SpaceX says that it has discovered the cause of the failure that doomed its Falcon 1 rocket on Saturday. The new Merlin first-stage engine that founder Elon Musk praised as the major achievement of the failed flight may have performed a little too well.
The new engine added a more thrust to the first stage than the one used on the previous flight. This caused the first stage to ram into the second stage after the two segments separated at 2 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight, Space.com reports.
“We have quite a definitive understanding of what went wrong on the last flight,” Musk told reporters in a teleconference, adding that the timing error was on the order of seconds. “If we were to increase that gap by even a second or two, this problem would not have arisen.”
Yep, that’s all it takes. A mere second to destroy a multimillion-dollar rocket and consign its payloads to a watery grave. Musk and his team are now learning the difficult lessons that every other rocket pioneer has learned before them.
Rocketry is a much different field from his previous gig in software development. One can accumulate a fortune selling programs that are full of bugs, incompatibilities, and security holes that hackers can drive a Mack truck through. It’s relatively easy to release upgrades, patches, and security updates for software that may be used by millions of people.
The rocket business is the opposite of all that. Your hardware is full of fuel that has a nasty tendency to slosh, leak and explode. Engines must perform flawlessly under the most extreme conditions. Safety margins are razor thin; even minor corrosion can doom a flight. Testing is expensive, and customers relatively few.
In short, the industry demands a level of perfection that SpaceX is still trying to master. There’s nothing unusual here; rockets have a tendency to fail often during development, and periodically in operational flight. But, it remains an open question as to whether Musk will be able to complete his quest for the industry’s holy grail - a rocket that is both cheap and ultra-reliable. That prize has eluded rocket developers for 75 years.
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