Did we ever get any more after-action info on what happened? Only new info I’ve seen is an estimate that stage 2 blew up over the south Pacific somewhere, I forget what the story said.
Unfortunately not. It’s been confirmed that stage 2 blew up due to the Flight Termination System, whereas stage 1 did not–but no details on the why of either. Just speculation about fluid hammer effects and otherwise.
There was a huge piece of stage 2 left over after the FTS, and there was some concern that the FAA might not like that, but it’s unwarranted. The main requirements are as follows:
D417.3 Flight termination system functional requirements
(a) When a flight safety system terminates the flight of a vehicle because it has either violated a flight safety rule as defined in § 417.113 or the vehicle inadvertently separates or destructs as described in section D417.11, a flight termination system must:
(1) Render each propulsion system that has the capability of reaching a populated or other protected area, incapable of propulsion, without significant lateral or longitudinal deviation in the impact point. This includes each stage and any strap on motor or propulsion system that is part of any payload;
(2) Terminate the flight of any inadvertently or prematurely separated propulsion system capable of reaching a populated or other protected area;
(3) Destroy the pressure integrity of any solid propellant system to terminate all thrust or ensure that any residual thrust causes the propulsion system to tumble without significant lateral or longitudinal deviation in the impact point; and
(4) Disperse any liquid propellant, whether by rupturing the propellant tank or other equivalent method, and initiate burning of any toxic liquid propellant.
Nothing in there about blowing the vehicle to tiny bits. It’s a system for terminating flight, after all. Nothing more.
Seems like it’s for terminating powered flight. Falling out of control toward the ocean is still “flight” 
No, that’s just falling with style.
I thought orbit was falling with style. Or falling and missing the ground, at least.
So an event horizon is photons falling with style?
“There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Do you personally think they will achieve the Artemis 2 crewed flight around the moon in 2024? What would be your estimation of the odds?
So you mean SLS/Orion Artemis 2? Slated for launch in November 2024, but refurbishment of the Orion capsule will likely push it out to 2025. I don’t think Artemis 2 has any connection to SpaceX.
Artemis 3, including the HLS from SpaceX, is still scheduled for December 2025. IMO, that date will not be hit. SpaceX is a LONG way from landing HLS on the moon. I would not be surprised to see in-flight refueling still being worked on in that time frame. I would make a rough guess that Artemis 3 will be in the 2026-2027 time frame. Maybe a little later.
No, I am not talking about landing on the moon again, I mean the first flight around the moon, as in this article where the crew is presented. I can imagine that with the presidential elections taking place in November a flight would be influenced by all kinds of external considerations, and I would be interested in opinions in general, but specially Dr.Strangelove’s. I know it is a bit out of the scope of this thread, but related enough that I hope my question is not considered a hijack.
The first part of my post addressed Artemis 2. Currently slated to launch at the end of 2024, my understanding is that delays in refurbishing Orion will likely push that launch into 2025. Knowing Boeing’s latest performance, I’d say late 2025, but they are saying first quarter most likely.
I’m also interested in Dr. Strangelove’s take.
To be honest, I don’t have any great insight here either. SLS has flown, and Artemis 2 still uses the Block 1 version. So probably no delays on the rocket side.
Orion is the long pole. And I agree that Boeing’s performance doesn’t fill me with confidence. They’ve apparently built a capsule which is impossible to service without disassembling the whole thing–a PDU (Power/Data Unit) has failed already and NASA decided to ignore it since it would take a year to fix. There is plenty of remaining redundancy, but still–why did they build it that way?
Artemis 1 was a success, but didn’t fully test the life support systems, and they won’t be tested in orbit until the actual crew launch. This seems insane to me, but when launches are a few billion a pop, I guess that’s the way things go.
It’s not impossible for everything to go to plan, and as long as they don’t run into any roadblocks, I guess 2024 is potentially in the cards, but I think it’s much more likely that there will be some issue which should be minor but ends up delaying things by 6 months or a year.
