Earth from Space

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SpaceX failure probe complete; flights to resume Sunday from California

File photo. Credit: NASA

After an exhaustive investigation, SpaceX engineers have identified the most likely cause of the spectacular explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket during a pre-launch test Sept. 1 that destroyed the booster and its $195 million satellite payload, the company announced Monday.

SpaceX engineers believe the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station mishap was triggered by the failure of a high-pressure helium tank, one of three used to pressurize the second stage liquid oxygen tank.

Putting corrective actions in place, the company said Monday it plans to resume flights with a launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles on Jan. 8 to boost 10 Iridium NEXT satellite telephone relay stations into orbit.

It is not yet known when SpaceX plans to resume flights from Cape Canaveral. Launch complex 40 at the Florida Air Force station was heavily damaged in the Sept. 1 mishap, and the company plans to use a repurposed space shuttle launch pad at the nearby Kennedy Space Center for its next Falcon 9 flight from Florida.

Sources indicate the first flight from Kennedy will be another commercial mission. The next SpaceX flight to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, the company’s 10th under contract to NASA, is expected to take place some time after the commercial mission.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket uses super-cooled, or “densified,” liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene fuel to provide additional performance during ascent. To achieve and maintain the desired low temperatures, propellant loading begins just 35 minutes before launch.

To push propellants to the rocket’s engines, the Falcon 9 uses highly pressurized helium stored in aluminum bottles, wrapped in a tough, insulating carbon composite material. The bottles, known as composite overwrap pressure vessels, or COPVs, are mounted inside the propellant tanks, submerged in frigid liquid oxygen and chilled kerosene.

On Sept. 1, about five minutes before a planned test firing of the Falcon’s nine Merlin 1D first stage engines — a routine pre-launch test for SpaceX — the second stage suddenly exploded in a spectacular conflagration that was caught on video and widely seen around the world.

The rocket and it’s $195 million payload, a commercial communications satellite, were destroyed, causing heavy damage to launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Just 93 milliseconds elapsed from the first signs of trouble to the explosion.

“Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events,” SpaceX said in a statement posted to its website. “Because the failure occurred on the ground, investigators were also able to review umbilical data, ground-based video, and physical debris.

“To validate investigation analysis and findings, SpaceX conducted a wide range of tests at its facilities in Hawthorne, California and McGregor, Texas.”

SpaceX is generally tight-lipped when it comes to technical details, and the statement posted Monday provided only a general overview of the team’s findings. It said accident investigators “concluded that one of the three composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) inside the second stage liquid oxygen (LOX) tank failed.”

“Specifically, the investigation team concluded the failure was likely due to the accumulation of oxygen between the COPV liner and overwrap in a void or a buckle in the liner,” the company said.

Investigators believe those extremely low temperatures may have caused some of that trapped oxygen to solidify. In any case, when the tank was pressurized, trapped oxygen pushing against the carbon overwrap fibers likely generated friction “leading to ignition and the subsequent failure of the COPV.”

Liquid oxygen has a temperature of around minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit, but SpaceX chills the propellant to around minus 340 degrees for use aboard the Falcon 9. The RP-1 kerosene fuel, which normally is stored at a room temperature 70 degrees, also is chilled. The lower temperatures increase the propellants’ density.

A rocket engine’s thrust is directly proportional to the rate propellants are consumed and expelled. By “densifying” the Falcon 9 propellants, more fuel can be stored and pumped through the engines, increasing performance.

While earlier rockets, including the Titan 2 booster used to launch NASA’s Gemini spacecraft in the 1960s, used propellant cooling to increase density, and thus engine performance, the upgraded Falcon 9 is believed to be the first utilizing super-cooled cryogenic oxygen.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in 2015, when propellant cooling was first implemented in the Falcon 9, that “we’re sub-cooling the propellant, particularly the liquid oxygen, close to its freezing point, which increases the density quite significantly.”

Failure investigators “identified several credible causes for the COPV failure, all of which involve accumulation of super chilled LOX or SOX (solidified oxygen) in buckles under the overwrap,” the company said in its statement.

“The corrective actions address all credible causes and focus on changes which avoid the conditions that led to these credible causes. In the short term, this entails changing the COPV configuration to allow warmer temperature helium to be loaded, as well as returning helium loading operations to a prior flight proven configuration based on operations used in over 700 successful COPV loads.”

The company did not provide any details about those earlier helium loading procedures but said it plans to redesign the helium bottles in the long term “to prevent buckles altogether, which will allow for faster loading operations.”

The Sept. 1 failure was the second involving the Falcon 9’s second-stage helium pressurization system.

During a June 2015 launch to deliver supplies to the space station, a strut holding a second-stage helium tank in place inside the liquid oxygen tank failed, allowing the helium bottle to shoot up and crash into the top of the oxygen tank, triggering a catastrophic rupture.

