Really Rocket Science

8 Comments

• Rocco Fanucci says:

  February 1, 2007 at 5:24 am

  The implications of this failure are significant, as reported in Rapid TV News:

  Disaster to cause massive satellite launch delays
  Chris Forrester

  Tuesday’s SES-New Skies satellite (NSS-8) launch catastrophe from the Boeing ‘Sea Launch’ floating platform ‘Odyssey’ now seems to have created a massive amount of damage to the floating platform.

  As we reported yesterday, SES Global lost the bird late on Tuesday. The exploding rocket has damaged a specially modified vessel that was converted from a Norwegian oil platform, and repairs will take some considerable time. A helicopter crew, which examined the platform after the problem, said there was no fire on the platform.

  If this is the case then Sea Launch will lose six planned launches for this year, all of which will have to find new launch carriers in a market where there simply is no spare capacity. The schedule includes Thuraya 3 telecoms craft for mobile telephony, two DTH spacecraft for DirecTV and EchoStar, plus the giant Spaceway 3 broadband satellite as well as Galaxy 19 for Intelsat.

  There have been two previous problems for Sea Launch, both involving Zenit rockets, but the launchers involved both malfunctioned well away from the platform which was undamaged. Monday’s problems occurred at the point of launch, hence the damage. There was a huge fireball as the Russian-built Zenit-3SL rocket was lifting off at 11.22 GMT on Monday night. The satellite had been waiting for many days while weather conditions calmed. The launch took place from the platform positioned at the Equator on the Pacific Ocean, which is an optimal position for launch and – usually –saves precious positioning fuel for the satellite operator.

  The disaster will almost certainly impact future rocket launches. Russia’s Federal Space Agency, said Wednesday that it “hopes” the Sea Launch project will be resumed, following an enquiry. Established in 1995 the Sea Launch consortium is owned by Boeing, Kvaerner (who built the launch vessel and its companion control ship), ASA of Oslo, Norway, SDO Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzhmash of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and RSC-Energia of Moscow.

  SES New Skies will not be dramatically impacted by the loss as it already has a satellite on station (NSS-703) on station at 57 deg East, and which has a life expectancy to at least 2009. SES also has other satellites in its fleet that it could re-position should the need arise. NSS-8, the lost satellite, would have been one of the very largest communications satellites ever built. It had almost 100 transponders and would have greatly expanded the number of channels available over the Indian Ocean.

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• Rocco Fanucci says:

  February 2, 2007 at 4:41 am

  And now, via ITAR-TASS World Service:

  Booster destruction won’t affect further Sea Launch plans
  

  MOSCOW, February 1 (Itar-Tass) — The destruction of a Zenit booster rocket on Wednesday will not affect further plans of the Sea Launch company, president, chief designer of the Energia rocket space corporation Nikolai Sevastyanov said. Speaking at the 31th academic reading on space exploration, he said, "a regrettable booster accident occurred yesterday; the launch pad is intact. We intend to carry out the next launch on schedule.".

  The Zenit booster rocket blew up after it blasted off from a platform in the Pacific Ocean under the Sea Launch project on Wednesday.  The rocket was to deliver in orbit a communication satellite NSS 8 built by specialists of Boeing Corporation for the Netherlands’ company SES New Skies.

  The lift-off of the satellite, equipped with 92 transponders, was broadcast in real time on the Internet. It stopped as the rocket turned into a huge fireball.  It was the 24th launch of Zenit-3 SL and the first this year.  Zenit-3 SL is a three-stage liquid-propelled rocket, fueled by kerosene and liquid oxygen.

  Nobody was injured by the explosion, a Russian aerospace official told Itar-Tass. The official explained that “before the launch, a launch crew leaves the Odyssey platform and watches the launch from a command ship that is a few kilometers from the launch platform”.  He said that there was no heavy damage to the launch pad.

  An executive of Sea Launch Company, Paula Korn, said that a commission was set up for investigating causes of the incident.

  The Sea Launch program involves Boeing, the Russian Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Ukraine’s design office Yuzhnoye and Norway’s Kvaerner.  An equatorial part of the Pacific Ocean is used for launches. The catapult effect of the area facilitates the delivery of heavier payloads in orbit as compared to other spaceports.