Sounds about right. Orion’s heat shield did not survive the last mission unscathed as it was supposed to. A new one had to be installed and was just finished in August. I guess they are going to fly it with people without testing that, just as they plan to fly people without first testing the life supprt system.
That article has a timeline of Orion issues that start in 2014, when it was first launched on a Delta IV. That it’s still not ready for space almost a decade later is a bit of a disgrace. It’s a fricken cpsule. Not that they are easy, but we’ve been building them for a long time. No excuse for the horrific numbers of failures, design errors, and delays in that program.
I noticed Boeing didn’t even bother to bid on the latest fixed-price contract they were offered.
You’d think the last half of that statement would be, “…until we finish revamping the company to make it more competitive”, but apparently they are happy enough to just latch their beak onto lucrative cost-plus contracts and ignore the growing demand for fixed-price contracts. If they keep that up, they are a dead company walking.
This is why you need a healthy entrepreneurial economy. These ossified big contractors are increasingly uncompetitive and lack the ability to innovate quickly, and especially in disruptive ways. As Elon says, they have grown too full of MBAs and too few people in upper management are product people. They spend all their time on finances, and little time trying to build better products - especially if doing so is hard and will create temporary pain.
Looking at where Boeing is going, it seems like they’d rather fail or be bailed out than do the hard things required to make them competitive.
Boeing does have a point about fixed-price contracting: It only works if the requirements don’t change after contracts are signed, or a process needs to be in place to add the cost of changes. But governments are control freaks, and NASA’s budget and demands change at the whim of regulators, and they often push those new requirements down on contractors after contracts are signed. That’s why cost-plus came along in the first place.
So if we want fixed-price contracting, the government has to learn to let go of control over projects. They did that with SpaceX and other newSpace companies, They tried to do it woth Boeing, but Boeing’s entire bloated structure is built around cost-plus contracting, and they just can’t do it. I think they have lost momey on every fixed price contract rhey’ve signed in the last few years.
Both of those sound insane to me. Even back in the Cold War Space Race, it was crazy, but at least there, we had a reason to be in an all-fired rush. Now, if it takes more time to test it, well, take more time. It’s pretty basic engineering that when lives depend on something, you test it as fully as you can without the lives first.
Yeah, SpaceX is generating a lot of impressive explosions, but that’s because they’re doing the damned tests.
I can’t blame Boeing for the life support stuff, though. It’s actually Airbus that’s building the service module, which contains the long-term life support equipment.
According to them, Artemis 1 did provide a nitrogen-only atmosphere. They say that the O2 and N2 systems are similar, and that testing the N2 system on orbit is similar to testing the O2 system. Ground testing will cover the differences. I am skeptical.
SpaceX was testing their life-support systems all the way back in the Dragon 1 days. It wasn’t human rated, but it was good enough for rats. Unlike Orion, which would have made a great euthanasia chamber.
Later, with the Crew Dragon, they did an unmanned flight with the final life support system, and then a short flight with just two people, and then finally a normal flight with the full complement. Progressive testing, the way it should be done.
Oops–that should be Lockheed-Martin, since they’re the primary contractor for Orion. I mean, I can’t blame Boeing either, but they were never in the running, so it seems unfair to single them out 
.
Boeing does deserve heaps of blame for Starliner, but that’s something else entirely.
Sorry, thst’s probably my fault. I went into a rant about Boeing right after talking about Orion.
Looks like IFT-3 might get a propellant transfer test:
Obviously, they aren’t transferring between vehicles, so it’s unclear what this test will entail, but there are lots of internal things they could test. Including just getting a better grasp of internal fluid dynamics as they subject the vehicle to various accelerations. They might also transfer fluid between the header tanks and main tanks, or vent some propellant into space.
Or carry an expperiment onboard with a couple of tanks and the proposed transfer hardware. You could probably just transfer liquid nitrogen as a proof of concept.
If their O2 systems are similar to their N2 systems, that really scares me.