Indian space program hit by another launch mishap
spaceflightnow.com
spaceflightnow.com
Here's a link to video of the explosion - eerily reminiscent of Challenger :( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLO-XoDkBM&feature=playe...!
Falcon9 has had how many launches? and none were heavylift, they were all medium lift. (The answer here is two.)
GSLV has had a 4 for 7 success ratio.
Challenger was the 25th mission, Columbia was the 107th.
Apollo 1 (which wasn't named Apollo 1 until later) was the only catastrophic failure, Apollo 13 being a successful failure. Apollo 6 experienced problems, missed its intended orbit, failed the original mission, but not catastrophically. Ariannespace has launched 200 missions, I believe 1 catastrophic failure, 2 non-catastrophic failures.
In 2008, SpaceX had a failure two minutes into launch on their Falcon 1 platform. In 2006 and 2007, they lost two, with the latter making it to orbit, but being lost after five minutes.
When SpaceX has more than two launches under their belt with the Falcon 9, then I think we can champion the success over other designs.
SpaceX uses a vertical process, everything is done in-house..India outsources the rocket motors from Russia, etc..
SpaceX founder's thesis is that using a vertical process you have the opportunity to reduce both costs and failures..
In fact SpaceX's percentage of failures to successes has decrease which was one of the founder's predicts of the thesis being correct.
India uses the same engines that the Russians have used for their Progress supply ships and Soyuz Rockets. Tried and true, numerous launches and successes behind them - a design that has been mostly unchanged in the last 30 years.
There are two parts to Elon Musk's thesis. 1) vertical process is more reliable - so far, 66% launch success rate. 2) Space cargo would be one tenth the price of existing solutions. One needs only review the Iridium contract to realize that $452 million is not one tenth of Arienespace's bid - it is about 105%. So, that cost savings is not being passed through to the US taxpayer, or, his estimate of 10% of the cost of conventional heavy lift systems was a bit overzealous. In addition, their bid for the ISS resupply contract exceeds the Progress supply flight costs.
In order for any solution to be 10% the cost of an existing solution, you have to get a rocket to escape velocity with less fuel, a more efficient engine using 10% of the fuel or, fuel that is 10% the cost of existing fuel, or some combination thereof. I don't believe rocket technology can become efficient enough to meet those claims.
Even the Delta IV which is the Dragon's direct competitor, had 18 launches, with one partial failure where the satellite didn't make orbit. One might contend that the Falcon project would need 36 more successful launches before he could say his process is more reliable than the Delta IV platform. If he compares it to Ariennespace, he's got another 400 launches to go.
I think it's clear that fuel costs are not the major part of the cost of a launch to orbit. Development, support, and manufacture of the vehicle itself are much more important, and those are areas that seem ripe for innovation, which is why SpaceX can hope to achieve major reductions in cost as they ramp up flight frequency.
He's using a 40+ year old design for his engine (with modern equipment). His engine doesn't consist of fewer parts, it has a large R&D/Engineering budget, and carries with it the same launch pad staffing/rental fees that any other launch must have. The only place he can really optimize his solution is more efficient engines, cheaper fuel or, a much more reusable system. At this point, only the first booster stage is reusable and recovered which is possibly the least expensive part of his system. As his avionics gear must continue with the launch vehicle, it becomes unrecoverable.
While I'm only an observer from afar, I believe his heavy lift capabilities will result in more fuel being required to make escape velocity. There is a reason that most heavy-lift rockets use solid rocket boosters.
I really hope that they can bring down the cost of putting cargo into space. From what I see now, I don't see him doing anything significantly different from Ariennespace's approach which can recover/reuse the booster stage.... which brings us back to the only real thing he can do to reduce cost is improve fuel efficiency/fuel cost.
Really, I don't think there's any simple thing you can point to and say "That's what they're missing". It's just too complex an undertaking for that. In any case, I wish them all the best of luck.
Gotta write more unit tests. I'm completely serious, I wonder what their process was.