Consequences of the SpaceX disaster
how one accident brings their ambitious, pioneering progress to a halt
Minutes before a test firing of the engines, the second stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames and destroyed both the rest of the rocket and the satellite payload that was mounted on top. Thankfully, no one was injured and fortunately none of the toxic hypergolic satellite fuel has contaminated the site.
The cause is not yet clear. Even the best case scenario – that the problem was with the loading equipment and not with the rocket itself – spells out months of review and repair before the next launch. It’s clear from the video of the accident that the explosion originated from the second stage. The second stage was responsible for the last launch failure of a Falcon 9 in June 2015. If the stage is consistently causing problems, this is reason for concern. The space industry is among the most rigorous with their engineering and problem-solving, and this accident will be studied down to an atomic scale and down to hundreds of thousandths of a second if necessary. However, this work takes time, and nobody wants to risk a multi-million dollar vehicle having a catastrophic and potentially lethal failure, so SpaceX’s fleet will be likely remain grounded until the problem is discovered.
This disaster means that SpaceX will be unable to reach several ambitious targets that they have set for the near future. First of all, many of the planned launches will be pushed to 2017, and the fleet will likely be grounded until the cause of this accident is found and remedied. It also looks unlikely that the first flight of a “flight-proven” booster (a booster being reused after launching and landing) won’t take place in October as planned, although the company whose payload is being launched by the re-used booster remain confident in SpaceX. Additionally, the test flight of the Falcon Heavy – which was meant to take place in early 2017 could be significantly delayed. Finally, Musk was slated to announce the details of his Mars colonisation effort at the IAC in Guadalajara this September, and it’s possible that the short term resolution of this issue takes precedence.
Longer term goals may also suffer: the ambitious plan to land an unmanned Dragon capsule on the surface of Mars in 2018 could be affected. Because this mission needs to launch when Earth and Mars are in the correct alignment, if it doesn’t launch in 2018 it will have to wait an extra 26 months.
The Falcon 9 is probably the best hope for NASA to launch humans into space in the near future, but this accident will mean a further delay to this too. Musk did assert that if there had been humans aboard the Dragon space capsule, the launch escape system would have safely thrown them free of the explosion:
The launch site probably sustained severe damage and repair cannot begin until all of the evidence has been gathered from the pad. After that, major parts of the pad will need to be rebuilt including the transporter-erector which carries the rocket to the pad. These repairs alone are likely to take months, even if SpaceX was cleared to begin flying again. SpaceX is working on another larger pad near the site of the accident, which will be able to support both Falcon 9 and the larger and more powerful Falcon Heavy, although construction won’t be complete until 2017. SpaceX does still have one launch site — on the other side of the country at Vandenberg Air Force Base, although that site is only appropriate for launches into a polar orbit.
This accident is also a black mark against SpaceX’s reliability. Out of a total of 29 launches, this is one of only two catastrophic failures. This failure comes barely a year after the previous failure, and 2/29 doesn’t compare well to competitors such as ULA, whose Atlas V and Delta IV have only had one partial failure each in all of their 64 and 33 launches respectively. However, both the Atlas and Delta families started as NASA launch vehicles 50 years ago, whereas the Falcon 9 is only the second generation launcher, is designed and manufactured completely by SpaceX without government aid, and has the potential for re-use – which other companies are scrambling to emulate.
The other victim of this incident is the satellite carrier whose payload was destroyed. This launch was intended to put Spacecom’s AMOS-6 satellite into a geostationary orbit. From its position over Europe and Africa, the satellite would have provided communications functions which it leased out to other companies, including a 5 year lease of half of the capacity to Facebook. Contingent on the success of this launch, Spacecom was meant to be purchased by Beijing Xinwei Technology Group but now negotiations will have to start over considering the loss of AMOS-6.
There’s a good reason why rocket science is the proverbial definition of difficulty. Rockets harness immense explosive power with infinitesimal precision, and if anything goes wrong at any stage of the rocket’s life that explosive power becomes a hugely destructive force. In the early days of the Space Race in America there were almost as many explosive failures as there were successes. We are in the early stages of a new era of spaceflight and there will be failures – but we should not forget about the incredible milestones that have already been achieved, and I remain optimistic about the future of the space industry.
Update: according to the tweet below, Lars Hoffman (SpaceX’s liaison to NASA) has said that the Falcon Heavy will launch in Q1 2017. The Falcon Heavy is essentially three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together to launch heavier payloads into orbit. In what promises to be an incredible spectacle and feat of engineering, the three boosters will separate and land independently after sending the payload towards orbit. When it launches it will be the most powerful launch vehicle in operation today, and the second most powerful ever (number one will still be the Saturn V which sent Apollo to the Moon). Early 2017 is very soon, considering, and it’s excellent news for SpaceX: they aren’t letting this problem slow their progress.