  Another investigating commission has been formed in Yuzhnoye design office in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, where the rocket was designed, the Russia Federal Space Agency’s press secretary Igor Panarin told Itar-Tass.  “We hope that the contingency will not affect the further implementation of the international project Sea Launch,” he said, adding that the commission “will make necessary conclusions”.

  According to information coming to the Federal Space Agency, the contingency happened on the first second after the lift-off of the booster from the platform, resulting in escape of the rocket.  Panarin said that the contingency was unrelated to the Russian-made upper stage.  “The upper stage of the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia was to turn on only on the tenth minute of the flight,” he said.  The explosion of a Zenit rocket on Wednesday has not damaged the Odyssey launch platform, and it remains usable, the press service of Moscow’s Rocket and Space Corporation Energia told Itar-Tass.

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• Rocco Fanucci says:

  January 29, 2007 at 10:46 am

  Postponed again: NSS-8 satellite launch has now slipped to Tuesday, 30 January 2007.

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• Rocco Fanucci says:

  February 1, 2007 at 6:58 am

  via PR Newswire:

  Sea Launch Assesses Status and Plans for Next Steps 

  LONG BEACH, Calif., Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ — Following the unsuccessful launch of the NSS-8 spacecraft on January 30, and subsequent safing of all systems, Sea Launch is now in the process of securing the Odyssey Launch Platform and taking initial measures to determine the root cause and implement necessary corrective actions. Applications for all necessary permits and licenses required to proceed with these activities are also in process.

  A preliminary assessment of the Odyssey Launch Platform indicates that, while it has sustained limited damage, the integrity and functionality of essential marine, communications and crew support systems remains intact. The vessel is operating on its own power and is currently manned by the full marine crew. This team is performing a comprehensive assessment of all aspects of the vessel, including its structural integrity and sea-worthiness, in anticipation of identifying and planning the next steps. The team on the Sea Launch Commander is in excellent condition and is supporting these activities. The Commander incurred no damage during yesterday’s launch attempt, as it was positioned four miles from the Launch Platform at the time of lift-off.

  The Sea Launch partners will be conducting an independent investigation to review relevant data, determine root cause, and develop recommendations for corrective actions. In accordance with established procedures, Sea Launch is establishing a Failure Review Oversight Board (FROB) to review the partners’ findings, conclusions and recommendations. Kirk Pysher, vice president and chief systems engineer for Sea Launch, will chair this board. The main activity of the FROB will commence once the partner-led independent investigation is complete.

  "We deeply regret the loss of the NSS-8 satellite, which was designed to be a significant part of the SES NEW SKIES fleet. We are receiving consistent expressions of confidence in our system and our team from our customers and the insurance community," said Rob Peckham, president of Sea Launch. "We have begun to discuss a plan for a Return to Flight.

  "The safety of our people is our number one priority. The Sea Launch team is the best in the business and will continue to work diligently to understand the anomaly, identify the root cause and determine a corrective course of action. As we move forward, we are maintaining a positive, progressive mind-set and a dedication to excellence."

  Sea Launch is an international launch service provider, based in Long Beach, Calif. Using a floating platform, one of two ocean-going vessels, Sea Launch lifts its Zenit-3SL rocket from a position on the equator at 154 degrees West Longitude. The Sea Launch partners include Boeing, RSC Energia, Aker ASA and SDO Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzhmash. For more information, please visit the Sea Launch web site at: http://www.sea-launch.com .

  We will continue to post updates on this site, as available.

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• Rocco Fanucci says:

  January 30, 2007 at 7:56 pm

   

  From The Australian:

  Satellite destroyed during lift-off

  A COMMUNICATIONS satellite was destroyed today when its booster rocket exploded in a fireball during lift-off from a converted oil rig in the Pacific Ocean.

  Sea Launch, the operator of the Boeing-built Zenit rocket, said no one was hurt.

  The extent of damage to the launch platform was not yet known.

  The commercial NSS 8 satellite, owned by SES New Skies of the Netherlands, was equipped with nearly 100 transponders for high-speed internet, broadcasting and other services.

  California-based Sea Launch is a partnership of Boeing of the United States, Russia’s RSC-Energia, Aker ASA of Norway and SDO Yuznoye/PO Yuzhmash of Ukraine.

