 and was lost in the explosion."
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/77135388623807283...
1. http://www.satellitetoday.com/technology/2016/08/24/spacecom...
There has been high level of criticism in Israel about the deal as many seen this as giving up it's sovereignty over its space platforms even tho under the deal the all operations of spacecom platforms would be still handled from Israel proper, I'm sure the r/conspiracies is already booming with sabotage theories.
But yeah it's not great for spacecom in general, Facebook also will now withdraw from their contract with them for supplying internet to Africa as AMOS-6 was supposed to replace AMOS-2 and enhance the coverage over Africa and the Middle East. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Amos-6-K... Israel is one of the few countries that is pushing satellite coverage in the area, AMOS-6 was supposed to grant up to 20gbps of bandwidth to Africa over the leased Ka band which was desperately needed.
All of the contracts were based on AMOS-6 being operational by a given date, AMOS-6 has been "under construction" for probably 4-5 years, SpaceX was selected as the launch contractor in late 2012 originally for a mid 2015 launch but the launch was delayed for various reasons.
Think of it like this if you total your McLaren P1-GTR there isn't an easy way to get a new one ;)
Why not?
:-(
It's not cheap but if that's your business you absolutely insure it. It's not cheap though. Would investors let you get away not insuring one? Rockets not making it in to space isn't uncommon.
Unless you're a Raman. Then you'll build three.
s/
Although whether it would cost an additional $200 million to build a second is another question, but I doubt there would be that significant an economy of scale for just one extra unit.
They very seldom do, at least for non-constellation projects. Cheaper just to pay the insurance premiums for loss of hardware and loss of earnings.
Sometimes it's wise to stop, read what you just wrote, then hit "back" rather than post a comment.
[1] Which also seems to be a problem at Tesla as of late.
Edit: Yeah, here's Orbital's (I can't find SpaceX's): https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as... -- last two pages. It looks like they revised this license recently for their return to flight, too?
Edit: Now imagine if last week you'd shorted as much stock as you could in the companies involved...
This explosion probably put them way past the X amount of time so the deal would fall through.
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of things intertwined - moreover, M&A is not the most rational area of business.
Also - one side may 'cancel', huff and puff about it, then use it as a premise to come back to the table and negotiate a much better deal.
Of course normally a failure during a test would be something like minor thrust fluctuations - not a complete loss of vehicle and payload!
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/30/technology/spacex-rocket-reu...
There's a lot of testing, both in isolation and in integration with other components. The risk of the rocket exploding should actually reduce with each test. Note also that in this case the malfunction was most likely with the pad equipment, not the rocket, so not doing static fires would in this case probably just have meant that you'd have an explosion at launch time one day.
EDIT: The static fire is more of a test for launch procedures, apparently:
“The goal of the static fire is to provide a dress rehearsal for the launch team, culminating in a three second firing of all nine of the first stage Merlin 1D engines to validate the health of the rocket.” (https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/09/falcon-9-explodes-am...)
Makes sense in that the rocket itself is tested quite a bit beforehand already.
The tower features - the hold-down arms, etc - are painted with a sacrificial paint. The idea is that it's the paint that chars and burns, rather than the tower features.
Then there's the water deluge system.
In the video, the rocket and exhaust is clear of the tower, and the fires are out, within 30 seconds. Neither the sacrificial paint nor the water deluge are designed to handle long-duration fires from a RUD.
After a 2014 Antares rocket failure, the launchpad at Wallops Flight Facility took 1 year and $15 million to repair [1].
[1] http://www.space.com/31412-virginia-launchpad-private-rocket...
The energy released in the first few seconds of a controlled launch is not remotely comparable to the energy released by an entire rocket blowing up simultaneously. Also, with an explosion, the entire rocket, along with parts of the strongback and other structures it's attached to, become shrapnel. Superheated water exhaust is a lot easier to protect against.
Facilities and other things on the pad may not like it, though.
They already said that their Horizontal Integration Facility (where the rocket is put together prior to erection) is intact, as are the tanks on site. But the strongback looks mangled and may well be destroyed. It's also right beside the rocket, so the most likely casualty in such an explosion. Other pads and facilities are most likely far enough away that the only concern is debris from the explosion landing there.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/10/06/workers-complete-15-mi...
Just like when we test software, they want to have everything as close to what they would expect on launch day as possible (2 days from now). All the stresses, the structure, etc. That means putting stage 2 and the payload on top of the main rocket before the test starts. They probably did a lot of tests before the payload was on board as well, and those didn't reveal whatever flaw has caused this issue.
Yes, it sucks that the payload was lost but there will have been insurance to cover the loss. No human lives lost, no cruise missile scenario, no out of control fire... this is the best case scenario for a rocket failure.