It was SpaceX’s first outright Falcon 9 failure in 19 launchings dating back to the rocket’s maiden flight in June 2010. After taking steps to ensure all internal struts met design specifications, SpaceX launched nine successful missions in a row before the Sept. 1 launch pad disaster, all of them using densified propellants.

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First launch from Russia’s new cosmodrome declared a success

Disclose.tv - Космодром Восточный. Пуск РКН Союз-2.1а.

A Soyuz rocket streaked into sunny skies over a new multibillion-dollar Siberian spaceport Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin watching from a nearby viewing stand, opening another gateway to space for satellites, and eventually cosmonaut crews.

The Soyuz-2.1a rocket took off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome with three satellites at 0201 GMT Thursday (10:01 p.m. EDT Wednesday), one day after a technical glitch scrubbed the launch in the final minutes of the countdown.

Vostochny’s construction began in 2011, four years after Putin approved the spaceport’s development. The cosmodrome has been one of Putin’s top domestic priorities, with an eye toward shifting more Russian space launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch facilities on the country’s home territory.

“I would like to congratulate you all. We have reason to be proud,” Putin said at a meeting with rocket launch team and Roscosmos representatives, according to a statement released by the Kremlin. “This is definitely a very important and significant step forward in the development of the Russian cosmonautics.”

Located in Russia’s Amur region near the Chinese border, Vostochny sits about 3,400 miles (5,500 kilometers) from Moscow, not far from an abandoned Soviet-era missile base called Svobodny, which itself hosted a handful of satellite launches.

Vostochny will eventually have a launch pad for Russia’s future heavy-lift Angara rocket, a booster designed to replace the Proton launcher, and accommodations for human spaceflights. The first Angara launch from Vostochny is targeted for 2021 — all Angara test flights will take off from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome until then — and crewed missions could begin launching from the new cosmodrome in 2023, according to plans released by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

Thursday’s launch is the only mission on the manifest at the partially-built cosmodrome this year, but its success offers a counter to critics who note construction delays at Vostochny and widespread corruption among the launch base’s contractors.

Putin told reporters before Thursday’s launch that contractors found guilty of crimes will face prison sentences.

“If their guilt of the suspected of crimes is proven, they’ll have to swap their warm beds at home for prison bunks,” Putin said, according to a report by Russia’s Interfax news agency

Russian President Vladimir Putin watches Thursday’s launch at the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Credit: Kremlin

But the mood Thursday was one of celebration.

“As they say, the proof is in the pudding,” Putin told the launch team in congratulatory remarks after Thursday’s mission. “You need a successful first launch to prove that the space center is ready for work. You have done it.”

Workers raced to complete the first phase of the Vostochny project in time for a first launch by the end of 2015, the date targeted when construction began, but officials in October delayed the Soyuz fight until this month as construction progress ran behind schedule.

Facilities finished in time for Thursday’s liftoff included a satellite processing clean room, a hangar for assembly of Soyuz rockets, and the Soyuz launch pad at Vostochny, featuring a huge concrete flame trench and a mobile gantry with a mural of Russian cosmonaut hero Yuri Gagarin.

Next up will be the completion of a space city with schools, mid-rise apartment blocks, rail and road links and other amenities for the cosmodrome’s workforce, which could number in the tens of thousands of engineers, technicians and support personnel.

Building the Angara launch pad at Vostochny is also on the to-do list.

“The construction teams still have much to do yet,” Putin said Thursday. “The first stage has been completed, but there are more stages ahead. As you know, we plan to build new infrastructure for heavy carrier rockets. We are also considering building infrastructure for super-heavy rockets and manned missions here. I am confident that together we will accomplish this task.”

The civilian-operated Vostochny complex covers an area of 270 square miles (700 square kilometers) — about the size of Singapore — and Roscosmos says it will cost 180 billion rubles, or $2.7 billion, when finished.

A Soyuz rocket lifts off for the first time from its new launch pad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East. Credit: SpaceX

The Soyuz-2.1a rocket — its engines guzzling a combination of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants — took off Thursday and rolled on a course north-northwest from Vostochny, heading to a polar orbit with three satellites on-board.

The launcher’s four strap-on boosters came off the rocket two minutes after liftoff, and moments later the Soyuz shed its aerodynamic nose done to reveal the three satellite passengers, all experimental spacecraft developed with the participation of Russian universities.

A Volga upper stage detached from the Soyuz rocket’s third stage less than nine minutes into the mission and started maneuvers to place the three satellites into orbit.

The trio of payloads deployed from the Volga rocket stage 0407 GMT (12:07 a.m. EDT), Roscosmos said in a statement.

U.S. military tracking data indicate the rocket put its satellite passengers into an orbit with a high point of about 300 miles (483 kilometers), a low point of 290 miles (468 kilometers), and an inclination of 97.3 degrees.

Those parameters are close to preflight targets.

