SpaceX is still trying to find a theory that fits the data transmitted back to Earth on June 28 as its Falcon 9 rocket failed 139 seconds after launch.   It hopes to have preliminary findings by the end of this week as it works to establish an extremely detailed timeline of events.

SpaceX founder, CEO and lead designer Elon Musk spoke at the 4th International Space Station R&D conference in Boston this morning.  The conference is organized by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) in cooperation with NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS).  It continues through Thursday.  He participated as part of an on-stage  “conversation” with NASA ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini

Musk’s message this morning repeated what the company said last week — there was an overpressure event in the upper stage (or second stage) liquid oxygen tank, but apart from that, the data do not fit any known theories of what could have happened.

Calling the failure a “huge blow to SpaceX,” he emphasized that “whatever happened is totally not simple or straightforward.”   A “super detailed timeline” at the millisecond level is being generated to determine precisely what happened.  They are comparing video taken during the launch with data that was received.  The timeline must account for each millisecond between when a sensor took a reading, the data got encoded to a data packet, the packet was transmitted to the ground, and received on the ground.  Because the data do not fit any known theories so far, they are also considering whether there might be data measurement errors.

Suffredini asked whether there were any hints yet, but Musk declined to answer because there was media in the room and he did not want to say anything that “turns out to be a misunderstanding of the situation.”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket failed while attempting to send a Dragon capsule full of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station (ISS) under its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA.  This was the seventh mission in that series — CRS-7 or SpX-7.   It was the third failure of cargo missions to the ISS over 8 months:  an Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Orbital ATK) Antares launch of a Cygnus capsule on October 28, 2014; the Russian Soyuz launch of the Progress M-27M spacecraft on April 28, 2015; and this Falcon 9 launch of a Dragon capsule on June 28.

The conference is for the community that conducts research aboard the ISS and Suffredini reassured them that the ISS itself is healthy and still open for business.  However, he acknowledged that the failure has a “big impact to us,” and while the ISS program “always assumed we’d lose one or two” cargo flights, “never in my wildest dreams” did he think three would fail in such a short period of time.

Nonetheless, one must play the hand that is dealt, he continued, and the program is resilient.  The Russians now have launched the next in the Progress series, Progress M-28M, which successfully docked with the ISS on Sunday.  Japan’s HTV cargo vehicle is being readied for launch on August 16.  Suffredini said NASA did make changes to the supplies that HTV will deliver because of the CRS-7 failure, but the research component is relatively unchanged.  Orbital ATK plans to launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in December while updating its Antares rocket with a different engine.

Suffredini conveyed optimism and enthusiasm for the potential of the ISS for research that will benefit people on Earth, calling it the “next dot com” that is worthy of the challenges it presents.

In a panel discussion following the Suffredini-Musk conversation, Bill Gerstenmaier,  NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, similarly praised the potential of ISS, but also stressed a theme he often expresses these days — that ISS has a finite lifetime and the key question is how to prepare for the next step since he does not anticipate that the U.S. government, at least, will build another ISS.

Russia’s Progress M-28M robotic cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station at 3:11 am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) this morning (July 5), a little over two days after it was launched early Friday morning EDT.

The cargo vehicle, called Progress 60 or 60P by NASA, is delivering 1,940 pounds of propellant, 106 pounds of water, 106 pounds of oxygen, and 3,133 pounds of food, parts, supplies and experimental hardware.

NASA calls it 60P because it is the 60th Progress mission launched to support ISS, an indication of how often these spacecraft take supplies to the ISS crew.  They are so routine that they often get little notice, but the previous Russian flight, Progress M-27M, failed.  Two U.S. cargo spacecraft also failed over the past eight months:  Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Orbital ATK) Orb-3 mission on October 28, 2014 and SpaceX’s CRS-7 last Sunday (June 28). 

Although there were four successful cargo flights over that 8-month span (two Russian, two SpaceX) and NASA said the crew has plenty of supplies through October, the failure of three of the four ISS cargo systems in such a short period of time was worrying.  

The fourth system is Japan’s HTV and the fifth in that series, HTV-5, is scheduled for launch next month.

