6 ms·
India's workhorse rocket fails for the first time in decades
- senatorobama 9y agoIndia had a good run. The technical deficiencies and unsophisticated working environment would eventually result in failures such as these.
- talonx 9y agoCare to cite any sources for these "technical deficiencies" and "unsophisticated" working env?
- StavrosK 9y agoSource: Missile with an apparently very very low failure rate fails once. Them damn Indians and their shoddy engineering is certainly to blame. It's just stereotyping/racism. Flagging/downvoting would be appropriate here.
- krapp 9y ago> India had a good run. The technical deficiencies and unsophisticated working environment would eventually result in failures such as these. Odd. When SpaceX loses a rocket, do you write that off as American technical deficiency as well?
- gaius 9y agoWhen things go wrong for Western companies people absolutely do blame it on cultural factors, yes. Beancounters, pressure on quarterly earnings from Wall St, to name a couple of examples. SpaceX through the sheer force of Elon's will has kept some of this at bay, but he won't be able to forever, and the cold winds are already blowing at Tesla.
- QAPereo 9y ago"Through sheer force of Elon's will..." you don't really believe a word of that, right?
- gaius 9y agoWhy not? A charismatic CEO can get away with a lot, in terms of investors giving them more leeway. Sometimes this is good, like Steve Jobs, sometimes it is bad, like Elizabeth Holmes. Eventually tho' SpaceX will be as constrained by demands for quarterly earnings figures to start making bad, short-term decisions, just the same as most Western corporations.
- jccooper 9y agoOnly if it's Musk demanding quarterly earnings figures. SpaceX is privately held, with overwhelming control by Elon himself, and much of the rest by his friends. While eventually he might be diluted out of control by (very large amounts of) additional investment, that's not going to happen any time soon, and is predicated on being significantly unprofitable for a long time.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- krapp 9y agoI'm not certain technical deficiency or lack of sophistication are valid cultural factors to criticize in the case of India's space program. Having the latter implies the former aren't really issues.
- gaius 9y agoIt wasn't technical deficiencies that killed the UK space programme, was it? Or was it?
- rsynnott 9y agoThere's never been a series of rockets with a significant number of launches that _didn't_ have a failure or two.
- mikeash 9y agoDepends on how you define a "series." Atlas V has no outright failures (there were two anomalies: one placed the satellite in a different but acceptable orbit, and the second still got the satellite to the intended orbit) in 72 launches. Atlas II had no failures in 63 launches. But that is unusual and your overall point still stands. Orbital rockets are inherently difficult and failures are to be expected.
- sctb 9y agoHacker News would do very well without uncivil handwaving generalizations like this, they spark flamewars and we learn nothing. The guidelines ask that you post civilly and substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- templar_muse 9y agoI find it unconscionable that a country with nuclear weapons and a space program still has a caste system, receives foreign aid in the 100s of millions (£) and is 93rd on the social progress index (2017). Get it together India!
- navinsylvester 9y agoWhat is the relevance of this comment to the article?.
- templar_muse 9y ago"space program"
- navinsylvester 9y agoI think you belong to the group of people who think India should look into other things first instead of space program. Sigh.
- templar_muse 9y agoAnd you're suggesting the opposite??
- robin_reala 9y agoIt’s OK to look at multiple things at the same time.
- statictype 9y agoAre you suggesting that every country should look into other things before a space program? Or is India somehow special?
- templar_muse 9y ago
- blckmirror 9y ago41 launches with 2 failures seems pretty impressive to me. I think the current Soyuz (Soyuz-2) is at nearly 70 launches with 3 or 4 failures (some partial) and this is considered one of the most reliable systems made so far. (Obviously not making an exact comparison - PSLV can only lift around half or so as much to LEO as Soyuz). Hopefully they will find the root cause and get it fixed before serious delays to the Indus lunar rover launch are caused.
- rsynnott 9y agoAriane V and current-Soyuz's predecessor would have better track records. But yeah, 2 failures in 41 launches puts it fairly high in the league tables.
- TheAdamist 9y agoThe faring failed to separate trapping the satellite which also may have caused a lower orbit due to extra weight from the faring. With the headline "rocket fails" i was expecting an exploding rocket.
- jccooper 9y agoPayload shroud and other separation failures are actually one of the most common failure modes in orbital launch once past the early space age. It's easy to have problems with systems that you don't or cannot test before deployment.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoClearly someone didn't heed the reminder about ensuring the device is plugged in and powered on. /s
- samoright 9y agoDid you look at the address bar while posting this? It says, "news.ycombinator.com", not "reddit.com"!
- phaemon 9y agoThere are a couple of dead comments that, essentially, made the same argument that I've heard here in Scotland when there was talk of a Space Port being set up: why are you wasting money on this when there are problems with poverty etc right here at home. The response to those arguments, at least here, is simple enough. There are currently about 7000 jobs in the Scottish space industry and in the last two years Glasgow has built more satellites than any other city in Europe. Yet, we have to go to another country to get these satellites launched! And I suppose the choice of phrase, "space industry", is what makes the difference. It can seem reasonable to say, "this country shouldn't have a space program" but it sounds far less defensible to argue, "this country shouldn't have a space industry". And so with India. This particular launch was for the Indian government, but the article mentions the previous record-breaking launch of 104 satellites at once. Of those, 88 were for a company called Planet, "a US private imaging company". And the others were commercial launches for various other countries. Since the space industry is rapidly growing with huge commercial potential, it seems ludicrous to argue that you shouldn't be developing it. It would be like someone 20 years ago arguing that you shouldn't be developing Internet connections when you had poverty issues to deal with. How exactly will avoiding hi-tech industry help that in any way?
- rtx 9y agoWe also got ICBMS out of the program so its a win-win.
- andars 9y agoMore like we got a space program from ICBMs.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoUnless you're launching into high-inclination orbits you really don't want to be launching out of Scotland. Anything going to GEO (quite a large percentage of commercial satellites) needs to be launched from near the equator.
- mikeash 9y ago