In that case the rocket has a flight-termination system, though, which should activate as soon as it veers too far outside the planned/expected parameters of the flight.
http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet87/cavall87.htm
But yes, Cluster was run on the cheap, hence the use of the Ariane 5 test flight, and didn't have insurance.
The board argues that there was a bias towards believing the software does not have an error. Thus, any out-of-range value is interpreted as a hardware error, which means the CPU should shut down.
There was a decision to not include Ariane 5 trajectory data in the SRI requirements and specification. Thus, while tests were rigorous at the equipment ("unit") level, and there were system tests, they didn't test that case. This is test design failure.
In addition, the board says "the review process was a contributory factor in the failure."
I can see how those can be aspects of "over-reliance on unit testing", but it doesn't explain, for example, how some of the variables from Ariane 4 were protected from overflow exceptions but others were not.
Lots of things had to go wrong to cause the Ariane 5 failure - including bad handling of overflow, as you mention. But to my mind, the universal last line of defence against any kind of mistake is an integration test: put all of the parts of the system together, feed them real input, and verify that you get correct output. Arianespace did not do that.
Well, until they actually launched it. It was a test flight, right? It proved to be an essential and very effective test.
Everything is incredibly obvious in hindsight, of course, but making things obvious is largely what hindsight is for.
And once you've finished reading that, go look up the Therac-25...
The cruise missile scenario is highly unlikely as the rocket itself would be destroyed soon after leaving its intended trajectory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708
(China, CZ-3B, Intelsat 708 payload, the launcher flew off-course and crashed on a village in 1996: by some estimates 200-500 civilians were killed.)
> Like Russian vehicles, there is no flight termination system that receives ground commands onboard Chinese launch vehicles. Only US and ESA launch sites have such a system. Correction, Falcon 1 did not have such a system for launching on Kwaj.
The launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center/CC is effectively about 50 mile from downtown Orlando, Baikonur is in the middle of nowhere.
An unpredictable, malfunctioning rocket could still million-to-one itself onto a school bus filled with children, halfway across a continent.
The text I quoted implies there is an onboard flight termination system, even if there is no Range Safety Officer who can send external commands.
FWIW, a part from an exploded rocket, like the engine, could still destroy a school bus filled with children. The odds are very hard to estimate, and made more complicated in that there are few failure modes where a rocket failure halfway across a continent, at supersonic speeds, would reach the ground without breaking long before.
There will still be debris, of course, but I guess the reasoning is that it's preferable to have relatively small debris, than one large piece of exploding debris.
Two important roles of flight termination are: 1. Cause the rocket to stop thrusting (and thus prevent it from thrusting out of range safety exclusion zone). 2. Cause the propellant tanks to be destroyed. This prevents the propellants from causing a large explosion on the ground (when the tanks hit the ground) in preference to a conflagration in the air.
But of all systems I never want to have to test in production, the flight-termination system is at the top of my list.
A rocket straying off course could either smash into city under full power (thus being a cruise missile) or have its propulsion cut off remotely beforehand (thus being a ballistic missile), depending on a scenario. What kind of a correction were you making?
This is a big plot point in the "Twin Spica" series.
If you get interest in this stuff, the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" has an episode about Apollo1 (and the series as a whole, though slightly dated on the FX side, is amazing).
The bourgeoisie of the developing world he wanted to help protested, the political class looked into constraining it by law, the first world hated it for misrepresenting the ideals of the Internet and going against hard-earned net neutrality laws, local Internet service providers backed off because of the negative publicity...
And the satellites he wanted to use to circumvent that went up in flames.
Nope.
>Elon Musk has stated that because the rocket didn't intentionally ignite for launch, the loss of payload is not covered by launch insurance.
https://www.reddit.com/live/xix3m9uqd06g/updates/613f262a-70...
It did fail to earn a return, however.
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...
When it comes to innovation, however, failure is often the impetus to more efficient design. Not only was that $200m shifted from Musk/Investors to SpaceX, et al, but it also went to informing the process and improvements for the entire project, and future projects by other companies.
We wish we could learn these things more cheaply, sure. But that doesn't mean the world or company would have been better off in the long run had the incident not occurred -- it's too soon to tell, and we might never know.
Yes, it is probably lower ROI than that payload getting into space, but it does mean it's not a total loss and not simply a broken window fallacy.
It's more akin to if the window maker also tried to learn/test harder to break windows with each one she installed. Then, each broken window would be an experimental outcome instead of just a lost window.
I thought that is precisely what using a fallacy makes you. It's what the word fallacy means. It essentially means a "false statement".
