Satellite burns up following SpaceX rocket glitch
reuters.com
reuters.com
Just awesome.
The mission was a success. The satellite maker's loss was covered with insurance money, the ISS stays up in the sky, engine-out capability proven, subsequent launch contracts remain in place from both NASA/the satellite maker - and the ISS astronauts get home-made chocolate ice cream! Win-win-win.
The only entity that got screwed was the insurance company, but that was a risk they were willing to take and were duly paid for doing so.
[Edit: OK, a link on spacecraft actuarial methods: http://www.casact.org/pubs/forum/00fforum/00ff047.pdf]
I don't suppose you have other links to catastrophic risk insurance papers that are relatively interesting. I've always been interested in the industry from a far.
SpaceX is awesome, but this isn't an unqualified win. There are groups out for SpaceX's head and they will try (unsuccessfully, I hope) to use this "engine incident" against them. SpaceX did not want this to happen at all.
SpaceX is dramatically lowering the cost of space launch. They are eating the lunch of dinosaur space companies who are only too happy to apply FUD that SpaceX is being "too cheap." There's a lot of money on the table being consumed by people who just have to keep on doing what they are doing and don't like competition.
Unlikely they got screwed over. Insurance money doesn't come out of thin air. Insurance companies charge a premium for coverage and that premium usually goes up after a coverage event to make up for the increased risk. Insurance companies very rarely get screwed over.
At earth parties, $10,000 gets you a lot of drugs/alcohol. At space parties, it gets you a tub of ice cream.
> At earth parties, $10,000 gets you a lot of drugs/alcohol. At space parties, it gets you a tub of ice cream.
Simple probability then gives a failure rate of 3%. I have not attempted the Bayesian analysis.
Who do you license orbits from?
The risk was almost certainly overstated, but NASA is understandably paranoid about things hitting the ISS.
To build credibility you have to admit failure. You can't just omit the bad news while focusing on the good news. You can't allow rumor and speculation to be your spokesperson. There's no way around the fact that an engine failure led to the failure of their secondary mission. Test platform or not, fully insured or not, an expensive piece of hardware became a shooting star. Someone didn't get what they paid for.
How it was handled was seriously amateurish. It made me cringe because I really want to see SpaceX (and Musk) succeed. Shit happens, but how you respond to that as an organization defines you for better or worse.
The satellite burned up when it burned up. It was very probable that it was going to have a short life, but no one really knew how short until re-entry was imminent.
Goodwill in the space community and helping to defray costs of future launches by making commercial launches more successful (and thus less expensive, if only for insurance purposes) seem like things that benefit their operations. Perhaps this is a naive opinion, though.
Purely on the basis that the new trajectory can't be gone over with a pin, even if all the maths comes out saying that everything is lovely, you do not refire an ISS delivery rocket that is not where you expected it to be, especially one that has already sustained damage, just to test a new robot.
Here's to many, many more private space successes!
The Falcon 9 ended up in a slightly different position/velocity than was expected, and the primary mission (deliver to the ISS and don't dare run anything into it) took complete priority over the secondary mission of launching the other satellite into a high orbit.
if there was not at least a 99 percent chance that the rocket had enough fuel to complete the burn
The problem was a (very small, almost surely overstated, but there nonetheless) risk to the ISS. From Orbcomm's press release: "the rocket did not comply with a preplanned International Space Station (ISS) safety gate to allow it to execute the second burn."
Compare with the age of sail, where a mission was considered successful if one the ships actually returned. Even with 75% of the crew dead and 25% toothless and malnourished from scurvy and other ailments.
And SpaceX behaved just as any other launch vehicle provider would in that situation. They gave their best effort to the secondary payload, but in the end, sacrificed it in order to achieve their primary mission.
It sounds like everyone involved with the Satellite portion of the mission knew full-well what the risks were and that they had no priority over the main mission. Insurance covered it. Done deal. All is well.
SpaceX can only get better from here. Kudos.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/11/satellite-investig...
http://www.spacenews.com/satellite_telecom/120302-falling-sa...
At that altitude, while short of the 466 miles desired, it still should have taken months or years for the orbit to decay and re-enter the atmosphere!
> To ensure the station's safety, the agreement with NASA prohibited Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX as the privately-held California-based company is known, from restarting the rocket's second stage - needed to deliver Orbcomm's satellite to its proper orbit - if there was not at least a 99 percent chance that the rocket had enough fuel to complete the burn, said SpaceX spokeswoman Katherine Nelson.
Because there was less than a 99% chance of success, SpaceX followed procedures and did not attempt to launch the satellite.
