First Satellite in Facebook's Plan For Global Internet Access Exploded With Falcon 9 (qz.com) 155
Mike Murphy, reporting for Quartz: The first step in Facebook's grand vision to connect the entire world to the internet -- or Facebook -- has gone up in flames. Earlier today, a SpaceX rocket carrying a satellite that Facebook planned to use in its internet.org initiative exploded during a pre-launch test at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket was due to send the satellite up into orbit Sept. 3, but during the set-up and testing process, an "anomaly" occurred on the launch pad, according to SpaceX, and the rocket exploded. Facebook had planned to lease some of the bandwidth on the satellite, Amos 6, from its operator, the Israeli company SpaceCom, to beam internet to sub-Saharan Africa. The satellite was intended to fill in until Facebook's more ambitious plans for internet access are ready, including developing and launching massive solar-powered drones that use lasers to beam internet to the ground. This the first time Facebook had planned to use a satellite.Facebook wanted to use the $200 million AMOS-6 satellite to beam free internet to developing parts of the world such as Africa. The satellite was supposed to ride SpaceX's Falcon 9 into orbit. After hearing the news, Mark Zuckerberg said he is "deeply disappointed" to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed his satellite. But this setback won't stop him from his goal to connect every person he can find on the face of the earth to get online. He said, "Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided."
Video of the accident (Score:5, Informative)
USLaunchReport has video of the accident [youtube.com]. The first visible anomaly is at 1:11.
Re:Video of the accident (Score:4, Funny)
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Hey! Leave him alone. He's spacesick!
Re: Video of the accident (Score:2)
What about technology powered by this kind of drive?
http://www.screanews.us/SouthS... [screanews.us]
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Wait, wait, wait! Elon Musk can build electric cars with big batteries. Why didn't he build an electric rocket? I barely remember seeing black and white movies of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon as a child, and their spaceships seemed to be powered by electric razors, that emitted smoke.
Come on Mr. Musk, watch some ancient science fiction films, and get your engineers working on it!
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On the contrary, Elon should build Tesla cars driven by chemical rocket propellant. That would rock the place.
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That's nonsense! Everyone knows that the known laws of physics mean that chemical propellant are the pinnacle of engine technology and will never be replaced, ever. The known laws of physics say so, and if there's one thing I know it's that the known laws of physics have never changed.
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Re:Video of the accident (Score:5, Funny)
Because the known laws of physics clearly dictate that chemical propellant is the only way to do this. That's why we've been doing it since the 50s, because in the 50s we already knew all of the known laws of physics (which don't change), so we already knew that the only way to do this was chemical propellant, therefore that's what we used. If it was possible to use a railgun then we would have done that in the 50s, because we already knew everything and technology and our understanding of physics has not progressed since then. I can't even have a conversation with some kind of luddite nutter who doesn't even understand that what we know about physics is as immutable as the fact that chemical propellant is the pinnacle of space launch technology.
At least, known laws of physics have been immutable since Newton finally figured everything out and gave us all the answers. And if you don't know that then there's nothing I can do to convince you that things never change.
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Re:Video of the accident (Score:5, Funny)
You clearly don't understand how this works, so let me help explain this to you. I'll use small words. I do physics. That's my job. I do physics every day, in fact I'm doing physics right now. That means that I'm superior to you, which means that I'm right, ergo you are wrong. Good day sir!
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I SAID GOOD DAY!
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But, why would we need a vehicle for "space travel", when we could just use project montauk, That's been explained in great detail. [youtube.com]
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If they were using anti-matter, we'd be missing Florida instead of just a rocket.
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I would think that if they powdered or granulated Elon Musk and packed him into a rocket, all that hot air would make a great propellant.
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It does kind of look like an electrical arc. There is definitely a really bright, really regular shaped flash before the next frame where it's already looking like a regular explosion.
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Ouch, looks like a second stage failure - seems very odd!
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Ouch, looks like a second stage failure - seems very odd!
Does it fuel from the top? If you stop at 1:11 and single-frame through ( , and . ) there's is an X of light (lens flare?) that seems to cross right where a hose-like thing enters the second stage of the rocket in the previous frame.
There was another lens flare around 1:08 which seemed odd, but maybe that was just out-of-focus bugs.
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Clearly, from following your advice it is quite obvious it was caused by that bird. The bird shot at the rocket and caused the LOX to explode.
In all seriousness, how did you zoom in enough to see the sparks you are mentioning, I don't see anything in the frame before the conflagration obscures everything. By how fast that bird moves between frames, I am guessing that the video has an extremely low frame rate. That bird looked like it flew 100ft or so in the span of a frame.
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Thanks for the link to the video.
I've watched it on slow motion now a handful of times. "Something" flies across the frame right at the time of the explosion, almost like an overflying aircraft dropped a bomb or something...what do people think?
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Can't decide if it's a bug or a terrorist drone strike...
