Firefly Alpha Rocket Explodes In-Flight 

First 20 seconds look good then 00:24 seconds we see exhaust splutter and then the rocket seems to take forever/ slowed down compared to the first 24 seconds

@@NickSandM Good eye! that does look like an engine failure, and the rocket thrust seems off-centre from then on.

goood camera dude

The problems start immediately. On original audio, at approximately T-1, you can hear a callout for Abort. On that same audio, at approximately T+6, you can hear the lead call out a request for safety checks on the pad due to "anomaly". The calls for pad sweeps and fire checks follows the same check list used in the abort of the first launch attempt. They knew from the beginning there was a problem.

Now climate is not changing? How many million O°2 burned

Or a sign that it is built too strong, reducing payload capacity.

It was high in the atmosphere at this point. The drag received was low hence it just flipped

@@hooveyjones It didn't appear to be going really that fast, either. I'm guessing they outright lost an engine at 25 seconds into this video, resulting in this slow climb and ultimate loss of control.

@@ugowar potentially. If you watch the close up cams during liftoff. The engines are constantly gimbling left and right. I wonder if the tvc was too sensitive and once supersonic and in the higher atmosphere caused the gimbling to be exaggerated making the rocket flip

@@HouseGurke yah I mean rs1 rocket is smaller than alpha but rs1 can carry 1.3 tons to LEO than alpha's 1 ton.

Haha I get this reference!

Copvs go brr

COPVs be like 😂

Which COPVs, the N2 or He ones? :D

I’m literally out of breath AHAHAHAHAHAAA 🤣

"Hey hey, Marcus House with you here"😍

@@tekkx_avery2137 no way it was great

Agreed - I was under the impression it broke up at maxQ but from what we see here it looks like it lost control when it went supersonic and the FTS triggered

@David Wang what even are you doing on NSF? Let us people enjoy knowledge and science, human adventures, emotions, and find yourself a hobby that's not about belittling others.

Neither did Astra's Rocket 3.3, it continued to send telemetry after starting to tumble at 890m/s!!! That's >Mach 2.5, more than double the speed of Firefly Alpha. Imo the fact that it didn't explode despite a lot of remaining fuel in the tanks is way more impressive (Of course Firefly's tumbling was still very spectacular. I had a bad feeling about the one-directional gimballing anyway...)

Looks like the FTS was triggered, it did not explode from a structural failure from what I see.

@@Turbo999be Yeah - it had been tumbling for long enough to allow them to collect whatever telemetry might help to understand the problem, pretty sure the Flight Termination System was triggered...either automatically or from the ground. It's a shame - it was doing so well up to that point. However, getting to orbit on the first try is something that I don't think anyone ever managed before...so the odds weren't in their favor. The important thing is whether they learned enough to fix the problem for next time around.

@@SteveBakerIsHere I have to disagree, it didn't do well at all. The acceleration wasn't high enough and it wouldn't have reached orbit with such low thrust anyway. 343m/s after 1min 50sec burn time? Wait, actually 2min 28 seconds!!! Even worse!That's about

@@falafeldurum2095 I think when ppl are saying that "it did well," it is relative to other 1st flight attempts made by pretty much any other rocket company. To my knowledge this is the best a rocket's ever done on it's first flight attempt.

Ill tell you what happened. The faring disconnected and hit the siide of the rocket made it spin out then they. terminated

@@sun5534 thx

I doubt it. The rocket and its fairing seems in one piece when it starts turning. The debris we see later, when the rocket turns side-on, could just be ice. My conclusion is a sudden loss of engine gimballing, which meant that the rocket, which isn't passively stable, rotated. You're right that the end was the termination charge blowing. Because the countdown net callout was only 'anomaly', nothing to do with termination, I'd say that an on-board automated termination system made the call. Edit: More information since then. of course. We found out that an engine failed early in the flight, and the rocket tumbled because the reduced control wasn't enough when the rocket went supersonic. Also the US Space Force branch that was in control of the range reported that they manually terminated the flight. The debris was not ice, as I suggested, but was actually the fairing, but the fairing was blown off by the cross-wind when the rocket spun sideways.