The successful docking gives everyone a sigh of relief.   One of the crew exclaimed that it was like “Christmas in July.”

SpaceX is still trying to determine what went wrong 139 seconds into the launch of its seventh operational Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-7) mission to ISS on June 28.  Orbital ATK found that a problem with the NK33/AJ26 engine of its Antares rocket caused the Orb-3 failure last October and is switching to a completely different engine (RD-181).  While waiting for the re-engined Antares to enter service in the first quarter of 2016, it will launch its next Cygnus cargo craft on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket later this year.

UPDATE, JULY 5, 2015:   Progress M-28M successfully docked with the ISS this morning.

ORIGINAL STORY, JULY 3, 2015: Russia’s Progress M-28M robotic cargo spacecraft lifted off on time at 12:55:48 am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) this morning (July 3) and is successfully on its way to the International Space Station (ISS).  The successful launch is good news, though with two cargo launch failures in the past 8 months, many are waiting for docking on Sunday before breathing a sign of relief.

The last Progress launch, Progress M-27M on April 28, failed due to a “design peculiarity” that affected third stage separation between the Soyuz rocket and the Progress spacecraft.  The spacecraft reached orbit, but the wrong orbit, and was spinning. It reentered over the Pacific Ocean on May 7.

That was just over two months ago, so this is a quick return-to-flight.  The Russians used a different version of the Soyuz rocket today, a Soyuz-U instead of a Soyuz 2.1a. 

The Progress M-27M failure was the middle of three failed cargo flights to the ISS over 8 months.  First was the October 28, 2014 failure of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Orbital ATK) Orb-3 launch (Antares/Cygnus), then Progress M-27M (Soyuz/Progress), and most recently the SpaceX CRS-7 failure (Falcon 9/Dragon) on Sunday, June 28.  

There were four successful cargo missions in between — Progress M-25M on October 29, 2014; SpaceX CRS-5 on January 10, 2015; Progress M-26M on February 17, 2015; and SpaceX CRS-6 on April 14 — but the cadence of missions demonstrates the need for constant resupply of the crew.  Another cargo mission, Japan’s HTV-5, is scheduled for August 16 EDT.

Progress M-28M is taking about 3 tons of supplies to the crew, including fuel needed to periodically boost the ISS orbit, oxygen, water, food and other items.  The spacecraft reached orbit and deployed its solar panels and navigation antenna about 9 minutes after liftoff.  It is on a 34-orbit rendezvous trajectory with docking set for 3:13 am EDT on Sunday morning, July 5.  NASA TV coverage of docking will begin at 2:30 am EDT.  NASA refers to this as Progress 60 or 60P because it is the 60th Progress launched to the ISS.  Progress has been in use since 1977, supporting the Soviet/Russian space stations Salyut 6, Salyut 7 and Mir before ISS.

Three men are aboard the ISS right now:  NASA’s Scott Kelly and Russia’s Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko.  Usually there are six people on board, but they are in the middle of a crew changeover, waiting for three colleagues to arrive later this month.

There are several Soyuz rocket variants and the one used for launching crews is the Soyuz FG.   The next crew launch, Soyuz TMA-17M, is scheduled for 5:02 pm July 22 EDT, although NASA apparently wants more details about the Progress M-27M failure before signing off.  NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, indicated on Sunday at a press conference following the SpaceX failure that NASA wants to “fully understand” the April 28 Progress incident and for the Flight Readiness Review to take place before committing to the TMA-17M launch date.  The crew includes Kjell Lindgren from NASA, Kimiya Yui from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and Oleg Kononenko from Roscosmos.

The successful launch this morning is one step towards restoring confidence in the Russian systems.   Russia is the only ISS partner capable of launching people to the space station.  The United States has not been able to launch crews since it discontinued the space shuttle program in 2011.  It hopes to have two commercial crew systems in place by 2017 — the crew version of SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100.  How Sunday’s failure of the cargo version of Dragon will affect SpaceX’s commercial crew schedule will not be known until it determines and fixes the problem.