The largest of the satellites sent into orbit Thursday will study high-energy cosmic rays and gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, which astronomers believe come from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives.

“From the Earth’s orbit, using a space experiment, we will first study the particles of the highest energies that exist in the universe,” said Mikhail Panasyuk, director of the Skobeltsyn Research Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, which is managing the mission. “We observe an acceleration of cosmic particles called cosmic rays in the universe. The particles with the greatest energies are difficult to measure from the ground, because they are very few. Now we will do this with the space experiment on-board.”

Named for Mikhailo Lomonosov, an 18th century Russian scientist and writer, the multipurpose spacecraft weighs more than 1,400 pounds (about 645 kilograms) and will also investigate Earth, attempting to pinpoint the origin of mysterious brilliant flashes of light in the upper atmosphere called transient luminous events.

The flashes occur in milliseconds in a region of the atmosphere stretching up to 60 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude, making them hard to detect and study. But scientists believe they are linked to lightning in thunderstorms closer to the ground.

The Mikhailo Lomonosov satellite is designed for a three-year lifetime in orbit.

The 1,170-pound (531-kilogram) Aist 2D satellite, made by TsSKB Progress in partnership with Samara State Aerospace University, will demonstrate a new small spacecraft design with a high-resolution hyperspectral Earth imaging camera. Aist 2D also carries an innovative radar operating in P-band, a wavelength that penetrates through forest canopies and Earth’s surface to study underground structures.

Aist 2D’s other science instruments will study the environment around the spacecraft and monitor how the satellite’s components respond to the harsh temperature extremes, vacuum conditions and micrometeoroid and space debris impacts in orbit, according to TsSKB Progress.

A shoebox-sized CubeSat named SamSat 218 also launched aboard the Soyuz rocket Thursday.

Built by students at Samara State Aerospace University, SamSat 218 will pursue educational and technological tasks, including tests in how to control tiny satellites in orbit.

Sentinel-1B launch from Kourou

Date

Mon, Apr 25 2016 5:40 PM — Mon, Apr 25 2016 10:30 PM

About

Following an anomaly observed during the countdown for the launch of Soyuz flight VS14 carrying Sentinel-1B, the countdown was halted. The launch vehicle and satellites have been switched into a completely safe standby mode. The new launch date will be communicated after the anomaly has been analysed. LAUNCH DATE TBD

Live from Europe ’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana: follow the launch of Sentinel-1B. Webcast 25 April. Three ESA-sponsored CubeSats and the CNES Microscope satellite are also being launched on the same Soyuz rocket.

   European Space Agency

Sentinel-1B ready for orbit

After Sentinel-1A, last 3 April 2014, Sentinel 1B will be launched next 22 April on a Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The Sentinels, a new fleet of ESA satellites, are poised to deliver the wealth of data and imagery that are central to Europe’s Copernicus programme. By offering a set of key information services for a broad range of applications, this global monitoring programme makes a step change in the way we manage our environment, understand and tackle the effects of climate change, and safeguard everyday lives. The first in the series, Sentinel-1 carries an advanced radar instrument to provide an all-weather, day and night supply of imagery of Earth’s surface. Sentinel-1 is the result of close collaboration between the ESA, the European Commission, industry, service providers and data users. Designed and built by a consortium of around 60 companies les by Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space, it is an outstanding example of Europe’s technological excellence

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Live coverage: Soyuz launch from French Guiana delayed to Saturday

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana with Europe’s Sentinel 1B radar Earth observation satellite, France’s Microscope relativity probe and three CubeSats from Belgium, Italy and Denmark

13:59 SCRUB

Bad weather over the Guiana Space Center will keep the Soyuz rocket on the ground today, officials said.

Unacceptable high-altitude winds over the spaceport exceeded safety constraints for today's flight with five European satellites.

The launch has been rescheduled for 2102 GMT (5:02 p.m. EDT; 6:02 p.m. French Guiana time) Saturday, when weather conditions are forecast to be better.

07:34 Five European satellites ready for Soyuz flight to custom orbits

The term “direct flight” will go to new heights Friday with a four-hour flight by a Soyuz rocket and its Fregat upper stage to deliver five satellites to three distinct orbital destinations hundreds of miles above Earth.

The Russian Soyuz booster — crowned by a Fregat upper stage — is set for liftoff at 2102:13 GMT (5:02:13 p.m. EDT) Friday from the Guiana Space Center, a European-run spaceport on the northern shore of South America.

07:33 Norsat 1 grounded

Officials from the Norwegian Space Center are looking for another launch opportunity for a microsatellite designed to track ship traffic and study space weather after engineers determined it could not safely be attached to a Soyuz rocket set for liftoff Friday.

Officials decided to keep the Norsat 1 spacecraft on the ground earlier this month. Such a decision is rare so close to a launch.

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ARIANE FLIGHT VA228, Intelsat 29e

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