  SES New Skies is a unit of European satellite giant SES Global.

  Today’s launch from the equator in the Pacific would have been Sea Launch’s 24th since its debut in 1999.

  The company had one previous failure of its Zenit model, when a mobile communications satellite was lost in March 2000 due to a valve problem in the rocket’s second stage.

  SES New Skies said it was not prepared to comment on potential causes of the mission’s failure and was waiting for the results of an investigation.

  The Zenit rocket was fully fuelled with kerosene and liquid oxygen when it exploded.

  The launch was being broadcast on the internet but the transmission was cut off as a fireball enveloped the platform, Spaceflightnow.com reported.

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• Anonymous says:

  January 31, 2007 at 5:46 am

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• Anonymous says:

  February 13, 2007 at 4:14 am

  Kommersant comes through for us with a scoop of why the launcher failed: it is believed to have been related to a liquid oxygen (LOX) feedline rupture/valve failure, leading to a LOX tank pressurization failure.

  Interstate Russia-Ukraine commission for investigating the crush of Zenit-3SL carrier rocket on January 31 disclosed the preliminary results of its work yesterday. Experts believe that the accident’s most likely cause is the spoilage which happened during the rocket’s production in Yuzhmash R&D center in Dnepropetrovsk.

  Interstate commission for investigating the crush of Zenit-3SL carrier rocket began its work in Dnepropetrovsk last week. The accident happened on January 31, when the rocket took off with a Dutch commercial telecommunications satellite NSS-8 from Odissey sea self-propelled platform of Sea Launch international cosmodrome. Zenit crushed on the first minute of its flight, falling back onto the platform and causing strong fire.

  Experts found that the accident’s most probable reason was the disruption of main feed line of liquid oxygen from the fuel tank to the engine. It might be the evidence of spoilage which happened during the rocket’s production in Yuzhmash R&D center.

  Russia’s Ministry of Defense suspended preparation for launching Zenit-2M carrier rocket with Tselina-2 military satellite. Lockheed Martin corporation of the U.S. said the launch of Atlas-V carrier with six military satellites for the Pentagon, scheduled for February 23, is postponed till the reasons of Zenit crush are officially announced. The matter is that Atlas-V’s primary stage has Russia-produced RD-180 engine installed on it.

  

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• Rocco Fanucci says:

  February 13, 2007 at 9:27 am

  I enjoyed reading this discourse on The Space Review so much, I’d like to reprint them entirely. First, from Mr. Day:

  I write sins, not tragedies

  by Dwayne A. Day
  Monday, February 5, 2007

  Maybe you heard about Sea Launch’s anomaly. Maybe you saw the explosion…

  That’s what Sea Launch called it in an official statement, an anomaly: “The Sea Launch Zenit-3SL vehicle, carrying the NSS-8 satellite, experienced an anomaly today during launch operations. Sea Launch will establish a Failure Review Oversight Board to determine the root cause of this anomaly.”

  If you hadn’t seen the launch video, or the video capture of the fireball, you might have assumed that this was a small problem, rather than the spectacular accident it was. Of course, it’s also worth noting that while they were broadcasting the launch globally on a weblink, they immediately cut the video when the explosion occurred. If they had not been running the video, the general public might never have seen the anomaly at all.

  Sea Launch’s statement can now live in infamy, along with other attempts to sugarcoat failure. But it will never surpass the greatest euphemism for a destroyed rocket of all time, the June 1996 statement released by the European Space Agency when its Ariane-5 rocket blew up. Even if you’re not fond of reading bland press releases, this one is a jaw-dropper: “The first Ariane-5 flight did not result in validation of Europe’s new launcher.”

  If you hadn’t seen the launch video, or the video capture of the fireball, you might have assumed that this was a small problem, rather than the spectacular accident it was.

  The full statement’s a classic: 239 words and not once does it say “failure,” or “explosion,” or “destroyed,” or mention how much money was lost in the fireball. Not once does it mention that the Cluster satellite payload was lost, and along with it the opportunity for important solar physics science—an opportunity that was not realized until many years later. Instead, ESA announced that they would conduct an “inquiry” into what they called an “incident” that “did not result in validation” of the launch vehicle, as if somebody forgot to fill the tank with fuel and the rocket simply did not launch.

