Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.

It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.

To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.

Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.

Don't fret the failures.

I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.

Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time.

Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.

Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail.

Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always succeed at are fully mastered. Any knowledge or skills to be gained in those areas are at best minuscule improvements.

Then there's the part where you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. But each time you fail, you gain more data on how you failed, and you think about how you can fix those points. You're learning, and you're improving.

Now there are also tasks at which you'll consistently fail. Passing the BAR exam as a programmer with no preparation would be a good example. Since you have no sucesses to compare to in that area, you wouldn't learn a lot trying to retake the BAR exam, no matter how often you did it. You're lacking in knowledge and skills required, and trying to perform at that level doesn't do you any good.

Now the ratio of failures and sucesses is more of a rule of thumb, and not an ironclad model. If you do turn it into an ironclad model, tell me, because I'd love exact metrics to shoot for. The reason that the common adage is "If you're failing, you're doing something right", at least so I believe, is that "If you're failing some and succeeding some, you're closer to your optimum failure/success ratio for growth than if you are at either end of the extreme" simply doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. You can't put that on the cover of a self-help book. And since almost everyone is inclined to default to the "sucess" side of the continuum (coloquially known as your comfort zone) instead of the "failure" side (excluding select masochists), it makes a lot more sense to tell someone to fail more often. It's not a curse, it's a call for more ambitious projects. In this specific case, it's a comforting call to the fact that they're trying hard enough to fail at something. And I think that is commendable.

If I'm writing code for robots as a hobby and my robots behave exactly as I intended all of the time, then I'm probably not learning anything, and I should try to make the robots do more sophisticated tasks. The consequences of failure are minimal, so the optimum failure rate is high.

If I'm at work writing avionics code, the cost of failure is astronomical. It's nice to push boundaries and learn things, but it's better to avoid plane crashes. The consequences of failure are high, so the optimum failure rate is low.

I think the problem with rocket science is really the tyranny of physics. All the potential and kinetic energy you give to the rocket has to be stored in chemical form on the launchpad. You have to sit right on the edge of catastrophe or you are not going to make it into space at all. We've been doing this for half a century and the safety record is, quite plainly, not very good.

When we learn how to do spaceflight safely, we'll do that.

One great way to lower the amount of expesive failures is to hedge it with a number of cheaper failures, whether that'd be models, prototypes or testing rigs for individual components of an airplane or rocket. If you look at the early stages of avionics, there were many failures, some of them expensive, deadly or embarrasing. But over time, we did build up a repertoire of testing methods to verify a given airplane design. Does that mean our airplanes don't fail? No. Does that mean we aren't trying to develop even better airplanes because of the risk involved? No. But all in all, it's a considerable improvement. We'll get there for rockets, just like we did for cars, ships, airplanes or computers.

For example at a smaller pilot scale or in test benches.

Yet, if your test bench is very complicated, slow, costly and introduces errors of its own, it might not be wise. Also some "flying" test configurations can be a dead end.

So in the big "Battlestar galactica" NASA missions with lots of new technology, the cost of failure is very high. That's why they analyze a lot and test stuff in test benches. But those can be dead ends. It makes everything even more costly, making failure even more expensive, requiring more tests. Schedules slip while you have zero science return to show... It's a vicious circle.

It might make more sense to just for example launch many smaller probes, each one somewhat better than the previous one in some degrees. Some might crash, but if your audience understands that, it's not a political disaster. You're going to fly the next one again in two years. This way you also don't have to wait 20 years for your technology development to pay off.

So SpaceX launched Falcon 1 quite many times, and learned a lot about technology as well as matured as an organization. They crashed quite many times as well. But those were not nearly as expensive as Falcon 9 crashes were at this point.

That's also why they were flying different versions of Grasshopper and now Falcon 9 R. Retire risk. Allow crashes - when you can afford them. This will reduce crashes later when you can not allow them.

So it is a slightly complex issue but nothing very out of the ordinary. Usually in the real world things settle into a good compromise between conflicting goals.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means.

