Liftoff!
SpaceX’s Falcon 1 lifts off from its launch pad in the Marshall Islands on August 2, 2008. The third launch attempt for the private company resulted in another lost rocket, but provided hope for success, the Southern California company said. Photo credit: SpaceX.
By Marc S. Posner
SOAR Magazine
The first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket essentially crashed into the second stage as the two were attempting to separate during Saturday’s launch, the company’s founder said in a statement released in the last few minutes.
Under the heading “Timing is Everything,” Elon Musk said the origin of the problem stems from the shift to a new first-stage motor used during the launch — the third attempt for the Los Angeles-area company.
The issue deals with a “thrust transient” in which the first-stage’s unburned fuel “combined with a small amount of residual oxygen to produce a small thrust,” SpaceX said.
That surge from the first stage was stronger than the thrust produced by the mechanism used to separate the two stages, causing the “first stage to recontact the second stage”
“As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission,” Musk said in the statement.
The company was aware of the potential, but simply didn’t compensate enough for the issue, Musk said.
SpaceX’s conclusion was reached through four methods of analysis, the statement said.
Resolving the issue does not require a change in technology — as was the case with the switch in rocket engines from flight 2 to flight 3 — and, thus, the turnaround between launch attempts will be short, Musk said.
The company’s second flight attempt was made on March 20, 2007. According to SpaceX, the Falcon 1 rocket reached space, but not orbit. Issues identified in the failed attempt resulted in the complete re-design of the first-stage engine.
“It looks like we may have flight four on the launch pad as soon as next month,” Musk said in Wednesday night’s statement. “The long gap between flight two and three was mainly due to the Merlin 1C regen engine development, but there are no technology upgrades between flight three and four.”
Musk took seven positives from Saturday’s launch:
Merlin 1C and overall first stage performance was excellent
The stage separation system worked properly, in that all bolts fired and the pneumatic pushers delivered the correct impulse
Second stage ignited and achieved nominal chamber pressure
Fairing separated correctly
The failure was discovered with a Falcon 1 rather than the upcoming Falcon 9 series
Rocket stages were integrated, rolled out and launched in seven days
Neither the near miss potential failures of flight two nor any new ones were present
First-Stage Flight
SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rockets towards space on August 2, 2008. This image was captured from a video feed provided by the company. It shows the body of the rocket, looking down at the first-stage engine.
However, Musk said, because of when the failure happened in the flight sequence, the company was unable to test changes made to resolve the issue leading to the loss of the second flight.
Still, he said “I feel confident that this will not be an issue for the upcoming flight four.”
The first flight, on March 24, 2006, ended when a fuel leak caused the rocket to catch fire about 25 seconds into the flight.
Earlier this week, the privately-held Hawthorne, CA-based company announced a $20 million equity investment from Founders Fund, a San Francisco venture capital firm. The Founders Fund’s existing portfolio includes Facebook, Powerset, Slide and Quantcast, and Managing Partner Luke Nosek will join the SpaceX board as part of the financing, SpaceX said in an August 4 news release.
Musk prevously co-founded PayPal, the world’s leading electronic payment system, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. In 1995, Mr. Musk co-founded Zip2, which sold to Compaq Computer Corporation for more than $300 million.
