NASA Orion Crash While Testing Launch Abort Parachute System

[ahz123]

That was a big bag of fail, on multiple levels.

[thepet3r]

oddly reminiscent of Genesis return capsule?

[mbissaro]

Like Sheldon Cooper says: "Oh Gravity, thou art a heartless bitch " :)

[MrTheMLT]

If this was maned, the crew would have (or should have) escaped within 5 sec of the parachute failure

[Enatbyte]

Please don't show the astronauts this video.

[BernieEOD]

So much for going back to Apollo being easy and cheap

[k2477456]

dont worry the crew module kept the parachutes from getting really hurt

[k2477456]

@k2477456 or dont worry no parachutes were harmed in the making of this video which ever floats ur boat

[thereluctantspaceman]

We have here a good representation of the United State's current manned space program.

[scolen3]

Good thing they are testing it. That is why its a test, so they can see what went wrong and fix it.

[stevehoge]

Ruh-roh..

[Pooleparty]

Gee does that mean we'll get to see episode of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best? Great!!! I never could get used to rap or more to the point "crap" music!

[proaudiohd]

Didnt we already get this right in the 60's? Why are we spending billions to try and figure it out again?

[ldanley72]

The useless multibillion dollar project !!!!!!!!

[MrTheMLT]

@ldanley72 the reason there retesting it is because it is a bidder module w/ A LOT of updated systems

[Barnekkid]

Not a whole lot went right with that.

[iam1and1isme]

that was painful to watch.

[UnclePillz]

Does anyone truly believe that Nasa would use a system that doesn't work? Come on. They will find one that works perfectly every time and is subjected to many different scenarios before they put men inside of them and send em flying.

I'd be willing to bet that Astronauts would have something to say about failures like this one.



[punisher102938]

1:36 POOF!!!!!!

[kujiko88]

I certainly hope no one was onboard that thing....

[XTwina]

I somehow feel sorry for the poor thing : (

[DuRoberxkoz]

1:36  ¿¿??

[geomodelrailroader]

same thing happened with the Liberty Ares X core the chutes did not deploy and the booster buckled and sank

[stuntmanmike37]

I don't think this is where NASA saw itself in 30 years, when they first launched the shuttle in '81.

[ti994apc]

Orion has serious design problems as seen by its severe wobble. Its shape is not conducive for a controllable entry. Its simple physics. NASA should take a hint from SpaceX's dragon capsule. Its taller and skinnier which gives it stability. Dragon also has the same pressurized area and better heat shielding than Orion.

[MrTheMLT]

@ti994apc OR the RFSA(Russian Federal Space Agency)'s Soyuz

[airbeamer]

OUCH !!!!! my back.......

[mattmatt115]

somehow this reminds me of the "success" of the recent missile defence laser beam of massive failure

I would NOT want to hit the ground in this test.. OUCH

USA what has happend to you?? Where did the real USA go???

[wachox]

That's why it's called Testing.

[TheHappyFaceBoxMan]

'Cause I'm free...

Free falling!

[oomblikkies]

When I saw this, the reentry of the Genesis probe came to mind

[bobbypinhead]

Lol. The parachutes are struggling for dear life to deploy correctly.

[tpsossff]

It looked to me like the primary (or pilot) 'chutes came out prematurely the moment the capsule was released from the pallet. In the planes slipstream they violently twisted together. Unfortunately each pilot pulls out a very much larger main but were unable to do this properly because their lines were twisted together.

This caused the main canopies lines to twist badly and only one managed to partly inflate.

[Elamin008]

that you it is called a test

[mastasia]

That looks like alot of fun. Where do I sign up?

[nukesforce]

v=g*t

[rossco1966]

suddenly a glided reentry looks positively safe.....

[mathyson]

0:30 you dont have to turn your sound up, there's none at all. Also, what mac u have?

[grolgh]

According to Wayne Hale the failure was in the test rig - not the parachutes. There were also good tests preceding this.

[Tubes12AX7k]

I think my back would be pretty sore after that landing.

[Lgilsig]

Looks like Orion is still in the "snake killer" phase of testing...

[GeneralKenobiSIYE]

hahahaha! The snake was said "Sssssss hey the sssssthe fuck issssssss that?" Crash!

[HuskerFan1097]

NASA shouldnt retire the Space Shuttle! Orion is just stupid!

[TheRealSiguy]

The space shuttle is arguably so. It costs $500 million or so per launch, and is incredibly maintenance intensive. It's only partially reusable, and during its layover it has to be completely refurbished, >20,000 heat tiles inspected individually, etc.

Although there are advantages to having a crew when launching cargo, it's still severely limited by the fact that the orbiter his huge and heavy, using what could otherwise be payload space.

[TheRealSiguy]

There are plenty of heavy lift launch systems to launch payloads, and space capsules can launch crews. Either are cheaper and easier than having both in an over-engineered orbiter.

Rockets don't have to be expendable, either. The Falcon 9 is going to be the worlds first fully reusable launch system, and it doesn't need any wings or anything. It costs a lot less than the shuttle, to.