If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have an acceptable risk of zero. This means you can do very few things. Every time you get into your car, you are taking a calculated risk of severe injury or death. And that happens to many people who never do anyhing wrong.

To be specific, if the race isn't always to the swift, and if the best person can lose due to situations out of their control, maybe it isn't immoral to rely on a social support system for a while, which implies that perhaps we should fund such things.

And saying that is political suicide in some circles.

How is this different to you than launching rockets?

It's different to me because launching rockets is much more difficult. There are many more things that can cause you to fail catastrophically.

To me, failure is to be expected when you're doing something that is difficult. That is the definition of doing something difficult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

My favourite of those.

Fun note: a very long time ago I dated a woman who happened to be a brain surgeon. She used to joke her work was actually easy because nobody realy expecting her patients to survive.

It's a potential indicator of either the difficulty of the task, the abilities of the people performing the task, or both[1]. It's also an indicator that no matter how many things were done right, one or more things were done wrong.

I feel that your original post and subsequent reply reflect the pervasive perception that failure is a requirement for doing something big successfully. I think that's a misconception that's running rampant in the startup community. Failure can happen and it can be learned from, but success is possible without it.

1. In this case I'm going with 'difficult' and 'some things not done right'. Strongly suspect incompetence was not a factor :)

The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.

Personally I think he meant that eventual success is often achieve by applying this strategy.

http://www.iyqk.com/v/very-expensive-fireworks-compilation-o...

1. the cost of failure 2. the probability of failure 3. the cost of reducing the probability of failure

If these can be accurately calculated, then a certain failure rate can be quite acceptable. Of course, it's still worthwhile to determine the cause of any failures, and hence the cost of eliminating that cause and a reevaluation of points 1..3.

Except when it kills people (though this accident didn't).

No disrespect intended, but this is a disruption for the ISS, a loss (hopefully insured) for Planetary Resources, a real setback for Orbital... there's no point in sugar coating anything, it sucks. There's just no point in dwelling on it, either. RCA and move forward.

The unmanned missions have a higher failure rate, IIRC ~10%, but that number probably includes prototype and old models.

So a 2/80 failures is not so bad. It sucks when it explodes, but going to space is difficult.

For example, Soviet/Russian manned flight, "Soyuz", had 131 flights (123 Soyuz + 2 Voskhod + 6 Vostok) [1][2] and 2 accidents, resulted in death of 4 astronauts (1 + 3).[3]

However, both of these accidents occurred before 1972, and both were highly experimental flights. Komarov's was the VERY FIRST flight of Soyuz, and before Soyuz 11 accident, they were descending without space suits, as the space inside the cabin was so tiny.

So you can also say that there were 2 accidents in the first 10 Soyuz flights - they were still finalizing the technology - and no accidents in the remaining 113.

In addition, both of these accidents occurred during the landing, so there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_mi... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_manned_space_mis...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...

Soyuz T-10-1 burned on the launch pad, although the launch escape system saved the lives of the cosmonauts on board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No._16L

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-T_No.39

Still, it wouldn't be a "failure" under GP's original definition: "failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies" :)

And in Soyuz they also had other pretty close calls. Diving into athmosphere hatch-forward because engine module didn't separate in Shatalov-Volynov-Eliseev-Khrunov group flight... Near premature separation of said engine module in the Intercosmos flight with Afghani cosmonaut... Several ballistic landings - with accelerations up to about 20 g's...

Still nobody died. Perhaps in no small part because of overbuilding the ship and also changing the ship design along its long history, learning on mistakes. Soyuz spacecraft is the real workhorse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVvgpKt5uCA

Basically how cosomaunts train in Star City to how the rocket is built, take off and all the way till it is about to dock with the ISS, including how launch escape works etc.

The reliability and resilience of the system is just a marvel of engineering.

It remains to be seen if they will be able to complete the rest of their contract. The cause of the accident will need to be investigated, changes to future vehicles may be necessary, and right now it appears as though they damaged their launch pad severely.

