alt Hacker NewsVulcan rocket fails during return-to-flight launch, 40 Amazon satellites lost
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Launch stream from ULA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM5A1ZO9oh8
Seems to cut off near the end for some PR video and doesn't mention anything.
That's a success in my books, 40 less pieces of space junk floating about in low earth orbit.
Amazon had a deadline, now waived, to deploy over 1600 satellites by the end of last July. Now they need to deploy over 3200 satellites by the end of July, 2029. They are so far behind they need to buy RocketLab?
Eric Berger reports that the fault is likely in the booster stage, not the Centaur upper-stage and not the solid-rocket motors. The means it's either the Vulcan rocket or (more worryingly) the Blue Origin BE-4 engines. If it's the latter, this might also delay the next flight of New Glenn and possibly risk the timelines of the Artemis program.[1]
Irene Klotz reports that this set of BE-4 engines were modified after the New Glenn pad explosion. Specifically, they modified the oxygen valves, which were blamed for the hotfire anomaly (pro-tip: it's always the fucking valves).[2]
The booster shut down about 40 seconds later than the expected timeline, which implies that it had an extra 40 seconds of fuel relative to expectations. It is possible that the modifications somehow caused an under-performance of the booster, which would doom the mission.
Might honestly be the end of ULA. This is quite a disaster given how shaky everything already was.
And it's another 8 lengths back to Pvt. Smiles (ULA) who is trailing the field ... SpaceX is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine! ... Blue is dropping back ... But SpaceX is all alone!
2020s space race, visualized https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfCMtaNiMDM
Dang it. I feel a sense of despair about yet another failure. We need multiple providers for rockets. I know this is incredibly difficult, endless failures in this difficult world.
Since a lot of the rest of the US space world is struggling to successfully launch, it will be even more of a loss when space x stops the falcon. How much of this is coming from combining and revamping huge existing space companies with a lot of legacy and practies?