SpaceX continues to sort through reams of data to determine what happened on June 28 to its Falcon 9 rocket that was to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).  A SpaceX spokesman said there is “no one theory yet that is consistent with the data” they have looked at so far.   Meanwhile, Russia plans to launch its next cargo mission to the ISS, Progress M-28M, in less than 24 hours.  The launch comes just over two months after the previous mission, Progress M-27M, failed.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9, carrying a Dragon capsule full of supplies for the ISS, failed 139 seconds into flight on Sunday, June 28.  It was the 19th Falcon 9 launch after 18 consecutive successes.  SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said shortly thereafter that “there were pressurization indications in the second stage” and the first stage is not suspect.

SpaceX spokesman John Taylor said via email late yesterday that the company’s engineering teams are “reviewing every piece of flight data as we work through a thorough fault tree analysis in order to identify root cause.”  After that is completed, it will know more about rescheduled launch dates.  Although some debris has been recovered from the ocean, the flight data is expected to hold the key to the cause.

Among the first launches affected by the failure is that of Jason-3 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA.  The ocean altimetry satellite had been scheduled
for launch on August 8 after several delays.  NOAA and the European
Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites
(EUMETSAT) are the lead agencies for Jason-3, partnered with NASA and
its French counterpart, CNES, who were responsible for Jason-1 and
Jason-2, as well as the original satellite in the series,
Topex-Poseidon.  Jason-2, launched in
2008, continues to function nominally.

Sunday’s launch was SpaceX’s seventh robotic ISS cargo resupply mission under its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA — CRS-7 or SpX-7.  About two tons of crew supplies, scientific experiments and equipment was lost, including the first of two International Docking Adapters needed for the crew version of Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft to dock with the ISS.  They were the winners of the final phase of the commercial crew program and NASA hopes that the systems will be operational by the end of 2017.  The crew version of Dragon incorporates an abort system that can carry a crew to safety if the rocket fails, but it is not in the cargo version of Dragon used on Sunday.  No one was aboard Sunday’s launch.

This was the third failure in 8 months of systems that take cargo to the ISS:  Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Oribtal ATK) Antares rocket with a Cygnus spacecraft on October 28, 2014; Russia’s Soyuz rocket with the Progress M-27M capsule on April 28; and now SpaceX’s Falcon 9/Dragon combination.

Russia plans to launch the next Progress resupply mission tomorrow, July 3, at 12:55 am Eastern Daylight Time.  Although NASA insists that the ISS crew has plenty of supplies to take them through to October, at least, a lot is riding on the success of the Progress M-28M flight (which NASA calls Progress 60 or 60P because it is the 60th Progress intended to supply the ISS).   The Russians concluded the April failure was due to a “design peculiarity” related to frequency-dynamic characteristics between the third stage of the Soyuz 2.1a rocket and the Progress spacecraft.

One advantage of the ISS program is that it is an international partnership among the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe, and Canada.   Europe has discontinued its ATV cargo spacecraft, but there still are four systems to take cargo to the crew:  the U.S. Antares/Cygnus and Falcon 9/Dragon, Russia’s Soyuz/Progress, and Japan’s H2B/HTV.  It is extremely unusual that three of the four systems should fail over such a short span of months.

Fortunately, should anything go awry with Progress M-28M, Japan’s HTV cargo spacecraft is scheduled for launch next month. 

SpaceX officials confirmed today that although a range safety destruct signal was sent to the Falcon 9 rocket yesterday, it was 70 seconds too late. The “mishap” had already occurred and the signal played no role in the loss of the vehicle. 

Until this statement from SpaceX, it was not clear if the rocket
malfunctioned, veered off course, and was destroyed by the Range
Safety Officer, or if the rocket exploded on its own.  Rockets are
equipped with Flight Termination Systems that can be activated by
sending an abort signal in order to protect public safety.

The Falcon 9 rocket exploded 139 seconds after launch yesterday (June 28).  The launch, at 10:21 am ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL, part of the Air Force’s Eastern Test Range, came after a flawless countdown with excellent weather conditions.   It was sending a robotic Dragon spacecraft loaded with about two tons of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).  The mission was the seventh operational flight under SpaceX’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA — CRS-7 or SpX-7.