From wikipedia:

> "COTS is related but separate from the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program.[3] COTS relates to the development of the vehicles, CRS to the actual deliveries. COTS involves a number of Space Act Agreements, with NASA providing milestone-based payments. COTS does not involve binding contracts. CRS on the other hand does involve legally binding contracts, which means the suppliers would be liable if they failed to perform. Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) is a related program, aimed specifically at developing crew rotation services. It is similar to COTS-D. All three programs are managed by NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO)."

Personally, I am worried about Orbital's ability to complete the remaining flights for CRS. This is a very unfortunate setback for them.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl... [2] http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/re...

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

http://www.steorn.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

They've erased some of the history from their website and interest hasn't been high enough for full exposure of their nonsense. Yet a decade of failure hasn't shut them down. I feel sorry for the people who poured €11 million into them. Never seeing that back.

I found his public facebook feed recently. Whole thing is madness. People/friends/family seem to think he really is some kind of big shot. He posts pictures of T-shirts with CEO written on them etc. To me it is and always has been an investment scam.

That seems to be a little bit of a stretch.

I prefer Steve Jobs take - if you're failing, at least someone is making decisions!

| Don't fret the failures. Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.

Conversely, absence of failure may mean you took a calculated amount of risk and it paid off. But it could also mean you were overly conservative, didn't push the boundaries, and took a minimum of risk. There's no way to tell the difference purely from the absence of failure.

The worst outcome is when a failure happens and you though you were very conservative but actually had no idea what the real risks were. That's the Challenger situation.

This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.

There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them.

Feynman's Appendix F should be required reading for every sort of engineer: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

It's a little bit long, and gets a bit technical at some points, but everyone should read it anyway.

But if during the Challenger investigation an engineer or a manager had told Feynman "There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them", he would have regarded them as completely incompetent and part of the problem.

The very nature of the enterprise is risky, and so the goal was to manage the risk of failure to an acceptable limit. Cover-your-ass culture can be improved, engineers can be allowed to do their jobs, but you aren't going to eliminate risk. The fact that we can even try to put a number like "1 in 50" or "1 in 100" on estimated space flight failure rates is exactly what blhack is talking about. We could judge that too high a rate, but if we did, we wouldn't be going to space at all, at least not anytime soon. That's the tradeoff.

Note that the engineers and especially the astronauts were well aware of that risk, and you can find almost exactly that sentiment echoed by them in interviews after the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia accidents. Many astronauts were most worried that the American public couldn't stomach the idea that failure came with any ambition in spaceflight and so would shut the program down.

They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.

That is not the same as what blhack wrote, "If you're failing, you're doing something right."

you: zero failures = doing something wrong

blhack: any failure = doing something right

blhack's statement is clearly ridiculous.

blhack's comment was ambiguous. Under some interpretations it is ridiculous, but under others it is sensible. By interpreting charitably, we can avoid a fair bit of two of the worst things on HN: abrasiveness and nitpicking.

(Edit: and protracted disputes. So, three of the worst things on HN.)

In context, what I am saying is pretty obviously meant to be taken as:

Failure is part of taking risk. Risk is part of doing things that are difficult. Doing things that are difficult is part of progress. Progress is something that I consider "right".

And then put further into context, with regards to spectacular failures like the one today: Don't beat yourself up [engineers who worked on orbital] because the very difficult thing that you were doing failed. That is what makes that very difficult thing noteworthy.

Platitudes like this don't help anything, they just detract from actual discussion of reality, which is vastly more complex.

...and I believe this is the water-tower you can see in the video: https://www.google.se/maps/place/NASA+Wallops+Flight+Facilit...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5eddt-iAo

Why would it not do that? Was it to close to the ground?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety

Ariane 5 (the infamous flight 501) self-destructed.

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html

"The launcher started to disintegrate at about H0 + 39 seconds because of high aerodynamic loads due to an angle of attack of more than 20 degrees that led to separation of the boosters from the main stage, in turn triggering the self-destruct system of the launcher"

A SpaceX rocket self-destructed:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188593-spacex-rocket-self...

