Firefly Aerospace’s first attempt to launch the two-stage Alpha rocket ended in a spectacular fireball. Nor it was never said that setting up a rocket company would be easy.
The 95-foot-high rocket left Vandenberg Space Force Base 2 Launch Complex at 9:59 p.m. EDT on September 2. It was the second launch attempt of the day, as the countdown was postponed earlier for an unspecified reason. During the ascent stage, about two and a half minutes after takeoff, the Alpha rocket “experienced an anomaly” that “caused the loss of the vehicle,” as Firefly Aerospace he tweeted later the same day. There are no reports of injuries.
Photos captured by SpaceNews i NASA space flight show the aftermath of the failed test, with debris gushing from the fireball. It’s not the result anyone wanted, but Firefly founders Max Polyakov and Tom Markusic knew what they were doing when they founded the company in 2014.
The Austin-based firm seeks to provide small and medium-sized rockets, with Alpha “designed to meet the needs of the growing small satellite market.” seconds in the company. The disposable one the rocket is expected to lift 1,000 kg of payload into low Earth orbit and 1,400 pounds (630 kg) in the “highly desirable” synchronous orbit of the Sun (an orbit that allows satellites to cross the equator at the same time each day). Firefly expects to launch two Alpha rockets each month, and each mission will cost $ 15 million.
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But they are not there yet. Apparently, the Alpha rocket did not work as expected during its initial launch, like SpaceNews reports:
According to an overview of the mission distributed by Firefly prior to launch, the vehicle was assumed to reach a speed of Mach 1 67 seconds after takeoff, followed by a maximum dynamic pressure nine seconds later. However, launch controllers did not report that the vehicle was supersonic until 2 minutes and 20 seconds after takeoff, about 10 seconds before the vehicle exploded.
SpaceNews journalist Jeff Foust says the rocket “appeared to fall and then explode.” A statement of Vandenberg SFB made it clear that Delta 30 space launch He “finished” the mission, which he probably did by detecting the rocket’s lower performance. In a later one statementVandenberg SFB officials warned of “rubbish in the local area”, saying any fallen piece of the exploded rocket “should be considered unsafe”.
Alpha did have a payload, although the mission was a test. The cargo included a combination of technical and non-technical products, including cubes, a drag deorbit sail, a plasma propellant, DNA samples, photos and some personal items. Alpha shipped these items for free as part of the Mission dedicated to research and educational acceleration (DREAMS).
In a statement, Firefly said it is still “too early to draw conclusions about the root cause.” Its engineers, with the help of its FAA and Vandenberg SFB partners, are currently reviewing “thousands of terrestrial and flight systems telemetry lines to better understand what happened.” Clearly, not all mission objectives were met, but the company achieved some, including “ignition of the first phase, bearing take-off, progression at supersonic speed.” and “a substantial amount of flight data “.
In fact, we You shouldn’t download too much of Firefly for this release; after all, this is rocket science. Just ask Astro, an aerospace company whose rocket made an unexpected sideways during its failed launch last week.
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