Russian Proton-M Launch Failure
Russia’s Proton Crashes with a Trio of Navigation Satellites, Russian Space Web
“A Proton-M with a Block DM-03 upper stage lifted off as scheduled from Pad No. 24 at Site 81 in Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 2, 2013, at 06:38:22 Moscow Time (on July 1, 10:38 p.m. EDT).
The rocket started veering off course right after leaving the pad, deviating from the vertical path in various directions and then plunged to the ground seconds later nose first. The payload section and the upper stage were sheered off the vehicle moments before it impacted the ground and exploded. The flight lasted no more than 30 seconds.”
New spectacular video:
“During the evacuation, some of the personnel at Baikonur took photos of a reddish cloud spanning over the main road to the facility. In Baikonur itself, the city’s administration advised residents not to leave their homes, deactivate air conditioners and close tightly all doors and windows due to “a cloud of unburned propellant moving toward towns of Baikonur, Akai and Tyuratam.” Fortunately, starting rain apparently helped to dissipate the cloud, Kazakh media reported.”
Marc’s note: No one was hurt, and it appears the town which is 57KM from the launch site is fine. The investigation is already underway. It’s too early to tell how this will impact launches to the ISS. Progress 52 is scheduled to launch on July 24th and Expedition 37/38 is scheduled to launch September 25th. The Proton which launched from launch pad 24 at launch complex 81 crashed near launch complex 200 which is some distance, over 20km, from the Soyuz launch pad in area 254 as shown on the map below.
Ouch.
I couldn’t get the video on that site to play, but it’s available many places on the news.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/s…
http://www.latimes.com/news…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…
Discussion in the NY Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013…
No destruct system. Insane.
When you’re launching over land in an inhabited area, would a trigger-happy destruct system like we use be a good thing?
To what extent does this deterioration of Russian spaceflight expertise impact the quality of Soyuz launches? The redundancy of Commercial Crew capabilities can’t come soon enough for resilient space transportation ofAmerican astronauts to ISS.
No more than the failure of one of the engines on the CRS-1 Falcon-9 impacted on Commercial Crew overall. There must be questions about overall QA in the space industry but not enough to pull the plug.
Well, except that the CRS-1 was not a loss-of-vehicle failure, it was a very-slight-loss-of-performance-margin failure, which is to say, the mission was a success, and it also showed that their design process was validated.
However, Proton is manufactured by Khrunichev.
Soyuz is made by a completely different manufacturer at a different facility, TsSKB, so at the top level, it doesn’t say anything about Soyuz quality.
Nevertheless, I think it WILL be making people nervous, yes. It makes me nervous.
CRS-1 does make me worry that with so many engines, the launcher’s reliability may be reduced, even if it can tolerate a single engine out. You mentioned (at Worldcon last year) calculations suggesting the redundancy doesn’t entirely compensate.
Yes, drop me an email and I’ll send you the paper.
I’m pretty sure that ILS’s people will be sweating until they see the accident report.
While the Proton and Soyuz rockets come from different manufacturers, they are from the same country and are going through the same processing facility at Baikonur. Systemic issues will affect both families of vehicles.
How much longer will it make sense for us to depend upon our Russian partners to provide transportation for human crews and supply missions (Progress) to ISS? When will the risk become too great?
Does Congress understand these risks as it slashes funding for US Commercial Crew options, delaying availability of alternative transportation and thus expanding the length of time on which we will be dependent upon Russian-built and -operated rockets?
I’d love to hear Jim Oberg’s take on this.
You should also be asking does NASA leadership understand these risks as it eliminates the ISS crew rotation function of Orion or refuses to down select the number of CCDev contractors to match the available funding?
Or did the previous NASA leadership understand these risks when it refused to simplify Orion requirements to eliminate the post shuttle gap? Or did leadership before that understand the risks of their failure to initiate timely and effective shuttle replacement efforts?
All parties deserve blame for the current state of affairs in US manned space flight.
Right now we have two competing programs, Constellation and Commercial Crew. We need to downselect to one.
If we do so, and choose Commercial Crew, there will be sufficient funding to keep all three prototypes flying, at least to the point of several full demonstration flights to determine cost and risk of each design.
I’m sorry. You really need to get your facts straight.
For starters, Constellation Program no longer exists as a program. Congress voted to discontinue it.
NASA now has SLS (Senate, sorry Space Launch System) and MPCV formally Orion.
SLS and MPCV programs are completely separate to CCiCap and are totally government whereas CCiCap is modelled on COTS using SAA.
