Falcon 1 suffers another setbackBY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: August 3, 2008;
Updated following news conferenceThe Falcon 1 rocket, a sleek black-and-white booster built to usher in an era of low-cost space travel, was bitten by failure for the third time in three tries during a dramatic Saturday night launch from the central Pacific.
Disaster struck about two-and-a-half minutes after a seemingly picture-perfect blastoff at 11:34 p.m. EDT Saturday (0334 GMT Sunday) from the rocket's launch site on Omelek Island at Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean.
"Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together," said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and chief technical officer. "This is under investigation."
<snip>
Lost aboard the Falcon was the U.S. military's Trailblazer satellite, two small NASA payloads and a cache of cremated human remains, including the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James Doohan.
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http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/003/ Yeah, I know it's only about a quarter-ounce or so of his ashes, but still! It's like finding out the hearse carrying your loved one to a funeral drove off a bridge and into the ocean and the body was lost!
So either the second stage ignited with the first stage intact, or it didn't. I imagine in the first situation the first stage would explode when the second-state engines burned through to the fuel tanks, and in the second situation the rocket would simply plummet to the ocean at a sizeable fraction of the speed of sound.
:-(
I hope the second happened. Maybe they can recover the ashes and try again later on.
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