What's happening in space (that's interesting)

Yikes, not good for SpaceX since they have been trying to recover from the built up backlog from last years loss. Here’s an actual video of it happening. Something up on the second stage just goes boom during fueling it seems. Happens about 1:11 mark.

Video text:

… there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and it’s payload.

Gnyaaaar!

Man, watching the payload capsule falling. And, BOOM, $200 mil gone poof.

They do insure this stuff.

Was this the recycled booster?

Even if it was, the top part is the part that exploded. And the top part isn’t the part that gets reused.

“We choose [ spaceflight and other impossible things ] not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”

In times of space-related setback I occasionally refer back to JFK’s Rice College speech. I’m so glad no one was hurt today.

http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm

No, new one.

From what I understand a strut that held up the LOX tank failed. It then allowed the tank full of liquid oxygen to drop enough to cause a breach. The LOX vented strongly and a spark might have caused an explosion. If you watch the “anomaly” you will see the second stage blow out from the left side.

That’s what happened with the in flight failure last summer. I haven’t seen anything specific yet about this one yet so anything is just speculation. Would be really bad though if it was the same failure point again.

Damn SpaceX had been on such a roll lately.

It’s pretty much impossible to spin or hide failures in the rocket business.

I was going pick up my ironman Kerbal hard campaign, but now I’m scared I’m going to to kill Jebidah.

Edit: It seems that industry rate for failed rocket launched is about 5%. Evidently SpaceX is 7%, of course, the sample size is pretty small (5 out of 87 last year) and SpaceX has been making more launches.

It’s pretty scary to think that you have to make a saving throw ever ytime you going into Space and 1 (on a D20) is always a failure.

How many of those 5% failures result in explosions? If there was a 1 in 20 chance of dying in a fiery inferno every time you launch I don’t think many people would be astronauts.

The shuttle program flew 135 missions and lost two of them. Not 5% but not that far away.

The Challenger Accident Board discovered that NASA was telling itself the chances of a catastrophic shutle failure was 1 in 100,000. The board discovered it was really like 1 in 200. Challenger blew up on mission #25.

I grew up on the space coast in Florida. I could even see one of the launch pads from my house. I sure saw a lot of launches, far more than just space shuttle launches. I also saw a number of rockets where things went wrong.

There is no way in hell I would get on a modern space craft. I think it is far too dangerous, and while I think it would be neat to be in space, it is just not worth the risk.

Rosetta found Philae!

Wow that is so awesome!

Doesn’t that pretty much guarantee that Philae is infected with an alien virus, lying in wait for us to bring the probe back to Earth?

That’s so great. I’m sure the folks over at ESA are grateful to have that closure.

Here’s something that might be happening in space. Does that count?

One of the more famous challenges of modern science is the Fermi paradox. This is the apparent contradiction between the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations existing elsewhere in the galaxy and the lack of evidence of them. Or, as the physicist Enrico Fermi once asked over lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, “Where is everybody?”

The answer, of course, is that nobody knows. But in 1973, a potential solution was put forward by John Ball, a radio astronomer at MIT. Ball’s suggestion is that the lack of communication can be explained if extraterrestrial civilizations have set us aside, perhaps as part of a wilderness area or a zoo. In this so-called “zoo hypothesis,” aliens must have agreed among themselves to ignore humanity, perhaps to protect us or maybe even to protect themselves.

That raises an interesting set of questions. The galaxy is huge and communication between civilizations is limited by many factors, not least of which is the speed of light. So forging any kind of agreement among alien civilizations would be no mean feat. So how likely is it that extraterrestrials could come to such an understanding?

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Duncan Forgan at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. Forgan has built a mathematical model of the galaxy that simulates how alien civilizations would need to network to forge a treaty to leave primitives, like us, in the cold.