My frame by frame analysis is inconclusive.
What do you think?
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As alarming as that may be, I checked the pixels but don't think it was shopped.
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That is kind of interesting. I spent a couple hours to try to figure out what that object is, I zoomed in quite a bit on it and tried to enhance it as best I could. Here's the result [nocookie.net], what do you think?
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A setback but... (Score:3)
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No injecting thought into this discussion!
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Um, it would take one hell of an explosion to destroy a launch pad. It will be fixed, likely with only replacing the grating that sits under the rocket and the tower that fuels the rockets. The pads are designed to deal with exploding rockets.
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Re:A setback but... (Score:4, Funny)
Dear Mr 3208 (if I did the binary conversion right),
I taught a class on space elevator design last year:
Notes: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/... [wikibooks.org]
Slides: http://imgur.com/a/cCTY5 [imgur.com]
I should like to make a few comments on your post:
* There have been a number of small scale "space tether" experiments. These bear about the same relation to a full space elevator as flying a kite across a river does to a suspension bridge across that river. We have long way to go before we are ready to build a functioning space elevator.
* The popular image of a space elevator (a 60,000 km vertical cable attached to the ground) is based on a 121 year-old thought experiment by space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. That design is laughably impractical, and nothing like what a modern version would be like.
* A space elevator is a transportation infrastructure project, like a bridge or an airport. We don't build that kind of infrastructure for a few tens of vehicles a year, neither would we build a space elevator. The economics would make no sense.
These comments should not be taken as implying I am against the idea. On the contrary, I think space elevators will be very important at some point in the future, and therefore I and many others have done work on the concept. But the time is not yet ripe for them to be built.
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FYI, this person you responded to is the same guy who calls anyone trying to advance the state of the art in space, "space nutters".
He is a troll that honestly believes that the laws of physics are all known and exactly perfect, and that there is no chance of any human ever traveling to Mars or farther. Trying to have a civil discussion about these things will just get him calling you a space nutter for not giving up on ever improving the state of the art.
In fact, every post I have seen him make in respons
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If I'm reading those slides right, and I think I am, then I'm looking forward to a laminated Douglas Fir space elevator. I like it.
Facebook's grand vision (Score:5, Funny)
So, there IS a God. And He is just.
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Yeah. Who here read that headline as "... Facebook's Plan for Global Internet Domination ..."?
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Mark Zuckerberg: "The same thing we do everyday, Sheryl, try to take over the world!"
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Oh man, I miss pinky & the brain
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Re: Facebook's grand vision (Score:2)
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Perhaps a simple "they will rue the day" will do?
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Nah, he'll just go break his little ships.
We will keep working... (Score:1)
“To Serve Man” (Score:2)
But this setback won't stop him from his goal to connect every person he can find on the face of the earth to get online. He said, "Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided.”
Translation, “But this setback won't stop him from his goal to connect every person he can find on the face of the earth to Facebook. He said, "Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will collect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of assimilating everyone, and we will keep working until everyone provides their personal data to us for free, so that we can continue to monetize it for our proprietary business growth, since our product is humans.
Facebook
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Pokébook—gotta catch 'em all.
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His satellite? (Score:2)
It belonged to Spacecom and since it exploded before launch isn't covered by insurance, so they're out $200 million.
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Or SpaceX is out a rocket, a bunch of fuel and owes SpaceCom a whole lot of compensation?
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It's covered by insurance, just not *launch* insurance. You thought they wouldn't have a $200M machine covered by insurance for every step of its trip into space?
But yeah, Facebook was just going to pay for part of the satellite's capacity, they were definitely not the owner in any way.
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Yes. Now go apologize the poor engineers' whose years of work just went up in flames.
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If they didn't get paid for that work, they should have taken at least a few Liberal Arts courses in college.
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I wrote software for a living. Nearly all of it is no longer in use.
Today I do security audits. Some of the systems I audited and spent hours, days, even months to secure have been shut down in the meantime.
If you can't stomach the idea that something you worked on is no longer used or destroyed, maybe even willfully so, you might want to build cathedrals or chisel some statues. They tend to last a few years or millennia.
Failure is a part of success (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing to watch the people with zero achievements or inventions saying that SpaceX should just give up. You have to keep improving and keep trying. The Wright brothers airplanes didn't work on the first attempt. You cant have discoveries and advances if you just keep giving up.
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It was a huge step forward, just like the first country launching one was before. We're currently at the point where even our lower aristocracy can afford a trip to space, and seem to be moving towards Joe Average vacationing there in my lifetime.
Well, yes. That's what we're moving towards. However, it'll prob
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"Success is moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." --David Guy Powers
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Failure is a part of success
Sure, but failure is also a part of failure. Failure leading to success is much, much rarer than failure leading to failure.
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Von Braun said it best, it's not a failure as long as we got data.