No one was aboard this flight.  SpaceX is designing a crew version of Dragon for NASA’s commercial crew program, but that is not in service yet.  An emergency abort system is integrated into the crew version of Dragon.  It would allow the crew capsule to detach from its rocket at any point on the trip up to orbit and carry the crew away to a safe landing.

Two more SpaceX ISS cargo flights were planned this year, in September and December.   The schedule for those and all other launches of the Falcon 9 are on hold until this failure is understood. 

While many are focused on the impact to the ISS program or SpaceX’s efforts to compete for national security launches, SpaceX has many other customers who will be affected.  Among them is NOAA.  The launch of the Jason-3 ocean altimetry satellite had been scheduled for August 8 after several delays.  A NOAA spokesman confirmed today that the failure has affected the Jason-3 launch and NOAA is working with its partners to determine the next steps.   NOAA and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) are the lead agencies for Jason-3, partnered with NASA and its French counterpart, CNES, who were responsible for Jason-1 and Jason-2, as well as the original satellite in the series, Topex-Poseidon.  The NOAA spokesman added that Jason-2, launched in 2008, continues to function nominally.

Financial analyst Chris Quilty of Raymond James & Associates said
today that he is betting on a 4-6 month delay “which shouldn’t be
tremendously impactful” to the companies whose satellites are on
SpaceX’s manifest.  Quilty is Senior Vice President, Equity Research, and
closely follows the space business. He added that if the delay is
longer than that, it “could have a material impact on 2016/2017
revenues.” 

At a press conference yesterday, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said she could not provide a timeframe for when Falcon 9 will return to flight, but confidently predicted it will be less than a year.  She said then, and the company reiterated today, that it is in an extraordinary position to identify the
problem and fix it because it owns the majority of the launch vehicle
and its components, which streamlines the investigation.  SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk tweeted that they still do not know what happened even after several thousand engineering hours of review.

Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2015

SpaceX vowed today that it would examine every available piece of data to identify the root cause, fix it, and return to flight.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said during a press conference this afternoon that early data indicate that the cause of the Falcon 9 launch failure today was due to pressurization issues in the second stage.  Some confusion remains as to whether the rocket exploded on its own or because of a destruct signal sent by the Range Safety Officer, but Shotwell said she did not believe it was due to a destruct signal. 

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded 139 seconds (2:19 minutes) into flight this morning (Sunday, June 28) following a 10:21 am ET launch.   NASA posted a video of the launch and failure on YouTube.  Shotwell said data showed “some pressurization indications in the second stage” that the company will be “tracking down and following up on.”  She could not provide any other details at this early stage of the investigation other than saying they do not suspect the first stage.

The Falcon 9 was carrying a Dragon capsule with two tons of supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) under SpaceX’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA.  This was the seventh operational mission — SpaceX CRS-7 or SpX-7.

The cargo included food and other crew supplies, science experiments, a new extravehicular spacesuit to replace one aboard ISS that has partially failed, and the first of two International Docking Adapters (IDAs).  The IDAs are needed for the crew version of Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft to dock with the ISS.  Both were selected for the final phase of NASA’s commercial crew program.  NASA has been hoping that both systems will be available by 2017, although today’s failure certainly will impact SpaceX’s launch plans.  The crew version of Dragon is equipped with a launch abort system that allows the crew capsule to separate from the rocket at any time during the ride to orbit and carry the astronauts away to a safe landing.  That was not the version of Dragon on this launch, but the capsule did appear to survive for at least a short time after the explosion.

This was a commercial launch authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which facilitates and regulates commercial space launch services.  Pam Underwood, Deputy Division Manager of the Operations Integration Division of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, said during the press conference that the incident has been categorized as a “mishap.”  Under those regulations, the company takes charge of the investigation, while FAA oversees it.   This is the same process used for the failure of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Orbital ATK) Antares rocket in October 2014 on its third operational cargo mission to the ISS (Orb-3).

