SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Breaks Up After Launch With Space Station Cargo

[MohRokTah]

Rocket science is hard:

SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Breaks Up After Launch With Space Station Cargo

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket exploded and broke up on Sunday just minutes after its launch with a robotic Dragon cargo capsule headed for the International Space Station. It was the third failure of a space station resupply mission in eight months.

The Falcon took off right on time after a seemingly flawless countdown, rising into the sunny skies over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florda at 10:21 a.m. ET. But a little more than two minutes after liftoff, video showed the Falcon disintegrating in a blast.

"We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure," NASA spokesman George Diller reported. Air Force officials said the rocket "experienced an anomaly" 148 seconds into the flight.

Debris from the breakup fell into the Atlantic Ocean without doing damage on the ground. NASA and SpaceX were gathering information about the failure, and details are to be provided at a 12:30 p.m. ET NASA news conference.

...

More at this NBC Link.

[alfredo]

1. Damn

[-none]

2. We were the first to the Moon and back, using Apple]['s and slide rules.

and now we can barely get off the ground?

What has happened to us, US?

[Rex]

4. GOP Congress, they've been trying to kill off NASA for decades.

All that money toward war and all that little money toward exploration.

[Johonny]

5. nothing has happened roughly 2% all launches fail

The Russians, the Chinese, ESA, Japanese, Indians, they all have launch failures. Our launch record is rather good compared to the worldwide fleet and vastly better than the early days of space flight. These people decrying what happen to the US stuff only comes from people that need to look at how often we launch, what we launch and our success record. We don't suck. The only black mark on this is the USAF just certified the damn launch vehicle. Oops. Now there's a mess of work ahead for USAF, NASA, and SpaceX.

[Baclava]

6. SpaceX is a private company contracted by NASA to build rockets

Just pay the Russians, leave hauling cargo rockets into space to the experts.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Try desk calculators and IBM mainframes. Apple came a couple of decades later.

Like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_calculator#Mechanical_calculators_reach_their_zenith

HP introduced an electronic desk calculator in 1968, when the Apollo program was well under way. Prior to that, mechanical desk calculators (looking like overgrown cash registers) were used.

My friend's dad, who worked for a NASA contractor, brought home an early HP-35 calculator from work. That was the first "computer" I ever saw. They cost several hundred dollars when they were introduced in 1972 -- the year of the last two Apollo flights. They were the first pocket calculators to do scientific functions -- earlier pocket calculators were "four-bangers".

[-none]

11. You're correct.

My memory banks are getting old and sometimes get corrupted.

[Kablooie]

3. Sounds like NASA at the beginning of the space program.

everything was blowing up at first.
They gradually got their quality control up to to the extraordinary levels needed for space vehicles.

This is one case where government seems to be more efficient than private industry.

I've been to a JPL open house and you can see the standards and specs for everything are absolutely mind boggling. The assembly room for equipment is one of the cleanest environments on earth and they can machine metal to tolerances so tight that the human eye can't see the join.

[SCVDem]

7. To expect 100% perfection

Is a stretch.

The smallest problem in a two buck part and Boom.

Three booms from two private companies and a country, Russia.

Meanwhile our airbags are defective by the tens of thousands.

Nothing is guaranteed.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. The way the articles seem to describe it

that it happened "moments after launch". It actually traveled for a good 2.5 minutes before the catastrophic failure.

[sjk.fly4ever]

10. It's a sad news!