A stationary object placed 466 miles above the earth would just fall down.
Talking from the knowledge of a hobbyist here though, rather than an expert on such matters, so probably wrong on some counts.
Is the problem here that if you start a second burn and have to end it prematurely, you could end up in an orbit intersecting the ISS?
For the ride up, SpaceX stashed chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream inside.
the amount of liquid oxygen "was only enough to achieve a roughly 95 percent likelihood of completing the second burn..."
882 pounds (400 kg) of cargo aboard the Dragon capsule
The cynic in my wonders: would they have calculated a 99% likelihood if they hadn't sent the ice cream and had about .1% less cargo?
Dragon: 4,200 kg
Cargo: 905 kg
Ice cream: <5 kg, I'm guessing
Skipping the ice cream would've reduced their total mass by <0.001% or so, at least at launchtime.
Deleted comment
What insurance company lets a company take out a plan with that kind of risk?
Seems like NASA should've been getting insurance plans for the shuttle's External Tank all these years.
> "Orbcomm understood from the beginning that the orbit-raising maneuver was tentative," Nelson wrote. "They accepted that there was a high risk of their satellite remaining at the Dragon insertion orbit. SpaceX would not have agreed to fly their satellite otherwise, since this was not part of the core mission and there was a known, material risk of no altitude raise."
High risk, to me, says that there was a pretty good chance it was gonna fall.
> "Orbcomm had planned on reaching an altitude of 466 miles above Earth..."
> "Due to the engine shutdown, the Falcon 9 used slightly more fuel and oxygen to reach Dragon's intended 202 mile- (325-km) high orbit. Over the next 2.5 days, Dragon flew itself to the station's orbit 250 miles above Earth. It reached the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 countries, on Wednesday."
Initial Dragon Orbit: 202 miles above Earth
ISS: 250 miles above Earth
Desired Satellite Location: 466 miles above Earth
There was only a 95% chance of the rocket reaching the location 466 miles above Earth (due to the reduced fuel reserves), so they didn't perform the burn, because NASA's contract with them forbade it (had to be >=99% chance of success).
The expected outcome (F9 upper stage doing the raising) was considered non-risky, and I'm sure that's the premise the insurance company was operating under when they agreed to insure the satellite.
Quoth the article:
> Falcon 9 had enough kerosene fuel left over to relight the engine, but the amount of liquid oxygen "was only enough to achieve a roughly 95 percent likelihood of completing the second burn, so Falcon 9 did not attempt a restart,"
I doubt many satellites have enough maneuvering fuel on-board to raise their orbit like that.
My point was more that, prior to the engine failure, raising the orbit with the second stage was considered non-risky. You're correct that after the failure, raising the orbit with the second stage was risky.
Besides polluting the relationship with SpaceX, raising a fuss would put their own plans into doubt. Orbcomm's stock price already fell 15% in the past week, I don't think they need more trouble:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=ORBC+Interactive#symbol=o...;
Either way they're still paying the premiums. I have a feeling, though, that the premiums will be going up after this.
There are very few insurance carriers on earth that write "specialized risk" like this -- it was most likely one of very few large multinational carriers or, more likely, a Lloyd's syndicate.
The problem is that these very same carriers are, somewhat ironically, exceedingly risk-averse. They pat themselves on the backs and tell each other how smart they are when their bets go well ("Ha! We got $2M in premium for that satellite launch and didn't have to pay out a penny") and they are very quick to play Monday Morning Quarterback when their bets go wrong, especially when it's the first launch ("Johnson, you are a foolish underwriter. How could you write that risk? Get off the risk immediately.")
As frustrating as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if they either cancelled the policy (if the policy covered multiple launches) or non-renewed after this failure and claim the risk profile changed or something like that.
It turns out Orbcomm has had large losses before -- they collected $44M on a $50M claim a couple of years ago (http://www.spacenews.com/archive/archive09/orbcomm_0518.html)
Another tidbit from the last article: the form of deductible on such a policy.
"Orbcomm [...] said the insurance policy covering the six satellites includes a one-satellite deductible, a condition Orbcomm filled early this year when one of the spacecraft suffered a power failure."
A one-satellite deductible. Love it.
So: The insurance company looks at the deal and sees that they have a 1 in 27 chance of having to pay out. Then they ask Orbcomm to pay $10,000,000/27 + profit. Statistically, the insurance company will always win if they make enough deals.
Oh, and I am sure that if NASA offered $1B to anyone who would insure the 50 million tank, there would be an army of takers. ;)