atpcficto

“Rocky liftoff”, to say the least. Even when scanning archives of German V2 rockets, I’ve never seen a “lateral liftoff” or “side-slide” like that. At what point did the launch controllers determine the ship was out of control?

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system

Bad when you have a blow out on liftoff, and parts hanging off the side at destruction. Not a pretty picture.

Also now all that debris all over that beautiful Kodiak Island. Hope they have a trash collection contract.

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system

What debris? It launched out to sea, good luck finding any pieces.

system

This was different than German designs because this was a multiple-rocket design.

One YT commenter said they were shy to abort the launch because of the high cost of cleaning up/repairing the launch site, so let it continue. (Apparently a previous launch site cleanup was expensive.)

system

Check out Scott Manley’s knowledgeable report on this event at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2jU5W4ehPE

system

I will give them credit for a pretty good guidance and control system, if not their engine design. Having that extensive of a malfunction at liftoff and still having a control system capable of stabilizing the rocket is pretty impressive. As Scott Manly described it, the rocket basically hovered at it moved slowly sideways until it burned off enough fuel to begin climbing. Losing control at an altitude of 20+ miles probably resulted from simply running out of fuel. Most boosters expend their fuel load in 2-3 minutes, but usually have the velocity to be a lot higher than 20 miles. Hope their data recovery will be able to tell them what happened.