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Oh well, space engineering is an iterative process. That means that on every subsequent test flight, the kaboom comes later into flight. If they have the money, know what went wrong and see any means of improving it, they should continue. They must learn the vehicle, learn the failure modes, get them out ofthe design, and eventually they will have a good launcher. First attempt went kaboom due to human failure. Second attempt went kaboom quite late indeed. They're on track. An expensive track, but they knew that when they started.

I didn't see the launch myself, is the clip available somewhere?

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Video is on-line now: http://spacex.com/video_gallery.php

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Thanks. The video link on the spacex site was broken earlier today, but now it seems OK.

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That stage seperation looked rather rough. It looked to me like the first stage slammed pretty hard against the nozzle.

What was that ring at the end of the nozzle that came off during the fairing sep? Was it there to protect it from the separation problem that I saw?

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It sure did hit the nozzle of the second stage! That ring is a bumper to protect against this, as far as I know. I don't know whether the hit and the subsequent off-centre ignition was within structural limits; it might very well be so, so this doesn't have to indicate the casue of the mishap. But it could.

I don't think it was a cooling ring that broke off due to the impact, because I couldn't see any fuel spillage subsequent to the ring falling off. So a bumper that was deliberately thrown off seems most likely to me.

The colrisation and initial point where the ring let go both were at the side of the impact, but agina tht doesn't have to mean anything. Of course ti could be that the bell was deformed or cracked by the impact.

If the ring is a bumper, I assume it is detached due to the heat of the bell letting the glue, rubber stops or whatever they used melt? That would be an elegant method.

btw I think we can see 2 rings falling, I assume the second one coes from the fairing? The bell one falls back very fast, and you can see a ring falling slowly when the fairing halves come into view, falling away.

btw2 it is normal for certain bells to glow hot during engine firing, but those I've seen had a more even glowing to them.

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Maybe the separation didn't kill it this time (or maybe it did), but it came awfully close. It really needs some more testflights, but as I understand it SpaceX is rapidly running out of money and will have to fly real payloads that bring in some cash. They are skating on very thin ice.

BTW. The ever so popular (on this board) Mr. Jeff Bell wrote an interesting article on the COTS program last month: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Th...nigma_999.html

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You don't know that, do you?

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I don't know if it caused the loss of the vehicle. (Musk thinks it didn't)
I do know that a spend stage is not supposed to hit the nozzle of the next stage. There is also a mechanism on the second stage to prevent it from happening. Apparently that didn't work good enough.

BTW. That rocketcam sure did a fine job!

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I do think it's healthier if it doesn't hit, certainly not that hard . But still it's quite possible it had no influence whatsoever. I guess they will look into the separation after seeing what happened, so if it didn't hurt this time, it might prevent failures on subsequent launches, which would of course be a good thing.

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I'd sure like to know what happened as the telemetry stream ended so abruptly. Was there a catestrophic failure (such as a chamber breech) or did the vehicle simply fly out of range of the telemetry monitoring site? The radars at RTS could've tracked the vehicle for a long time. Perhaps the range radar at Kaena Point could as well. Did the Falcon continue accelerating after LOS? Did it stop accelerating but stay in one piece? Did it break up or tumble? The radar data could tell us a lot about what happened.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Fa...ision_999.html

No news from SpaceX itself. Except that Musk raised the success percentage to 95+. Whatever that means.

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According to this article, SpaceX is now admitting that there was a "bump" upon staging, but says that it should not have affected anything of consequence. They also continue to claim that the big problem was a roll issue, which should be easy to fix.

They say that no further test flights are needed before going operational. I hope that statement is based on good science & engineering rather than a fear of running out of money. If I was looking to hire these guys to launch my satellite, I might want to see another test that puts something into orbit.

Of course, I only know what I read on the web, and the folks at SpaceX have a lot more information than I do. The article says that they will post an update on their website "by next week." Let's hope they're right about the problems being minor in nature.

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SpaceX just posted an update.

Key point:

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Observatorio de la Ballona

Autopilot induced oscillations

Ah so that was the problem: shaken, not stirred .

Well, they are onto the problems and what they propose is what I'd propose as well. Not that I consider myself the reference, but at least that means what they plan makes sense to me.

Only the separation issue seems a bit hard to deal with very nicely: or they continue as usual, but hits won't cause trouble; or they make separation cleaner but load the resulable 1st stage engine quite a bit more (longer shutdown). I'm sure they'll come up with something. I don't know whether the ring we saw breaking off the 2nd stage nozzle was dumped on purpose, and why it was there. Maybe it really was a bumper, I don't know.

Apparently the colors seen on the nozzle of the second stage were OK, no mentioning of that.

Just one side remark: they mention the curvature of the earth, which certanly would be visible from the quoted altitude (on a sidenote, the nozzle looks intact after shutdown ). Given the limited cuvature, I'd say this is a "fair" camera; many onboard cameras have fish eye lenses which are very useful but create a fake earth curvature already at 1 meter altitude .

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I'm pleased to hear SpaceX recoved telemetry data following engine shutdown. The sudden loss of data made me worry about a catestrophic failure. This wasn't the case. I don't know why they lost telemetry so suddenly when the engine shut down - perhaps it was an attitude error.

This sounds like a fairly easy to solve problem. Let's hope it doesn't delay the next launch too much. This stuff is harder than some people seem to believe. SpaceX is 0 for 2 at achieving orbit. However, if you look at the history of booster development, many outfits had much worse records before they ultimately achieved a good vehicle. Even the Soyuz booster had a lot of early failures before going on to become one a very reliable booster.

Like I said, it's an iterative process and the test flights are about postponing the kaboom phase, and learning as much as possible until kaboom. They didn't even have a kaboom on this second flight, and have all required data to change the behaviour of this test flight into the wanted behaviour, so they're right on track indeed.

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