I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points, e.g. in electronics by using cheap solder or capacitors with a limited lifetime. Buttons also fail way too easily. Or think of batteries that cannot be replaced. Do they all commit this fallacy, too? Do they harm the economy and therefore indirectly also themselves?
Or is it a matter of how long the window is used before it is broken? If so, how long? You could also make nearly unbreakable glass (buttons, rockets, etc.) but at very high costs for the company and therefore also the consumer. What role do the costs play in all of this? Is it an equilibrium? When does the fallacy start and normal 'crap product' cycle end?
I've never seen any explanation of this alleged fallacy that answers any of these questions.
Building to last means high up-front costs, little flexibility (think of the Empire State Building and how much it must have cost to install air conditioning in it), but beautiful products with low total cost of ownership; throw-away goods are low on up-front costs, and they make it easy to respond to new technology, but they have a high total cost of ownership and they tend to be pretty ugly as well. A society which focuses on quality will be wealthier and more beautiful (look at Europe's low GDP and high standard of living), but one that's constantly rebuilding junk will be more equal; every 1970s Volvo still owned by an old-money family in 2016 is a Ford assembly-line worker without a job, or thereabouts...
There are a lot of apocryphal claims like this, but little evidence. Most manufacturers design for an expected life of the product, and making it last longer than that is a waste of money and resources.
For example, you could design a computer to last for 20 years, but what would be the point? Computers go hopelessly obsolete in about 5 years. The only people who care about longevity of it are a handful of collectors. Fashionable clothing is not made to last because people don't wear out-of-fashion clothes. It's pointless to make them to last. Cars are designed to last for 10 years. Airliners are designed to last for 65,000 flight hours.
Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
Except they rarely are nowadays either. Lightbulbs would be a common example, but so would be cheap construction tools, kitchen tools, knives, etc. all designed to last for few uses and then break, so that people buy a replacement. The argument of "waste of money and resources" only holds for a single company, but not for the economy as a whole - it doesn't factor in the costs (and energy waste) of replacement and of dealing with the garbage, nor does it factor in the ecological damage created by unnecessary manufacturing.
It all boils down to the standard short-term, greedy optimization (in algorithmic sense) of the market economy, giving you perfectly legitimately sounding reasons to keep being stuck in a crappy local minimum.
Most furniture is actually pretty shoddy, made from MDF and glue, but even so I've managed to find some that I'm happy with. My first office chair was not very good, and failed catastrophically in a few years, which was annoying. I managed to replace it with a much nicer one that I trust to last for decades. (It was rather overpriced though; I won't break even for something like 50 years. On the other hand, I can sit in it all day without hurting my back, which is more important to me.)
I have 8 year old computers that are perfectly good (aside from a hard drive that had to be replaced a year ago, and a new power supply the year before that), a 5 year old laptop that does all I could ask, etc. Computers are no longer advancing at such a breakneck pace that they're obsolete in a year, and the operating systems no longer have a lifetime measured in years either. I expect them all to last quite a bit longer.
I'm sure my washing machine will fail in a decade or two, probably the motor will burn out or a capacitor in the digital timer will fail. Neither are impossible to fix; the only question will be whether a newer washing machine would have enough extra efficiency to make replacement a better choice than repair.
Cars routinely last 200k miles or more, and replacement parts for most cars are easily had.
I would say that most products have a pretty good lifespan. Obviously my experience isn't universal, but I would say that most things are built well enough. It is worth paying attention to what you're buying, but most products are not actually intended to be disposable, except in areas of rapid technological change.
On the other hand, you could look at something like the jet turbine or transmission in an attack helicopter or tank. Those have a very definite lifetime, and a very strict maintenance schedule, and they're measured in hours, not years. If you do all the maintenance correctly, your jet turbine might last 500 hours (or some similar number, I'm not very familiar with the specifics) of use. Once you've used it that many carefully-logged hours you take it out and replace it with a new one. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? It's certainly expensive, but in military hardware you want to extract the maximum possible combat performance from everything; lifetime is pretty far down the priority list.
For instance, if you are the only window repair person in town and you go around breaking other people's windows, you will certainly profit. But the amount you profit will be completely offset by the window owners' loss. (Presuming you do not go to jail, of course.)
It was also spent on something they wanted to spend it on, rather than something they were forced to spend it on. It's still an interesting point though, because they spent it on something that carried significant risk. Does spending money on a glass window, which carries the risk of a broken window, work in the same way? I've not considered the broken-window fallacy from that perspective before. Perhaps it's not, for the same for the same reason that breaking a window is considered a crime and an exploding rocket generally is not.