"In a statement, SpaceX says the rocket detected an anomaly and automatically initiated its self-destruct sequence."

The Titan IVA-20 explosion was also due to a self-destruct, and not the range officer:

http://fas.org/spp/military/program/launch/titan_iv-20_sum.h...

"At this point, the northern-most Solid Rocket Motor (SRM #1) separated from the core booster, initiating the Inadvertent Separation Destruct System. At 45.529 seconds, approximately 3 seconds after the automatic destruct sequence, Mission Flight Control Officers sent command destruct signals to the vehicle."

EDIT: According to the press conference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

297 seconds of Isp is huge. The Saturn V's F1 engine only had 263 seconds. And the closest we've come since to that level of performance in a Lox/RP-1 engine is the Merlin 1D which will have 282.

They did it by using an oxygen-rich, fully staged combustion cycle. Which means that most of the fluid flowing around the engine and through the turbines of the pumps is super hot pure oxygen at 2000 psi. That's crazy. The US has brought over NK-33's and taken them apart and we still don't quite know how the Russians got it to work.

Of course, performance is only one consideration. All the other things you'd expect like integration costs, reliability of your suppliers, etc. made the Antares a pretty risky bet. But given Orbital's choices of developing their own engine from scratch, buying a hyper-expensive engine from Rocketdyne, or buying a wonder of engineering for cheap from the Russians, buying a bunch of surplus NK-33's wasn't totally crazy.

And we wouldn't have any at all if Kuznetsov hadn't ignored a direct order from Moscow to destroy all the engines and tooling, as part of the erasure of the N-1 launcher from official history.

IIRC the OKB knocked them off their inventory as them as 'surplus components' and stored them in a warehouse under plastic sheeting.

A suspicion is that the engines didn't quite survive the long storage... indeed they weren't quite designed for that. But we'll wait for results of analysis of the explosion.

The Space Shuttle Main Engines had an Isp of 452s and 500,000 lb of thrust, easily the most efficient rocket engines ever built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0120

Although I don't believe we ever tested it on our own test stands, so it's impossible to know for sure.

By the way you are conflating vacuum Isp with sea level Isp (what I was using). The Sea level Isp of the SSME is 366 s.

The SSME is also a fuel-rich staged combustion cycle. The point I was making above is that the Russians were able to get an ox-rich staged combustion cycle working reliably. That's the key technology breakthrough that we have never duplicated.

ISRO's CE-7.5 LH2/LOX engine[1] has an Isp of 454s.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-7.5

Similarly, citing the 850 ISP of the experimental NERVA engines is equally out of context.

Let me qualify the SSME claim as "highest Isp/Thrust of any widely used engine". Prototypes or engines that haven't flown much IMHO aren't able to make this claim.

The NK-33 may beat a Merlin 1D, but what much do they cost to make and what is the reliability? If you make 100 NK-33s and 100 Merlin 1Ds, what's your total budget, and how many NK-33s will fail compared to the Merlin 1D?

One thing I get with SpaceX, is that their engines are not designed to push the performance envelope. They want them to be cheap and reliable.

hydrolox engines have vastly superior Isp but come with their own set of limitations.

In May, an AJ-26 exploded on the test stand at Stennis space center in Mississippi, severely damaging the test stand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM

I watched it on netflix myself. Fascinating stuff.

As for these engines, they're currently retrofitted with new kind of fuel, new electronics and some modifications, after 30 years, by a totally different team.

I really don't think this kind of thing would work.

[1] http://www.spacenews.com/article/financial-report/42180aeroj...

http://online.wsj.com/articles/david-a-deptula-the-russians-...

The Soviet Union went so far with staged combustion engines in the sixties that that level of technology has not yet been reached elsewhere.

USA, Europe and Japan went with hydrogen staged combustion but that's quite different.

The ULA/Blue Origin decision about new indigenous US first stage engine development gets a huge boost from this problem.

It's just what can be reached when you put resources into it. Coming from the IT world it might seem strange that the investment has not lost its value, but it has not. It might be quite a lot easier to duplicate nowadays, but not child's play at all.

