NASA's Morpheus lander in fiery crash at Cape Canaveral
34 replies, posted
[quote](Reuters) - NASA'S Project Morpheus lander, an experimental vehicle designed with a view toward future U.S. space missions beyond Earth's orbit, crashed and burst into flames at the Kennedy Space Center in central Florida on Thursday.
During a so-called autonomous free-flight test, NASA said the vehicle lifted off the ground successfully but "then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight."
No one was injured in the accident, which followed nearly a year of testing on Morpheus at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But NASA TV footage showed the space capsule engulfed almost totally in flames after the crash, with little left to salvage.
The U.S. space agency said engineers were looking into test data to determine the exact cause of Thursday's accident, but further details were not immediately available.
"Failures such as these were anticipated prior to the test, and are part of the development process for any complex spaceflight hardware," NASA said.,
The hazard field where Morpheus had been scheduled to undergo about three months of increasingly rigorous tests was located at the north end of Kennedy's former space shuttle landing facility.
It was designed to mimic the surface of the moon, with an array of boulders, rocks, slopes and craters.
The accident came as NASA scientists were still hailing the Mars rover Curiosity's decent and landing on the "Red Planet" earlier this week as a "miracle of engineering."[/quote]
[url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/09/us-usa-nasa-accident-idUSBRE8781A220120809]Source[/url]
Video:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQeZqNCisrc&feature=g-u-u[/media]
I've been following the tethered flights of Morpheus for the past few months and was really excited for this test. Sucks, really.
rip that thing
I love how it just unceremoniously explodes after a few seconds
my day is bumbed
shit that explosion was unexpected
[editline]9th August 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=Ithon;37155571]my day is bumbed[/QUOTE]
tests aren't always successfull, they have to fix what went wrong to make it better.
That was cool.
It's good something like that happens during the tests so they can figure out what it is to fix it.
Well, since it crashed, you can't really call it a "lander" anymore can you?
[QUOTE=Forumaster;37155716]Well, since it crashed, you can't really call it a "lander" anymore can you?[/QUOTE]
it's a crash "lander".
Also I was wondering why nobody was trying to extinguish the thing, then it exploded.
Edit: Above beat me to it.
This video summarizes pretty much everything i create with Kerbal Space Program.
Nobody tried to extinguish it because it was going to explode. Cmon now, its like trying to put that firework back up on its stand after you lit it.
I was wondering how this didn't happen from day one, you can't balance it properly with a single thruster in the center.
Somebody didn't spend enough time prototyping in Kerbal Space Program.
To be honest, sometimes you just got to see what happens. Better to have it crash now than with an actual (manned) mission.
looks like NASA's dreams were shattered
e. [i]dreams[/i]
When I read Cape Canaveral first thing I thought of was MiB 3.
Wonder if they have any form of automated way of putting fires out on launch pads, EG water cannons or something similar
It must have taken the wrong pill.
[QUOTE=Techno-Man;37155903]I was wondering how this didn't happen from day one, you can't balance it properly with a single thruster in the center.[/QUOTE]
Of course you can, that's how the LLTV, LLRV, LM, all of those manned landing vehicles and prototypes all used a single engine pointed downward in the center of the vehicle.
[QUOTE=Techno-Man;37155903]I was wondering how this didn't happen from day one, you can't balance it properly with a single thruster in the center.[/QUOTE]
Ahaha. Yes you can. Do you have any qualifications to make this statement? Ever heard of thrust vectoring?
Looks like that went
Up in smoke.
This used to happen to me all the time when I fucked around with thrusters in gmod :v:
misread the title, imagined a huge molten glob slamming into a slurpee shack amidst a crowd of cheerful carnival-goers
Reminds me of Boyscout Model Rocket Day, right into the ground.
When NASA is testing something with a rocket strapped to it, you KNOW it's going to be both expensive and entertaining.
Once again they have no failed to impress us.
"I wonder why they haven't sent out a firecrew to..."
*BOOM*
".......oh."
It even LOOKS too fat to get off the ground in the first place. It would probably work correctly in a low-gravity environment, but getting shit to work with thrust vectoring in Earth's atmosphere is bullshit and fucking hard.
That drone that flies purely with 6-direction thrusters comes to mind.
Reminds me of kerbal space program.
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