Falcon 9 aborts automatically at T minus 0
A SpaceX launch attempt today to put sixty more Starlink satellites into orbit aborted at T minus Zero when the rocket’s computer software shut things down just after the engines began firing.
I have embedded the video below the fold. According to the broadcast, they had “a condition regarding engine power,” suggesting that one or more of the Merlin engines did not power up as expected and the computers reacted to shut the launch down because of this.
Not surprisingly, they have not yet announced a new launch date.
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A SpaceX launch attempt today to put sixty more Starlink satellites into orbit aborted at T minus Zero when the rocket’s computer software shut things down just after the engines began firing.
I have embedded the video below the fold. According to the broadcast, they had “a condition regarding engine power,” suggesting that one or more of the Merlin engines did not power up as expected and the computers reacted to shut the launch down because of this.
Not surprisingly, they have not yet announced a new launch date.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Most of the time I don’t like the notion of humans being ‘out of the loop’ for things like this. But given how fast the onboard computers shut things down, I do see the appeal of having such a quick response.
There’s pretty much no possibility of human in the loop for most of the T-0 conditions, things happen too quick, and holding the rocket on the mounts long enough for a human to evaluate things and make a decision is highly undesirable. One of my college compsci classes actually had a fascinating lecture series on the design of the controller logic of, if I recall correctly, one of the later Delta launchers. They had to go so far as to have decisions being made in the engine controller itself, because sending the raw data behind that decision the extra few meters to the main rocket controller imposed too much lag, and also required more bandwidth (and thus more heavy cable and interconnects) than they really wanted to route through that part of the rocket. I can only imagine how that scales to 9 not to mention 27, Merlin engines.
David–
Great factoids!
(Does that Lecture, exist anywhere?)
If I’m recalling correctly— light travels 1 foot in 1 nanosecond.
Electrical signals theoretically propagate at the speed of light but that depends heavily on the type of cable through which it’s running. (as you noted)
IIRC, when they built the first Cray supercomputer, propagation delay along the wires was a major consideration. One of the reasons why that computer was circular in shape was to reduce the length of the interconnecting wires.
Grace Hopper, the Navy officer who invented the COBOL programming language, used to hand out “nanoseconds” to her students. They were one foot lengths of wire.
“light travels 1 foot in 1 nanosecond.”
Spot on!
(300,000,000 m/sec) / (1,000,000,000 ns/sec) = 1/3 m = about a foot
Andi-
IIRC– for the Cray, no critical connections are more than 1 foot apart. (didn’t this come up ‘like a year ago for something else?)
Tangentially related– “Krytron,” an extremely fast switch used for early RADAR, and to trigger a symmetrical implosion detonation for nuclear weapons.
Diane–
I really enjoy your ‘inside-baseball’ tidbits!
They should have known not to try to launch on March 15th.
Beware the Ides of March.
Diane Wilson-
In later years, as computers got faster, a nanosecond was too slow. So Hopper started handing out packets of pepper. A flake of pepper represents the distance light travels in a picosecond: one trillionth of a second.
To a designer of modern integrated circuits, a nanosecond is a really, really long time. On the other hand, ten picoseconds, now that’s pretty speedy.