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SpaceX’s Falcon 1 Rocket Destroyed on its Maiden Flight |
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EL SEGUNDO, CA, March 25, 2006/Satnews Daily/ — The keenly-awaited inaugural flight of Falcon 1 launch vehicle, designed to reduce the cost of space launch, ended in a disaster on Friday when the rocket tumbled out of control and slammed into the Pacific Ocean shortly after its liftoff from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site on Omelek Island near Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands.
The mission, which carried a $6.7 million price tag, also lost its $800,000 FalconSat-2 satellite payload that was built and designed by the U.S. Air Force Academy to measure the effects of space plasma on communication and global positioning satellites.
Designed from the ground up by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Falcon 1 is a two stage rocket powered by liquid oxygen and purified, rocket grade kerosene. SpaceX launched the rocket at 5:30 p.m. EST (2230 GMT). Guzzling a highly-refined kerosene propellant and supercold liquid oxygen, the engine was supposed to generate about 77,000 pounds of thrust and accelerate to 17,000 mph (25 times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes.
A webcast video camera mounted on the Falcon 1 showed the rocket ascending skyward on the power generated by its Merlin main engine. But shortly after, the video from the rocket appeared to show a rolling motion before the feed was lost. Officials said later the rocket slammed into the Pacific Ocean moments after liftoff.
“We had a successful liftoff and Falcon made it well clear of the launch pad, but unfortunately the vehicle was lost later in the first stage burn,” announced SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk on the company website. “More information will be posted once we have had time to analyze the problem,” he added.
Taking more than three years to develop, Falcon 1 was intended to shake up rocket services by undercutting other players in an overcrowded launcher market. If successful, the inaugural flight would have made it in history books as the first privately developed, liquid fueled rocket to reach orbit and the world's first all new orbital rocket in over a decade. Its main engine, Merlin, would have been the first all new American hydrocarbon engine for an orbital rocket to fly in 40 years and only the second new American booster engine of any kind in twenty-five years.
In addition, Falcon 1 would have been the only rocket flying 21st century avionics, which require a small fraction of the power and mass of other systems and would have been the world's only semi-reusable orbital rocket apart from the Shuttle. But most importantly, Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, would have been the lowest cost rocket providing the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world.
But making it in history books is now the least of SpaceX’s concerns as it struggles to rebuild its reputation and attempt to hold on to its existing nine launch contracts worth nearly $200 million.
But SpaceX spokeswoman Gwynn Shotwell told reporters on a conference call: “We do know that the vehicle did not succeed after that,” she said. “Clearly this is a setback but we're in this for the long haul.”
SpaceX is the third company founded by Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, the world's leading electronic payment system, which sold to online auction giant eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. In 1995, Musk co-founded Zip2, which sold to Compaq Computer Corporation for more than $300 million. A theoretical physics graduate, Musk dreams of human voyages to the planets. His setting up of SpaceX with the goal of vastly reducing the cost of rockets sparked new life into the space program.
Expecting that it can compete in the launch market, Musk sued Boeing and Lockheed in federal court in California in November last year, seeking to prevent them from combining their rocket units in a joint venture called the United Launch Alliance, which would have a lock on $32 billion in Air Force launchings through 2011.
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