  Now to be fair, when rockets fail they always fail spectacularly. There’s no way for them to not fail spectacularly. At the very least they fall out of the sky, even if that happens far out of sight of land. And every loss costs tens of millions of dollars. Any major flight malfunction has serious consequences and there is no way to positively spin the failure.

  But why are these press releases so blandly euphemistic when describing explosions that they essentially seem like lies? The answer may surprise you.

  One would suspect that these statements represent bad bureaucratic impulses to try and spin the story so that failure is not reported as failure. Public relations officers, after all, are paid to make the company look good, to direct your attention to the pretty flowers in the staterooms as the Titanic slips underneath the waves, or to talk about positive fourth quarter earnings even as the company’s CEO goes to jail.

  However, the reality is that the field of “crisis communications” has actually made great strides in the past decade or so. According to a professor who teaches a course in the subject at a large university, many organizations have learned a lot in the past few years about the dangers of mishandling a bad situation. There are numerous examples of companies doing things right—like Tylenol handling a poisoning scare in the 1980s—to companies doing things dreadfully wrong—like Firestone tires denying that their tires could cause blowouts and vehicle rollovers in 2000. (Witness that you can still buy Tylenol on store shelves, but Firestone took a major hit.) The rule that many major companies and organizations try to follow is this: the truth is going to get out, eventually, and trying to cover it up just leads to suspicion and further investigation by the press. Shareholders, the general public, and potential customers have already lost some faith in the institution after the incident, and the important thing is to limit further damage.

  According to the professor, the worst possible initial response to a disaster like a rocket explosion is a “no comment” statement, because it looks like the company is either totally unprepared or hiding something. For this reason, companies and large organizations have pre-written statements intended to cover a wide array of possible events. That way they have something that they can simply e-mail to reporters or put on their corporate website within hours or even minutes after an event.

  The problem in both the Sea Launch and ESA cases was probably a combination of two things: a failure to anticipate specific possible failures, and a poorly-worded statement that provided no room to add language for a specific event. So the Sea Launch statement was pre-written and intended to cover lots of “anomalies”—everything from a fight between two employees in the lunchroom to a rocket exploding on the launch pad. Ideally, the statement should have included a fill-in-the-blank section: “The anomaly resulted in [loss of vehicle/damage to the launch pad/loss of life/etc.].” Of course, there is always a danger in adapting such boilerplate statements in the midst of a crisis, and public affairs officials scurrying to release a statement need to be careful of not repeating the incident depicted in the classic 1979 TV show “WKRP in Cincinnati” when newsman Les Nessman used a boilerplate civil defense warning to alert the populace of tornadoes, substituting the word “tornado” for the word “communist”: “If you see a… tornado invading your community, alert the authorities immediately!”

  While this explanation does not exculpate either ESA or Sea Launch for their lame statements, it does explain the wording. The key, according to the professor, is how the organizations respond after the initial statements. Do they try to cover up and obscure, or are they open and honest? In the Ariane-5 case, ESA followed up its initial statement with a second statement two days later, and this one actually was more honest, titled: “Flight 501 failure- first information.”

  Sea Launch’s follow-up statement, issued on February 1, is not quite as good. It mentions that the launch was “unsuccessful” and that the payload was lost, but it is less detailed and less honest than the ESA follow-up message. Maybe that is due to differences in the cultures of the two organizations or differences in the specific incidents. Sea Launch’s stockholders and their customers will be watching the company closely to see how it communicates in the future.

  In the spaceflight field there is actually a model of how to do things right when it comes to crisis communications: NASA. The space agency has done a relatively good job of handling major incidents and has a detailed set of instructions for what to do in event of a launch accident, including a crisis communications plan in event of a shuttle accident. It was this response plan that the agency put into effect when the Columbia was lost four years ago. The crisis communications plan includes fill-in-the-blank sections to tailor it to specific incidents, including loss of vehicle and loss of life.

  In the spaceflight field there is actually a model of how to do things right when it comes to crisis communications: NASA.

