A German company's first attempt to launch an orbital rocket ended after just 18 seconds on Sunday. Isar Aerospace's Spectrum started wobbling just after it cleared the launch site on Norway's coast and as it started to tumble controllers cut the engines and it fell to the fjord below in a huge explosion.
The subtitles say that it went into the water in a controlled fashion. I don’t believe that assessment aligns with what I saw in the video. I think they were just lucky. A rocket falling sideways isn’t under control.
Looks like a controller malfunction-They’re lucky it didn’t strike the launch pad on the failed launch attempt.
Looks to me like an under damped oscillation of the gimbal servos. But I’m not a rocket scientist…
BTW, Scott Manley produced a pretty good video on youtube.
I think I will put my money on some kind of engine anomaly. Probably partial or full loss of thrust from one of the engines. 1st stage flight control then saturated because it was not designed to handle that type of a thrust mismatch. I think the onboard software probably shut the remaining engines off when the off nominal attitude rates were detected. Maybe the ground overrode the automatic destruct since the rocket was close to the launch site.
Anyway, pure conjecture on my part. Kind of surprising it didn’t explode before it hit the water.
A lot of stuff has to go right to get a payload into orbit.
Didn’t they learn that from Elon Musk? 
Nor very “Rational”, Keith.
This topic was automatically closed after 7 days. New replies are no longer allowed.