SLS and MPCV are supposed to be BEO and exploration-forcused only whereas CCiCap and COTS are LEO only with ISS cargo and human resupply the focus.
SLS and MPCV are estimated to require tens of billions whereas COTS and CCiCap will total perhaps a couple of billion all up. These numbers are all public record.
The different programs should not be confused or mixed and neither should the funding as they are directed at totally different objectives and should have totally different justifications.
Bernardo, the funding has been slashed by Congress, a Congress dominated by the ignorant-of-all-experience-and-evidence position that we can slash and burn our way to prosperity.
Why would NASA downselect in commercial crew at this point? Does the GOP now see competition as a bad thing? Is the cost-plus budgeting model of SLS/MCPV somehow the better use of funds? Did you miss where NASA admitted that SpaceX developed Falcon and Dragon for, what was it, a TENTH of what it would have cost them under cost-plus?
Bush II started the commercial resupply and crew program, and Constellation for that matter. Constellation never was adequately funded, and so it eventually died. Obama continues to request full funding for this very excellent investment of our public money. For $2/person/year, somehow, I think we can manage it.
Folks:
That wasn’t just a rocket failure, it was a dirty, dirty rocket failure.
Proton M is one of the most powerful launch vehicles flying and it’s first stage is fueled by hydrazine! The worst possible scenario happened next to blowing up on the pad. They had no control over flight and it could have hit anywhere within 20 miles of the pad.
Regardless of what the investigation finds, I think Proton’s days are done. Even the Chinese are working on new launch vehicles that don’t use hypergolic fuel (where fuel and oxidizer ignite on contact).
Since this was a first stage failure, all Proton flights are effected including the new ‘science module’ (an FGB by another name) slated to fly by the end of the year.
tinker
I cant even imagine how many gallons of hydrazine are now in the soil there, not to mention the giant oxidizer cloud. Hopefully it was a hot and windy day to get rid of the bulk of the oxidizer.
Yes, it does look like the days of hydrazine-powered launch vehicles are numbered.
Titan IV is gone. Delta II has been replaced by Delta IV. Ariane 4 has been replaced by Ariane 5.
As you say, the Chinese are moving to kerosene-fueled launchers. And they’ve had a 100% hypergolic launch fleet for the past 40 years!
When the Russians finally finish the Angara, they’ll also be able to handle Proton-sized payloads with a kerosene-fueled launcher.
Anyone else still using hypergolics?
Tom:
A lot still use solid fuel stages. No good for us but a reliable (if expendable) way to send anything else to space. Hopefully, reusability will put an end to solid boosters for good. (Shuttle SRBs weren’t really reusable, just refurbishable.)
I still see hypergolics being used for spacecraft maneuvering for some time to come. That’s where it’s simplicity makes the most sense to protect lives and hardware.
Angara has promise. The Russians even had a ‘scissor wing’ flyback version (mockup) at the Paris Airshow years ago.
tinker
Tinker,
I suspect that the military people will still want hypergolic launchers for their larger satellites, and because they never let go of anything, whether it makes sense to or not.
Personally, I still prefer hypergolics to solids. Basically, cryogenic hypergolics put man on the Moon, so I suspect a lot of people will be reluctant to give them up.
Steve
Hypergolics do have advantages when used on spacecraft. But that’s still a substantial reduction in risk, as compared to using them on the first stage. Much smaller quantities involved.
As for military applications, solid rockets are storable and capable of immediate-launch. Without having to worry about leaks.
The Minuteman and the Trident are both solid-fueled. The French submarine force relies on solid SLBMs. The Topol and Yars are both solid-fueled, and intended to eventually replace older hypergolic ICBMs. The Chinese are also replacing their hypergolic ICBM force with solid-fueled ICBMs.
In other words, it really looks like the major pplayers are shying away from hypergolics. And that was even before this Proton launch failure.
There’s no question that solids will always be the choice for missiles, as opposed to launch vehicles, because when they want it, they want it right away. I was thinking of retaining cryo hypergolics for some first stages because military satellites are often much more massive than civilian sats, and that trend is mostly growing.
As far as non-mil LVs go, I think the world is finally starting to shy away from ever-larger SRBs, which I think is a move long overdue.
Hypergolics are not getting cheaper to service due to the many precautions needed, and they still have problems with reliability in long-duration missions because of the difficulty in making valves that can tolerate their corrosive effects for long periods. A little research in zero-loss (insulated/refrigerated) cryogenic storage could tip the balance to cryos even for long missions.