  Of course, the agency only got good at this after a lot of missteps, most notably the Challenger accident in 1986. And just because NASA has a plan ready does not mean that it cannot still make mistakes. Although there is a danger of looking like you have something to hide, there are also pitfalls with being too open and releasing information that may not be properly checked. If an agency has to retract or amend earlier statements, it starts to look bad. In the case of the Columbia accident, one problem that the agency encountered was that in the early days important shuttle officials were spending so much time conducting public briefings that they were not spending enough time on the investigation itself. Agency officials learned from this and reduced the number of press conferences. Even the most prepared organization is going to have to recalibrate its communications policy over time. For instance, it might hold fewer press conferences, or restrict who speaks to the press so that only those with direct knowledge of the facts do the talking and people with secondhand or speculative knowledge do not.

  But in the end, the best policy for organizations involved in spaceflight accidents remains cautious, carefully checked, honesty. The truth may set you free, but as a wag later added, you might not like it very much…

   And now, the reply from Peter Klanowski:

  Letter: Some do show tragedies while others complain about sins

  by Peter C. Klanowski
  Monday, February 12, 2007 

  Dwayne Day’s interesting article titled “I write sins, not tragedies” (The Space Review, February 5, 2007) unfortunately may create the incorrect impression that ESA and/or Arianespace tried to conceal, downplay, or sugarcoat the embarrassing failure of the first Ariane 5 rocket. They did not.

  I agree with Dr. Day’s analysis that the strange press releases sometimes published immediately after launch failures are prefabricated and thus cannot possibly cover all kinds of failures. Sometimes it even works the other way round: for instance, Lockheed Martin on April 30, 1999 issued a statement saying that “The first Milstar II satellite … was successfully launched today from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla. aboard a Titan IV launch vehicle.” It was not—the pre-written statement was published prematurely. As a matter of fact, the satellite never reached its target orbit because of an upper stage failure.

  While it is true that Arianespace’s initial written statement regarding the failure of Flight 501 on June 4, 1996 (“…did not result in the validation…”) left much to be desired, it should be noted that unlike in the case of the recent Sea Launch failure the live broadcast of the Ariane 501 launch was not cut off after it had become obvious that something had gone miserably wrong. Instead, Arianespace continued to show the blast in gory detail. Hundreds of burning fragments falling down from the sky were shown from several camera positions.

  Probably neither a single TV station nor a single newspaper in Europe cared about the press release that was published after the Ariane 5 accident.

  After lengthy footage apparently taken from a balcony somewhere near ground control using a hand-held camera, there was finally a cut back to the control room where Guiana Space Centre director Michel Mignon—speaking through a translator—clearly stated that “for an as yet unknown reason the launch vehicle exploded in flight [at] 4,000 metres height after lift-off, and the fragments fell back in a zone that was protected. I can reassure you there is nobody in these protected areas.”

  Rocket exploded, nobody injured—this is as much information as you might expect less than half an hour after such an incident, isn’t it? Probably neither a single TV station nor a single newspaper in Europe cared about the press release that was published later and which Dr. Day complains about. The media not only in Europe but also in every other part of the world had juicy pictures of the explosion almost immediately after it took place.

  Arianespace acted similarly in the case of another major failure, that of the first “10-tonne” Ariane 5 ECA on December 11, 2002. (It was not as spectacular as Ariane Flight 501 because there was no explosion to be seen—the failure was caused by the second stage at a much higher altitude.) Again the launch broadcast was not cut off, and officials made statements shortly afterwards clearly admitting that the launch was a failure. For instance, Arianespace CEO Jean-Yves LeGall noted that “tonight’s failure is very serious.”

  As far as I know, ESA and Arianespace never flicked the switch if something went wrong and simply stopped broadcasting, even at the risk of getting short-term bad coverage in the form of exploding rockets displayed on almost every TV screen around the world. Compare that to Sea Launch’s recent PR work, especially the cut-off launch broadcast.

  At least Sea Launch hasn’t adopted previous practices of some of the joint venture’s partners. During the launch of twelve Globalstar satellites aboard a KB Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzhmash Zenit 2 in September 1998, the Ukrainian launch commentator kept on reading a prefabricated script describing a normal ascent, leading Globalstar representatives present at the Baikonur cosmodrome to think the flight had been successful while in fact the rocket had exploded only five minutes after lift-off.

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