Sometimes it's chilling to think what kind of still secret projects were funded by the huge US defense budgets during the cold war. There are some public sides and declassified parts on things like very good glide ratio hypersonic vehicles, but officially they never went far and the space shuttle was the thing. ( http://www.456fis.org/THE%20B-52/FS-011-DFRC_popup6.jpg )

http://xkcd.com/984

I was curious about it, but from Reddit discussion, apparently this is totally normal; "Yes, the engines have been upgraded many times. To avoid having to recalibrate the software each time engines are upgraded, they are simply rated at over 100 percent thrust over the first engine's thrust."

Another interesting fact. The pad is NASA's. So you can imagine the crew that maintained it are pretty disappointed.... "Look at what you did to my pad!?!" The fireball was enormous. The view from the Cessna incredible.

That must have been just about a worst case scenario for the pad to sustain such a direct hit. Hopefully it was the strict safety protocols and not just dumb luck which kept everyone safe. That's another aspect of this event which can be studied and reported, so at least we maximize the take-aways. Track the entire response from T-6.

Apparently the rocket is designed to do that little lateral kick that you can see in the video and initially seems odd. 'Why is the rocket not going straight up' causes a little unease at first but apparently is nominal. If that's the case, then the time of the explosion may correspond to a point where they kick up engine output. It also may have been a heavier payload than usual requiring higher engine output? (Unconfirmed)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EnrVf9u8s

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/proton_glonass49.html

investigators simulated the improper installation of the DUS angular velocity sensors on the actual hardware. As it turned out, it would be very difficult to do but not impossible. To achieve that personnel would need to use procedures and instruments not certified either by the design documentation or the installation instructions. As a result, the plate holding the sensors sustained damage.

"That's what happens when you set 'a' to negative." a good lesson from my TA

Now imagine how people felt back in '86 when the challenger exploded with 7 people on board including a teacher. Shuttle launches were common by then but a lot of people were watching live due to the teacher on board aspect. It brings a whole different set of emotions to the event. Nobody made a joke that day.

Rocket science is hard, after all.

In the video, there are several pieces of debris that fly off and spin in a helical motion, I wonder what those bits are!

Nobody has said much yet: https://twitter.com/OrbitalSciences/status/52722568241456742...

So, that'll be paying out.

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast...

*Anything from loose nuts or fasteners up to improperly-attached fuel tanks or bombs.

This wasn't launched in a desert/uninhabited area?

Edit: Thanks for clarifying below.

Listening to the audio feed for a few minutes, I always find it a bit sad how people resort to 'officialese' bullshit when they're embarrassed or stressed, eg 'we're going to triage the data'?!

Furthermore, adding a launch escape system would mean adding parachutes and flotation to a payload which otherwise doesn't need it.

So, as a general comment, something bad happened with the gear that pumps fuel into the engines in the right proportion. Maybe involving a major leak of fuel into the structures around the engine. Leaked fuel explodes. Complete loss of thrust, rocket falls back to earth.

I wonder if the Russians would consider it a good or a bad thing for them, if the West decides to stop using those Russian-built engines? Specifically, who benefits if there's a series of failures of AJ-26 engines? Considering the current imposition of economic sanctions against Russia, based on quite untrue accusations related to Ukraine and MH17. The Russians are feeling considerably put out over that, and rightly so.

Definitely bad. Of course, that depends on whom you ask :) and which Russian we're talking about.

NK-33 is used on a recently created Soyuz-2.1v rocket (one engine on first stage). There is no production of NK-33 today in Samara - but the ability to sell engines to the West would oh so much improve economic situation for Samara's industrial space cluster. Among other things, NK-33 is a matter of pride in Samara. It's the only engine maker for first stages in Russia (if you don't count Voronezh'es LH2 engines, used on the second stage of Energiya) other than Energomash, its arch-rival. Since recently works are underway to restart the production of NK-33... and Orbital going away from using them, for whatever reason, is sad news.