Making another should be cheaper than making the first one; and this is Amos-6 -- how different is it from Amos-5?
Amos-5 uses the Russian-built Ekspress 1000H, while Amos-6 is only the second satellite to use the Israeli AMOS 4000.
From the quote below, they reference $85 to cover launch, insurance, and 1 year of operating costs. Presumably that insurance would cover some of the costs of an event like this?
Quote from an article on this (http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-1000759794)
Spacecom Satellite Communications' (TASE:SCC) board of director has authorized management to sign a contract with Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) (TASE: ARSP.B1) to build and buy the Amos 6 communications satellite for $200 million. IAI will build the satellite and its ground control systems, and will provide operating services. The company plans to launch the Amo6 in the first quarter of 2015, and its operating life will be at least 16 years.
Spacecom estimates that the cost of launching, insuring and one year's operation of the Amos 6 will be $85 million. The company has to pick a launch company. Spacecom said that it will seek financing for the Amos 6 from IAI and foreign sources.
Yeah it sucks, but it could have been a lot worse.
This payload, AMOS-6, was a replacement for the soon to fail AMOS-2 which among other things is part of a Facebook initiative to provide internet access in parts of Africa.
I am not aware of any replacement in the works for it, so that service may just shut down, and who knows if it will ever start back up.
So while this might be "nothing" to you, it has actual repercussions for people.
Not to mention the effects on the Israeli company that made the payload. Insurance may or may not pay for the satellite itself (I don't know), but even if they do, they were also relying on income generated from running it.
Actual humans working for that company may now be impacted.
If you mean internet.org wheter it's a loss or not is debatable
The fact that you were downvoted (at least when I saw your comment) indicates people don't agree with what you are saying and is an example of trying to enforce a particular type of thinking on someone else as far as what they should think or feel.
[1] Of course I wouldn't say "who cares" directly to someone involved in the project in some way then you extend your condolences.
Anyway, here's the scanner feed of Kennedy Space Center Communicationshttp://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/705
And ignoring second-order effects: People harmed because of the results of the fire.
The second group of people is not less important than the first.
Sorry but I can't relate to this type of tragedy at all. I can relate to someone getting hacked and losing their business or customer information though. That pain I can imagine. And to hear someone say to me "that's sad" about the latter when knowing they don't have any idea what it is really like to me is just lip service and almost patronizing.
But you don't have to go around saying "LaLaLa I don't feel sad." Just don't say anything.
This was a major part of a charitable initiative to bring free internet access to Africa.. That's a lot of lost opportunity for business, education, health care..
From a technical perspective, the laser-based communications network being developed by FB for Africa is super cool. I'm sad to see this delayed. Even though it doesn't affect me directly, it hits my inner nerd right in the feels.
Sure, it will delay some things in Africa, but we can't easily say whether that delay will be good or bad. For all we know people will be better off due to the delay as it may be less disruptive of existing economic structures, notwithstanding their long-term inefficiency. You're assuming incorrectly that the consequences of this satellite deployment would have been all upside and no downside, but such effects are not reliably quantifiable.
Knowing how smart and methodological Musk is, I wouldn't be surprised if the rule at the office is actually to leave your desk and go home at 5pm sharp.
You are prone to make more mistakes when you tired and overworked and I cannot imagine more important place not to make mistakes, than building a rocket.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-a-week-does-a-typical-S...
http://spacenews.com/op-ed-3-things-to-know-if-you-want-to-w...
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/25ixxq/is_spacex_wo...
So they are paid overtime for this, is that correct?
So US doesn't have paid overtime on a regular salary work?
Is that even legal in USA? Aren't they obligated by OSHA and USDOL to be paid for the time they work??
Yes, they have experienced people too, but overall, turnover is high for a reason: https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-employees-turnover/Los-Angel...
Which is exactly the kind of people that SpaceX does not want and who should not apply there. The turnover is high for a reason indeed.
All you said was that it is good to have some perspective. Yes, it sucks to lose the rocket and the satellite. But to put it into perspective, the husband of the lady sitting next to me as I type this (and a friend of mine) is currently sitting in the shelter at the launchpad. He texted her to let her know he was alive. He can't give out any more details.
Have some perspective people.
A static fire without the payload on the rocket was already done in Texas several weeks ago. This is the final dress rehearsal before launch. I always thought of these tests as low risk, but I guess nothing in rocketry is low risk.
I imagine they _would_ do these tests with the crew compartment attached and dummy human loads strapped in to the crew seats.
That said, NASA has raised concerns about loading crew pre-fueling as part of the NASA-SpaceX Commercial Crew development contract (CCDev).
[1] Here's a video of the LES test for Dragon 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8