So SpaceX got data, FB got a setback, it's so win-win.
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Yeah, Americans fucking suck at space flight.
I forget though, how many countries have landed men on the moon? How many countries have sent a probe to visit every planet? Sorry, I don't remember. There's a list here if you'd like to help me [wikipedia.org], it would also be interesting to calculate the percentage of successful launches on that list for each country. The US only has around 4% of the global population, so I assume that we also have around 4% of successful space launches. I could be wrong though, since we
Geekdom is Torn (Score:2)
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Rockets explode. Even the best and most tested design will loose a rocket every now and then. That's what happens when you strap cargo or people to a few million pounds of explosive that you hope will go off in a controlled manner. The key is to iterate and learn from the mistakes.
As far as Facebook it's not a big deal, everyone buys satellite launch insurance these days. They'll have to build a new bird but it likely won't cost facebook anything other than another launch insurance. It will make the rates f
Send 'Thank You' cards to Musk (Score:1)
No, you got it wrong (Score:2)
It wasn't an explosion, but rather a Rapid Unplanned High-Temperature Disassembly.
test (Score:3)
if they're just testing the engines why did it need the payload in place ?
is testing the engines worth the risk ? what is gained by it that they would not find out on the day of the launch ?
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They were loading propellant at the time of the accident. It's something you have to do if your engines don't run on magic sparkle power...
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you do a static fire because on launch day once you hit T+0:00 and you are separated from tower, you are either going to space or you're not. Static fire helps because you can analyse the rocket conditions and system operations to ensure there are no issues prior to actually launching the thing. This gives you time to verify and check data and fix any issues that might arise. Also, you can use the data to know how nominally the systems are operating, so if something happens before you separate from the towe
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> if they're just testing the engines why did it need the payload in place ?
They're not just testing the engines. They are testing everything on the rocket, including communications and power to the satellite. It would be embarrassing if they forgot to charge the satellite's battery (it has to use one before the solar arrays open up). Basically this is a dress rehearsal for launch, where they do everything except let go of the rocket from the pad. Assuming everything went well, it would shut down the
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With their experience built up and rocket design finally(?) standardized, they judged the risk to the payload was small enough to be worth saving an extra day or so of work to do the test without the payload. This is the first time a payload was or would have been harmed by a static fire on the pad.
Doing the test without the payload means after the test they have to lower the rocket, bring it back into the building t
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My guess is that de-erecting the bird and returning to the hanger to install the payload breaks the very interfaces that are part of the static test in the first place. Which (likely) negates the reason for performing the static test. (Not that I understand or even know SpaceX's reasons - nobody else does them routinely, only SpaceX.)
Re:test (Score:4, Interesting)
If you static fired without payload, you'd then have significantly longer between the static test fire and launch (during which something might break) and you'd need to lower the rocket to horizontal to attach the payload and raise it again, again with the potential for breaking something. You'd also have each launch keeping the launch pad occupied for longer.
So, it is a trade-off, and you'd need an intimate knowledge of the rocket and launch operations to know whether SpaceX's choice to test with payload was correct.
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This is correct. They *can* do the static fire without the payload attached - and for many early launches, that's what they did - but it takes longer between static fire and launch. With the launch window coming only three days away, and no incident like this having occurred in approximately forever (they didn't even have the engines lit yet!) saving some time and (presumably) risk by having the payload stacked on the rocket probably made sense... to the satellite owner.
It wasn't even SpaceX's decision; the
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It wasn't even SpaceX's decision; the payload owner makes the choices like that.
That is an interesting bit of information which I was unaware of.
It did not explode. (Score:2)
Most advanced AI to date? (Score:2, Insightful)
There is enough suffering and disease in Africa already, if the country also became infected with Facebook the situation would be unbearable. The Falcon 9 onboard artificial intelligence therefore decided to self-destruct. I think that is incredibly noble.
I warned Musk (Score:2)
it was too soon to replace rocket fuel with Tesla batteries.
Why second stage? (Score:2)
The explosion appears to have started in stage II. You can't test fire stage II, so why would it even have fuel in it?
Matthew 23:12 (Score:2)
A facebook sat, you say? (Score:2)
Anything of value that was lost?
But seriously why don't they make two (Score:2)
satellites every time they make one, as a general rule.
I don't think that would double the cost (or if it does, something's very wrong with the engineer and build process),
and you can just launch the duplicate when the original blows up instead of goes up.
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$60M of the $200M is the cost of launching it.
They take a long time to design and build.
Why not just do what they do now, and start development on the next satellite before the current one is finished?
Then if the launch fails, you don't have to wait for another launch window and pay to send up your then obsolete spare satellite. May as well send up a more modern one.
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Not to mention, accidents are quite rare, so companies like Facebook actually would have launch insurance - if anything went wrong, like this,
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Just imagine him sitting in that payload pod instead of the sat. It's such a nice mental image.