Still NK-33 is a great piece of technology, in some aspects still unsurpassed. It's too early to consider it's over for NK-33.

As for politics and sanctions against Russia - this is quite different subject, almost completely unrelated. Leaders come and go... and people stop wars at some point, yet the aspiration of going to the stars remains.

Considering the funding for these missions comes from the U.S. Congress, the matters seem pretty tightly coupled.

It was sure a topic of conversation when Elon Musk and Michael Gass (ULA CEO) testified before congress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0

http://xkcd.com/1133/ [text at the bottom]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system

But don't worry, future-people-I-will-argue-with-on-the-Internet, I'm sure that's the final gap in my knowledge base.

As a testing problem, rockets have always fascinated me. At some level you have to trust in first principles but being so thorough so that you know will either fly or fail safe. That has got to keep folks up at night.

Also, it might be fun to note that no one on that launch gets a refund. Generally you pay for something like 90% before the launch (in different milestones leading up to the launch) and only 10% after safe delivery to orbit.

Then there is all the video and film footage. I bet some of it was high speed (so the resulting film will be slow motion). Slo-mo film helps show the exact sequence of failures and was a big part of the Challenger investigation.

Finally, there will be a ton of data that was collected from the rocket in its brief flight.

Guess we've come a long way from a magnifying glass investigations :)

Each single professor explained us why their subject was the reason for Ariane V to explode. The physics one went about how the imperial/metric discrepancy was the cause, the mechanics one went about how error margin management wad the cause, the CS one about integer overflow... Each of them made it clear that their course was the center of the world, but altogether it didn't look smart.

I chose that the CS guy was right ;)

- A pea growing experiment from students in Houston

- A human health study investigating blood flow to and from the brain in space

- 19 student projects from New Jersey

- A reentry breakup recorder

- A meteor dust analyser

- 1,360 pounds of food

- Spacewalk equipment

- Flight crew equipment

- Fight procedures books

- Computers

- Classified "Crypto equipment"

Source: https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/527235620578787328/ph...

Right, there was to be a video recording of the Cygnus spacecraft as it reentered and broke up (it's designed to disintegrate). Kind of ironic now.

https://www.planet.com/pulse/space-is-hard/

I know we might never know but I did wonder if the draining and refueling the fuel caused an anomaly somewhere and lead to this?

Such a big loss for us.

Though NASA seems to be paying for Orbital launches more than SpaceX (even considering the difference in payload): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153960-private-spacefligh...

Therefore failure does not always occur when one is trying too hard because it is also feasible to fail when not trying hard enough.

There's some obvious reasons why the International Space Station might be less likely to carry sensitive US military communications gear than the NASA Space Shuttles.

Even the massive arms for lifting the rocket into position are impressive for the N-1.

Musk: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.

http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

No comment on the unprofessionalism bit. I don't disagree, but then it's hardly uncommon in high tech either.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/527247155954610176

Was he speaking facts? Because if they were using rockets made in the 60s - he's not really badmouthing them as much as he is making public facts.

Despite that, I don't blame him. Being factual is what's important.

So factually he's right - but also misses the point. Here I should admit that Elon says more than he does - but he does quite a bit too, so kudos to his successes - Merlin-1D is a great engine.

I took his comment to be more in the "that's your business model? buying and selling old Russian hardware?" vein. It's not that the hardware is bad, per se.

Although the hardware might be bad. I imagine they're looking into that...

Samara is not in Siberia. It is in the Volga Federal District, which is west of the Urals and therefore in European Russia.

In fact, Samara is 1000 miles away from Siberia. Even for Russia, that's still quite a distance.

Omsk is in Siberia and it's only 1000 miles away from Samara.

Anyway, Los Angeles is not in Oregon, Moscow is not in Germany, and Samara is not in Siberia.

I'm not arguing for that business strategy; I think it would not be successful. I also don't think that re-using old rocket parts actually reduces cost to orbit significantly (I haven't looked at the numbers). I also don't think that what I think matters a whole lot.

However, it's worth a discussion beyond simply rejecting the model at face value.