@@robertbackhaus8911 About the termination you saying that wasnt necessary because they called out anomaly because the rocket was spinning out therfore the mission control or most likely rocket decided to do a termination. and you actully can not see the faring at the top of the rocket when it spins out

@@robertbackhaus8911 the rocket starting indeed veering of course before we see debris.

It did

Not a doubt it was FTS. Can't have an out of control rocket going anywhere it wants. I hate to be the poor guy tasked with pushing the button though. Be like killing your own child.

@@Losttoanyreason That's why it's the Space Launch Delta 30 that's in control of FTS for Vandenberg launches. They can be objective, when a company employee potentially may not.

@@Losttoanyreason then imagine being the guy who has to do it on crewed launches like shuttle

@@Alucard-gt1zf oh man

Even SpaceX failed the first couple times.

Gagarin didn't

Failure is the path the success....

@@alexbeck204 The R-7 "Semyorka" rocket, the prototype of the rocket Gagarin eventually flew on in 1961 DID fail, multiple times, in its early development phase. The first flight-ready vehicle was flown in May 1957. A fire broke out one one of the D strap-on boosters right at liftoff. It broke away at T+88 seconds, and the rest of the rocket crashed. During the next attempt on 11 June 1957 (the same day the United States conducted its first test launch of an ICBM), an electrical short caused the missile to start rolling uncontrollably and disintegrate 33 seconds after liftoff. The Soviets kept improving the rocket, using it to launch Sputnik and other unmanned satellites. The upgraded and more powerful man-rated version, Vostok-K, made its maiden flight in December 1960. The third stage engine failed 425 seconds after launch, and the unmanned payload failed to reach orbit. I believe the Soviets kept the failures secret until after the USSR broke up.

@@CraigCholar i appreciate your knowledge of our history very much, sir! You really made me ashamed for my unthoughtful reply

I saw that, too. And just after, it seems that there’s a brief period of slowing during ascent. There’s also what looks to be a bit of “wobbling” where perhaps it’s trying to gimble and compensate for an engine outage but ultimately just could maintain trajectory.

Saw that as well. During the rest of the flight, I could see that the exhaust plume was slightly canted to one side to compensate. Congratulations to Firefly for the apparent robustness of their design, and hope the next one is a '10'.

At 1:26 or so you can see that the plume isn't centered on the rocket either. Wonder if the combination of a small angle of attack, reduced thrust vector control authority, and "pitch-roll" coupling from asymmetric engines is what caused the max-Q tumble? (having flash backs to the MANY times I've done this tumble in KSP...)

Good eye. After what looks like the flame-out of a rocket engine at 0:23, the plume seems to immediately push to the side to compensate.

Saw that discrepancy too, but I'm not sure that was the root cause of the problem or not. I'm wondering if one engine was running at reduced power from that point, the other engines throttling-up to compensate, and then at that higher power one of the other engines quit unexpectedly, leading to the rocket pointing in the wrong direction before tumbling.

I thought it was very respectful of NSF to not go live on this launch and only show their footage now. At the same time, this footage does, for me, show NSF is quite a bit ahead of the rest in reporting on these events.

@blazemonger I agree. NSF does a much better job generally. Everyday Astronaut has been dropping the ball lately it seems like.

Well, NSF always streamed when there were official SpaceX, ULA or other streams too. I know, this is a bit different, but they brought their own cameras, so I wouldn't mind if NSF brings some competition. Although I was blown away by the "flamey end down" callout, trench cam and the engine ignition cam, the stream could've gone MUCH MUCH better. The lack of replays of all those amazing camera angles ruined it for me the most. And the lag, the switch between 1080p and 720p, was super annoying.

I’m sure the actual video quality that firefly had is much higher quality than this lol. Just was downscaled for streaming

@@kylekingsberry5680 yeah Tim was given access to the camera feeds from the site itself as opposed to having his own dedicated cameras set up to capture the launch. This meant that he was at the mercy of the poor internet connectivity from the site to transfer the stream to him so he could stream it to us.

@@psycho42069 Yeah exactly

@David Wang lol, when you find the edge of the flat Earth, why don't you do us all a favor and keep walking...

@David Wang You're joking right?