[zataflex]

Space Shuttle reaches the orbit only. Orion is for reaching other planets. The plan is to let private companies get control of the orbit business so the NASA can use the money to do something that cannot be done privately.

[fubuh8r]

This definitely wouldnt have won the Ansari X prize. I think Scaled Composites is looking to the future and made more progress for space than NASA. Thats only my opinion.

[crazybastard82]

not nasa's fault. blame annual budget cuts for the last 30 years. nasa's role went from being pioneers in extreme space exploration to merely bus drivers taking satellites into orbit. the constellation program is their chance at reviving its old status.

[tpsossff]

@crazybastard82

Not necessarily a failure, they would have been testing parachute systems in many different configurations and it would be important to know what can make them fail.

If you jumped from a plane you would want to know the makers fully understand everything possible about the one thing that is going to stop you.

[vcz11]

@crazybastard82 is wrong. (1) NASA does NOT in com- or waethersat launch business. (2) constellation program is a disaster. NASA become incompetent and should be disbanded or reorganized.

[crazybastard82]

@vcz11 what are you talking about? i simply stated that nasa has inadequate funding to do anything spectacular like the apollo program. all they do is take supplies and pieces of the ISS up into orbit. and if constellation program is a disaster then how did they get a sucessful launch of ares with the shitty funding they receive? they're not incompetent, they just do the best they can with the little money they receive.

[vcz11]

@crazybastard82 if they need more than $20bn/y to do more than just haul stuff to ISS, then they are incompetent. 25 tons to ISS costs about $200m. NASA does it for $4bn. There was no successful operational launch of Ares-I yet, and it does not even matter - at $1.4bn/flight, Ares-I is DOA.

[crazybastard82]

@vcz11 dude, ares launched last october...where have you been? oh, yeah, the czech...prob don't hear much over there, huh? also, where do you get your info? cost of shuttle mission is $450, not $4b. and why complain about nasa when russia's space agency is a joke with no funding and aging scientists?

[vcz11]

@crazybastard82 Ares-I-X test was not Ares-I. It was a bastardized 4-seg SRB with 5th dummy section and a dummy shell instead of upper stage. "cost of shuttle mission is $450, not $4b" - I wonder why in NASA budget STS program costs $4bn/year then. I guess "creative accounting" was involved in creating $450m number.

[crazybastard82]

@vcz11 i really find it humorous watching you make mistakes. now you're saying it's $4b/year when you were originally saying that $4b was what it cost nasa to lift a payload to the iss. but i say it again, why rip on nasa when the russian space agency is a joke?

[mattmatt115]

@crazybastard82 Whats to joke about the Russian Space Agency? Aren't you hitching rides with them for the near future? Last i checked not only that, NASA also purchases Russian RD180 engines? For??? Decorations maybe??? No? I didnt think so either....

[AirSimming]

@vcz11 A Shuttle launch costs more than one billion in average (between 1.3 and 1.5 billion). Don't trust on Wikipedia and on FAQ-based NASA advertisement too much. You have to take a look at the STS program costs and by the number of launches.

[AirSimming]

* and devide it by the number of launches.

[thedavidwilson]

@crazybastard82 Uh, Nasa's budget has been increasing.

[datzfast]

@crazybastard82 thats right any problem can be solved by paying some private company to build the parachute. Just like when man went to the moon eveything was contracted out. its not NASAs fault they havent had to do it before.

[datzfast]

@crazybastard82 be a good boy now and go home and cry to mommie

[jezus22]

@crazybastard82 russians were pionners

[ti994apc]

@crazybastard82 The constellation "program" is just another welfare program designed to keep the money coming in from the same old contractors. The Shuttle cost 1.5 BILLION p/launch, NASA is getting money. The problem is NASA is creating Programs and not using fixed cost mission oriented vehicles. Lockheed and the Thiokol Corporation have FAILED us. These contractors should be excluded from the next vehicle. NASA is forcing us to use the same crappy Shuttle parts.

[skyprop]

Agreed

[LaserParody]

Space shuttle = cargo vehicle.

Orion = launch vehicle.

Different roles.

[crazybastard82]

correction:

orion is the crew vehicle, like the lunar module. the launch vehicles are the ares I and ares V rockets

[Seymore190]

If the tossing and turning didn't kill you on the way down, I'm sure that landing would.

[acsial]

A ballistic capsule, with an ablative heatshield and expendable launch vehicles...

Sad and kind of pathetic, really: just how far backwards they've gone. The '60 Dyna-Soar was more advanced.

NASA is not going to allow the development of a reusable system that would lead to gutting their bloated workforce (10-20k, to turn-around the Shuttle). You U.S. taxpayers get to piss away billions more on some stupid Kennedyesque moondirt stunt.

At this rate, TRULY routine space access will never happen.

[Paragon0fVirtue]

Yeah they made it there in less then 10 years and we are gonna be there when? 2020? Back then they had guys like Wernher Von Braun who hand calculated everything. Now they just type data in a computer and it figures it out. While accurate, these rocket builders don't have the same understanding of rockets as they geniuses of the Apollo Program. They don't do the calculations on paper, they just plug numbers into a computer and hit enter.