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, and Mike Suffredini, ISS Program Manager at NASA, also participated in the post-failure press conference at Kennedy Space Center.

Gerstenmaier, Suffredini and Shotwell conveyed a similar theme — launching rockets is hard, sometimes they fail, and the key is learning from whatever went wrong and moving on.

Gerstenmaier and Suffredini also made clear they do not want to underplay this “big loss” that is “a blow to us,” but they wanted to focus on the fact that the ISS crew is safe and well provisioned.  SpaceX recently completed its sixth operational mission to the ISS, taking up many supplies and returning to Earth much of the scientific experiments and other hardware NASA wanted back on Earth.  

Russia suffered its own failure of a cargo mission to the ISS, Progress M-27M, in April.  It is set to try again on Friday, July 3.  When asked if NASA wants to add any items to that spacecraft at the last minute to compensate for anything lost today, Suffredini said no, that the crew has everything it needs.  NASA tries to “protect” against such failures by having extra supplies aboard and the crew will be fine through October even if no additional supplies are delivered.  He noted that other cargo vehicles are on track to deliver cargo to the ISS in the near future:  Progress M-28M on July 3 and Japan’s HTV in August.   Orbital ATK is also planning for the next launch of its Cygnus cargo ship before the end of 2015 using the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket.  Its own Antares rocket is expected to return to flight in the first quarter of 2016.

The NASA representatives said they do not expect any change to the launch of the next ISS crew in July because of this failure.  Usually there are six people aboard the ISS, but currently there are only three — NASA’s Scott Kelly and Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka — because they are in the middle of a crew changeover.   Three crew members just returned to Earth.  Their replacements — NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Russia’s Oleg Kononenko — are scheduled for launch on July 22.   Gerstenmaier stressed that the Flight Readiness Review still needs to be held for that launch and NASA wants to fully understand the Progress M-27M failure to make sure a similar problem could not happen on a crew launch (both use Soyuz rockets, although they are different versions), but the SpaceX failure today should not be a factor.  Russia concluded the Progress M-27M failure was due to a “design peculiarity,” but Gerstenmaier’s comments implied that NASA is not yet fully satisfied with that answer.

Asked about whether this might hamper NASA’s efforts to convince Congress to provide full funding for the commercial crew program, Gerstenmaier stressed the need for the full $1.244 billion requested for FY2016.  The House approved $1.000 billion and the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended $900 million.  Both are above the current level of funding ($805 million), but less than the request.   Gerstenmaier said the money is needed to do the technical work necessary to move forward, pointing to the three failures over the past eight months in the commercial cargo program (Orb-3, Progress M-27M, and today’s CRS-7) as examples of what can go wrong.  There is no commonality across the failures, he said, except that “it’s space and it’s difficult” to fly.

Some members of Congress have suggested that only one company is needed or that if two are needed as NASA insists, they be funded in a “leader-follower” mode where one company proceeds more quickly than the other to spread out the costs. Gerstenmaier remained steadfast that two systems are needed to provide redundancy, and there is no way to predict which company might be ready sooner than the other.

Shotwell was optimistic about how long it will take to identify and fix the problem.  While reluctant to provide a time frame at this early stage, she said she expects it will be “a number of months” but less than a year.  She declined to say how much the launch cost, saying that SpaceX does not discuss costs in public.  

SpaceX and NASA are continuing to investigate this morning’s failure of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.  It was launching a robotic Dragon cargo spacecraft full of supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) crew.  The rocket failed 2:19 minutes after launch.

NASA TV and SpaceX provided live coverage of the launch of SpaceX’s seventh Commercial Resupply Services mission, CRS-7 (or SpX-7). A SpaceX video showing the failure is posted on YouTube.  The failure is at 23:44 into the video.  NASA also has a video beginning with the launch itself.  The explosion is at 2:32.

SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk confirmed the failure through a series of tweets (@elonmusk).

Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown. Will provide more info as soon as we review the data.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015

There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015

That’s all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015

 

NASA is planning a “contingency press conference” no earlier than 12:30 pm ET today that will broadcast by NASA TV.  Check back here for more information as it becomes available.