Audio is a-okay, Jack :) thank you for the coverage and incredible shots, great exposure on both cams for the RUD

Awesome work on camera.

audio isnt important, excellent footage of RUD better than the official feed. very interesting to visually see what the rocket did. in wondering if someone activated the FTS, was a very clean disassembly

Excellent work Jack. 👏👏👏

@@leonbarnes1402 yeah..i think the FTS was activated.

❤❤❤❤❤❤😎

When they launched, I said to myself, "Lets moon em." 🤣

“I am a leaf on the wind, watch me soar”

I’m not crazy by any means 😂😂😂

Does anyone know what went flying off to the upper left of the picture frame? It looked like a second stage took off on a reasonable trajectory.

@@iitzfizz not stainless right (jef)

Well, I think Elon's starship pretty well just "balances" on the super heavy - couldn't hold for much or any sideways force on that "joint".

As long as there are no humans inside, the ones that blow up with only computers and data sensors is one thing but human lives of course we don't want to see that anymore

Why wouldn't it have?!

Did jeb set the SAS to retrograde?

Space is hard bro, space is hard...

nah dude if they used ksp it wouldve worked fine :))

@@azerbenelhedi1099 i know, this comment supposed to be a joke ;)

@@Hanz_Otto It just went sideways (the joke)

Made in Ukraine🇺🇦

@@maximusmeridius6950 made in USA

but ThE tOp FLew OFf! ;)

@@gierdziui9003 only after it exploded

@@_gray_ actually, when it flips for the first time you can see fairing being eaten by aerodynamic forces, look for yourself trust me i have 484838838484h in KSP RO and as an absolute expert in the field let me tell you - this rocket did, in fact, stay in a suprisingly good shape... ;) /s /j

I think the T+6 call for pad checks is only procedure. She says "run pad check procedure and report anomolies." Protecting the pad is probably the more pressing issue after launching a rocket, its a very expensive site that has to be reused for future flights. They probably run that same procedure after all 'hot' operations at the pad.

Yep, at T-4 you hear the abort call. Even Tim heard it in his stream, you can see it on his face like.

@@bobloblaw1636 You may be right about that. I don't know the call outs for after liftoff. But right before liftoff there is still an audible callout of "abort" that needs explaining.

ya the ignored call for abort before launch is concerning. But I think the pad check procedure callout after launch is a scripted first step for safing the pad, probably done after every launch / static fire

@@CR-iz1od but what is "lifting off properly" for a company that has never launched before? They had no idea how the pad would be affected and a lot of things are being tested for the first time right then. I think safing the pad was a huge concern regardless of how well the vehicle lifted off the pad.

The failure looked similar to most of my launch attempts in ksp too

@@iamjadedhobo would they not have been able to also use their own footage also?. Footage aside, in my opinion their way of presenting is far more professional.

Probably. It is significant, however, that we can see pieces of debris fall before the vehicle loses control. More than a simple "loss" (i.e., shutdown) of one engine, it looks like it actually exploded and damaged the avionics to the point that the other engines were not able to provide enough trust vectoring to compensate (If they had the capability to do so, in the first place).

@@SystemBD no, the vehicle loses control before the debris flew off.

@@avhuf engines being ripped away by the airflow?

Doesn't need FTS to terminate it when it spins out of control at high speed like that, those forces are enough to RUD it.

​@@SystemBD you can advance frame by frame on youtube. the debris that fell off was the payload. was ripped off when it was sideways already.

My guess too. At ~1.40 you can even see the thrust asymmetry, and it took a long time to get anywhere.

Yea, too bad he doesn't make anything

@@ev17dan He does XD

@@pewpewman._.3415 name one thing at Tesla he has made?

@@ev17dan Bruh he owns the company

@@dervinsam7124 oh, my bad, he owns the company, well shit, he doesn't need to make anything, just owning the company makes him a genius I suppose, you weird nerds.

That totally looked like a FTS. Tumble, Tumble, and then the whole thing just disintegrated. Can't wait for Scott Manley to give us his play by play.

That was FTS, whether or not it was automated is the real question

You can hear just before launch, someone saying abort, abort, abort. Order was not heard i assume.

Yeah the abort call and then watching it launch was awkward.

@@draken5379 I heard him say him say abort once. It wasn't clear though, he might of said something else.

Yep! Looked similar to the Challenger disaster. Woah!

Yikes! Concur. You bet.