Space accidents and incidents in 2015

“There is much sorrow in many wisdom; and whoever multiplies knowledge, multiplies sorrow ”- as it is written in the book of Ecclesiastes. Surely, this was written by a wise man, but I do not agree with this opinion in relation to the space industry. In my opinion, knowledge here multiplies, firstly, calmness, and secondly, interest. Understanding why this or that accident occurred wears off attempts to make global conclusions in the style of "X can not make rockets and generally bad." And acquaintance with how they analyzed the accident, and how they learned what and why it broke, causes emotions, as when reading a good detective, hiding in dry lines of technical information. I suggest you recall what accidents happened in 2015.

SpaceX CRS-5

The year began with a beautiful babakh when, when trying to return to the barge, the first step of the Falcon 9 crashed against her:



As it turned out, the Mask engineers decided to use an unorthodox technical solution - an open hydraulic system. Typically, hydraulic fluid is used repeatedly, moving between the motor and the pump. In the case of the Falcon 9, the hydraulic actuators were made open and dumped the hydraulic fluid spent in the engine overboard. Engineers made a little mistake in calculating the required amount of fluid, and it ended corny. And without the ability to control the aerodynamic rudders, the first stage was doomed. It is a pity, Musk never showed a video with a simulation of how automation worked, according to telemetry. It would be very interesting to see how the control system tried to fight for a soft landing in such conditions ...

SpaceX CRS-6

On April 14, Musk again pleased us with a second beautiful explosion while landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 on a barge.



In this case, enough hydraulic fluid was poured (I think, even with a margin), but the fuel valve failed. He began to react too slowly to control system commands, which led to developing self-oscillations. The first stage of the Falcon 9 (like the vast majority of launch vehicles) is in unstable balance, the same as if you put a pencil point on your finger and try to hold it in that position. If you haven’t trained on purpose, then after a second the pencil will swing, and your attempts to keep it in balance will be belated. About the same thing happened in this case - because of the slowly responding valve, the control system began to issue more and more active stabilization commands, which instead of stabilizing rocked the step, and it hit the barge with a high horizontal speed, tried to hold on to the gas engines on top (dramatic moment!), but couldn’t, fell onto the barge and exploded. Here is a very interesting video with data added by amateurs, according to which the operation of the control system becomes clearer:

Progress M-27M

On April 29, the next Progress truck launched to the ISS. Messages about successful withdrawal quickly gave way to news about problems on board. And after the publication of the video from the docking chamber of the ship, it became clear that the ship was almost certainly lost. The online community did a great job of wit by putting appropriate music on the video. The No Time For Caution from the docking scene at Interstellar was too obvious, and I personally liked the other two options:





What happened? On May 5, when I described in detail the chronology of events and the materiel, it was only possible to come up with versions. On June 1, Roscosmos published an official release on the results of the investigation. But the press release is written in a completely creepy language, which simply needs to be translated into popular science. The phrase about the frequency-dynamic characteristics leaves us with only one reason - resonance. A bunch of "Progress" and the third stage of the Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicle behaved like a shot glass in this video:


The light blinks so that we can see the fluctuations, this is such a physical hack of creating slo-mo in real time.

First the oxidizer tank burst (at the bottom of the stage, near the engine), then the fuel tank, fragments broke the engine compartment of the Progress, and the rotation was caused by a leak fuel components through holes, or by attempts of the control system to stabilize the ship, for which part of the orientation engines did not work as it should.

New shepard

On the same day, April 29, Blue Origin launched the New Shepard complex - a suborbital ship and a reusable missile. The ship flew normally, and the rocket crashed due to pressure loss in the hydraulic system. Alas, Blue Origin is secreted even more than Musk, and we did not see any savory photos of a rocket crashed into a cake, nor, moreover, a video with telemetry, and we can’t find out anything useful for ourselves.

Proton - Mexsat-1

The sad annual accident of Proton did not pass 2015 - this time on May 16, the Mexsat-1 satellite was lost. Investigation of the accident showed that the cunning bug that had lived on the rocket for decades, but proved to be in 1988, 2014 and 2015, was to blame. After the 2014 accident, additional sensors were installed in the suspected node, which finally allowed us to find and fix this unpleasant defect. More information can be found here .

SpaceX CRS-7

In 2015, the first serious accident of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle occurred with a complete loss of the payload (in 2012 they lost their associated load due to the destruction of the first stage engine, but Dragon successfully reached the ISS).



As I suspected, attempts to guess the cause of the accident from the information available in the early days failed. Type of accident collective intelligence Geektimes guessed correctly - manufacturing defect. But the true reason did not even appear in the list of options, and the option closest to it took second place and received only 18% of the vote. On June 28, at 139 seconds of flight, one of the boost tank mounts broke.


Boost tank mounts

The tank was obviously damaged and lost its tightness. Helium coming out of it raised the pressure in the second-stage tank, which burst, and the rocket collapsed. SpaceX increased work - they announced that they would test each such mount, obviously, they used to check it selectively.

Soyuz TMA-17M

I made the launch of Soyuz TMA-17M nervous on July 22 - for the second time in the last couple of years, one of the solar panels did not open:



Both times the panels were opened from the slightest shock, which, according to the law of meanness, only occurred at the end of the journey - when docking with the ISS . If this goes on, I won’t be surprised if a small sledgehammer is added to the Soyuz toolkit - knock on the case so that everything opens. Our western partners will be delighted with crazy russian's space kuvalda :)

Super strypi

On November 3, at around 60 seconds of flight, the Super Strypi rocket collapsed during its first launch. Alas, no new information has been made public since then, and it seems that we are unlikely to know the cause of the accident.

Soyuz-2.1v - Canopus-ST

The first place in the nomination "the most annoying accident of the year." On December 5, the new Soyuz-2.1v rocket, which launched just the second time, worked wonderfully. But at the booster block, which routinely put two satellites into the target orbit, one of the locks worked incorrectly when the Canopus-ST remote sensing satellite was separated, and the satellite could not separate. And, to make it even more annoying, the second satellite, the dummy sphere for calibrating radars, was successfully separated. Fortunately, this problem is very easy to fix.

Soyuz TMA-19M

The docking with the Soyuz TMA-19M ISS was very nervous. Failed automatic docking system. When trying to manually dock the ship went sideways relative to the docking station, and had to retreat again. Fortunately, the docking was successful the third time.

Short version (time lapse):


Full option:


As for the reasons, they have not yet been published. News agencies write about different versions - the failure of the control system, the failure of one of the engines or even electromagnetic interference from the already docked ship Cygnus. The problem is that journalists are not squeamish about writing any rumors referring to a "source in the space industry." Until the official results of the investigation are published, we can only guess what happened.

Separate publications will be published on the achievements of 2015 and, possibly, plans for 2016.

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