Adumbration

Or, The rocket's red glare bursting in air

I wrote recently about how the prospects of space travel include the chance of going out in a blaze of exploding rocket fuel, which risks are in the news recently with the loss of three more GLONASS satellites that were sitting atop a Proton-M rocket set to go at Baikonur Cosmodrome.  Here are a few other tidbits of news I collected in the last couple days.

The basic story was linked to me through my AIAA news feeder Tuesday morning, which started with the headline "Proton Rocket Crashes During Launch" and included this link to NASASpaceFlight.com, and others that show the real-time televised imagery of the rocket going out of control shortly after launch, breaking up in the air and exploding into a fireball on the ground near the launch pad.  Separately I discovered that the Atlantic linked a different shot of the event, with sounds from the launch and explosion (characteristically delayed from the imagery due to the distance separation) and what might be weeping by a witness. 

It's a bad day in the satellite business when they experience dramatic failures such as this.  The satellites are a complete loss, of course, and that cost is borne in the resources spent in their original design and construction, but also in the time lost due to having to make replacement satellites.  Such losses can have further adverse effects when the satellites are part of a constellation such as GLONASS (or GPS, and other systems that aim to provide geolocation, communication, or remote sensing services around the world), when the full provision of those services depends on the full availability of the complete satellite system. Research satellites heading to other planets have the additional problem that planetary alignments are a function of long orbits around the Sun, which reduce the options for a new launch once the root cause is determined and corrected.

While satellites are known for their share of issues, and sometimes the satellite interface to the launcher can be the underlying failure, the early onset of problems with this launch make it seem most likely in this case that the root cause was with the Proton-M launch vehicle.  No matter what that root cause turns out to be, we can be assured of a substantial period of time to be taken to review all the data, time that no additional launches will be conducted for that type of vehicle.  This case also has the problem of clean-up at the launch site, including the possibility of injuries at the scene.  The crash occurred so close to the pad that there may very well be supporting infrastructure that was damaged or destroyed, which will also take time and resources to repair.

For commercial satellites, the launch failure is often insured by the likes of Lloyd's of London, who are paid a premium to accept that risk, but each such event causes the names in those enterprises to reassess their risk exposure and often increase premiums to compensate for the greater perceived risk exposure.  This will make it more expensive to plan launches on the Proton and related vehicles, and may have some effect on the insurance costs on other vehicle types.

But here’s a weird twist from the news on Wednesday morning, from the LA Times report describing rising concerns about the capability of Russian launch vehicles:  These paragraphs summarize a few of the recent problems with Proton launches, and give a somewhat frightful impression of what might happen whatever root cause is determined, frightful especially when you follow the Itar-Tass link to find that this is a criminal investigation.

Another Proton-M failed in August 2011, an incident blamed on a control system malfunction, and complications with the Briz engine on the rocket scrapped a Proton mission last summer. In December, a booster failed to lift the Proton to its planned satellite deployment position, necessitating a second mission to put the satellite into the correct orbit, the Russian space agency Roskosmos reported at the time.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered his deputy, Dmitry Rogozin, to set up an accident investigation team, Itar-Tass reported. The news agency quoted Medvedev spokeswoman Natalia Timakova as saying the prime minister, alarmed at the loss of 10 satellites in seven rocket failures in little more than a year, had demanded a list of “the guilty persons,” including high-ranking officials of Roskosmos.  Tuesday’s Proton-M launch was the fifth so far this year and also the fifth failure of the rocket since December 2010, according to Space.com. 

The Proton-M rockets, developed during the Soviet era, are produced at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center in Moscow. The program has also been plagued by corruption allegations, and the rocket’s chief designer was fired last year after a fraud investigation.

The following pair of blurbs forces a bit of cognitive dissonance.  The Christian Science Monitor reports "Russian space scientists say the series of accidents that has beset Russia's space program is probably not due to any flaws in the basic technology, which is mostly tried-and-true designs from the Soviet era. Rather, the problems probably stem from quality control and human-factor issues that have emerged in recent years as Russia scrambles to become a major spacefaring player without the benefit of the USSR's vast industrial base and huge corps of trained space professionals."   Meanwhile, in NPR's “The Two-Way” blog report we have Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who told them "that he doesn't think the accident poses a risk to American and Russian astronauts, who depend on a different rocket known as Soyuz to get to the International Space Station. The Soyuz is built by a different manufacturer and uses different parts."   I would venture to say that quality control and human factors issues are independent of the hardware and more likely to be systemic in the Russian space launch industry.

Finally there is a report that reminded me of the outcome several years ago of when US persons tried to help figure out what caused a Chinese launcher to fail.  The LA Times quotes William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations to say "Should they request it, NASA is prepared to assist Roscosmos in failure analysis".  How exactly they plan to do so in the face of US export restrictions on rocket technology is unexplained.