Granting that this is an ugly failure, I think the initial reaction and the undetailed video are having a greater impact than what we’ll see in the long run. The unfortunate reality is that there is really no alternative to the Proton (in its size and price range) at this time and they can’t just stop doing either the supply flights or the Russian satellite launches that use the Proton, so I think we can assume that as soon as a cause for the failure has been determined the Protons will be flying again and this will be more or less swept under the rug and forgotten. Today’s disaster is tomorrow’s page 10 filler.
Steve:
ISS supply isn’t hampered. Soyuz launches the Progress cargo ships. It is the only vehicle in it’s class the Russians have. Delta IV comes close, Ariane V lofts a few tonnes more. Cost isn’t much of an issue if incidents like this keep happening.
tinker
It should buy some support for Falcon Heavy.
Couldn’t agree more, though IMO SpaceX should develop either a methane 2nd stage or a kick stage for geostationary launches.
For GEO that makes sense, and I have heard Musk is working on methane/lox. For LEO high energy propellants do not provide that much of an advantage over LOX/kerosene.
That would be Raptor, said by SpaceX to be a 650 klbf staged combustion methalox. Might be a bit large for an upper stage, though there has been talk of a Raptor family. Odds are they will power their already stated 7+ meter core (prob. built @Brownsville, Tx) and the MCT (Mars Colony Transport.)
Sounds like fun 🙂
Has there been any/much work on raptor to date?????
What they’ve said overtly was in my previous post, but they’ve finished M1D/M1DVac development (flight engines being tested in the CASSIOPE stage now prepping it for shipment to Vandy). SuperDraco has its pad abort test flight later this year with a launch test in mid-2014.
Odds are the Raptor design stage is well along (M1D and SD in production or preproduction and design guys are doing what?)
As soon as flight SD’s go into production they’ll also have an entire propulsion team with lots time on their hands to start hydroforming metal, if they haven’t already started.
SpaceX is very unlikely to let those design and prop guys sit on their hands, so
Raptor may be a lot closer than many people think.
Have they had a 100% successful test of the Merlin 1D 9-engine octagonal setup yet? I heard there were a bunch of tests but with some aborts from over-temperature conditions and such.
http://www.nasaspaceflight….
Man in one of the pictures it looks like a giant oxidizer (n2o4) cloud is starting to form… scary
So a 1 a week launch rate does not keep failures from happening, at least for Russia. It seems to increase the chance. So SLS goes the opposite direction and has one every 4 years.
SLS will be the safest launcher ever, since it will never fly lololol
This is a repeat of the experience of the US during the 90s. The government (NASA/DoD in our case, the Soviet military in Russia) got out of the Systems Engineering and Quality Assurance game because all the launch vehicle developers wanted to make more profit selling “commercial” launches. As soon as this happened, there were a string of problems with Atlas and other vehicles. Turns out the primes didn’t appreciate what their NASA overseers were actually doing.
Russia is going through the same process now, only 2 decades later. The military recently pulled out of the SE/QA role, and now the designers/manufacturers/users are learning that what those inspectors and reviewers did actually had value.
This process force serious consolidation in the Americsn aerospace industry, and Russia’s is even MORE fragmented with mission concept, science hardware, LV hardware design, LV manufacturing, integration and operator being in different organizations! (At least in America we combine several of these specialties)
Expect the solution to look something like what America did: consolidation of small players to integrate capabilities (design, test and manufacture of rocket engines, which are currently separate) and develop in-house QA competentcies. Prices will go up, not because cost has gone up, but because the cost is no longer born by the military. And much like the US, the Russians will have a launch industry that can develop and fly vehicles independent of the military.
It’ll just be 20-30 later than when we did it.
Nice insight Jeff!
According to other websites the failure is thought to be due to premature separation of an electrical umbilical plate before the booster had reached full thrust. Due to a peculiar failure mode propagation, this caused the rocket to lift off prematurely when not enough thrust was available for controlled flight. An engine steering system failed (due to overtravel?) and a shutdown command was given less than a second later.
This suggests a problem with quality control (the premature movement of the umbilical plate) and with the control algorithm; the rocket should have shut down since it was prior to liftoff. Apparently it lifted off instead.
It had enough lift to lift off, but not have controlled flight?
This is just speculation of course but I’d guess that’s not it. It does seem like a steering failure though. It looks like it leaned and then over-corrected a couple times and then just kept steering the one way after that.