[robghansen]

But back then we had competition, that is what got us there in less then 10 years. We were going up against the Soviet Union. Who do we have to go up against now?

[TuboEspectador]

China, 1.5 billion of them. Remember that. ;-)

[robghansen]

true, but at the time both us and the soviet union were clearly racing for the moon. I suppose now we can race for Mars:)

[rwboa22]

Plus also von Braun used, for both the Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets, a cluster of Jupiter and Redstone fuel and oxidizer tanks and eight H-1 engines from the Redstone to launch them. According to a book by a former NASA HQ director who worked at P&W Rocketdyne, it was done so that the measurements would be easily calculated using a slide rule (used before the advent of hand-held calculators).

[tomcat2285]

at first u don't succeed try try again

[05u16hep]

they shoul use the whole apollo csm! maybe update it with new technology, but it got us to the moon 40 years ago

[masterj345]

maybe u should use the same parachutes they used during apollo. those seemed to work just fine.

[marktaylor0001]

epic fail

[AlexFictionFriction]

thats the whole point of the test!

[MrBennetzen]

Had it failed on a manned flight the astronauts would have been joining Vladamir Komarov and others that would have died on flights into space.

[TuboEspectador]

Correct. Apollo 1 all over again (please, no disrespect to Grissom, White and Chaffee). We must test and test and test. No failures, no learning.

[rwboa22]

Or to Cosmonaut Komarov on Soyuz 1, who was killed in an accident similar to what you have seen, only that the Soyuz return capsule was designed to land on solid earth and had retrorockets to cushion the landing. Komarov was blown to bits when the return capsule slammed into the earth at around 300 mph (the same speed the Challenger crew module hit the Atlantic after the vehicle disintegrated).

[risc19]

Useless.

[TuboEspectador]

Not at all. Rather useful from the point of view of failure analysis. Bush was useless. ;-)

[FB0102]

70 different parachutes and not a single one worked

[v16050118130114]

There were 10 parachutes in the test equipment section (designed to extract and orient the capsule)... the Orion parachute system itself uses 8 parachutes. That's 18 total.

The failure was in the first test equipment parachute, which was designed to orient the capsule for the test.

Once that first chute failed, nothing else had a reasonable chance of working.

[r0ck3tsm0k3]

I am confused... why in this recovery system do they use the little drogue chutes at first, off center no less, then go to the mains that slowly unfurl? If you are at the right altitude (say 30,000 feet), why not just blow the mains right away? They have drogues, and reef very slowly, so why the extra complications?

Anyway the capsule didnt seem stable at all, that has nothing to do with chutes... thats to do with the ballast and shape of it.

[MuckupAgain]

"why in this recovery system do they use the little drogue chutes at first, off center no less, then go to the mains that slowly unfurl?"

No idea about the initial drogues, but the reason that the main chutes unfurl progressively, as opposed to instant open, is likely two-fold; first to reduce the instantaneous g-loads on the astronauts and secondly to reduce the riser tension requirements, thus allowing them to be lighter than if they had to withstand an 'instant opening'.

[rwboa22]

The drouge chutes are used to stabilize the spacecraft (similar to a sea anchor), while the main chutes, which come out around 20,000 ft. slows the spacecraft down to a speed of about 20-25 mph.  While Gemini and Apollo just splashed down into the ocean, Mercury also had a "landing bag" similar to the proposed airbags to cushion the landing even further.

[eliteobserver]

D; r.i.p.

[risc19]

Oh ffs nasa. You realy have lost it.

[toddi1971]

Looks like prehistoric man inventet first parachute in the world.

[doctorgood2007]

No survivors would be possible from that impact!

[whadang]

how many other things fell out? must have been a bit confused as to which parachute it' could trust. If youtubers had built it it would not have done that, we're all way more on it.

[slafkec]

I would like to put politicans into this time-capsule

[TonyF2013]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 1963...

[RedneckResponder]

The chute opened after the capsule crashed and come to a soft gentle landing...

[Camelsarse]

I think they need to rename this the "vomet comet"

Ouch!!

[bniisan]

これには、乗りたくないね。

[nucleargenie]

It's a U.F.OHHH SHEEEITTT!!!

Ground control to Major Tom, this is Ground Control to Major Tom!

[DaLizard2137]

SMASH! FAIL! Man, I was hoping to see a full force collision after that 1st parachute failed, which would have been awesome. Alas, the second parachute prevented that from happening. Well, there's always the next test...

[reevesAstronomy]

It'd be terrible if someone was inside. First, the motion sickness from the turbulence. Then, a hard impact straight into the ground! They may survive but they won't be going back into space any time soon. Another reason why NASA needs budget increases. Increase the pace of development on the Aries rocket and work on testing it along with the Orion module. Maybe we can avoid another Columbia disaster.

[azjeff1971]

Oh $hit...that was a fuckup of a design...back to the drawing board!!!

[oldyuma]

OUCH! That's gonna leave a mark on the desert.

Go YPG!> Keep working on them' chutes.(Ex Yuma

Proving Ground employee 74'-76')

[NovusRimor]

Wow, I would not want to be in that capsule coming down like that.