TaurusXL launch failure.Glory spacecraft is lost.

clln

Glory was to study Earth's athmosphere changes for 3-5 years in conjunction with other crafts already in orbit but instead has finished up at the bottom of the sea with a sister ship OCO 1 which suffered the same faith from a Taurus launch.
it failed to seperate from its bearing leaving the rocket too heavy to reach orbit.
as well as Glory 4 NANOsites were lost the saddest of which was proably one that schoolchildren could send orders to such as 'take a picture of a particular object.

there is at present a shortage of launch vehicles worldwide with IMO dangerous pressure being put on Roscosmos to turn out more soyuz's.
NASA and ESA screaming for more and some already shipped to Guiana as Arianespace has chosen soyuz as its mid range launcher and not forgetting that every progress launched to the ISS is also a soyuz with a diffrient upper stage.

never nice to dance on graves but IMO the choice of TaurusXL to launch GLORY even given the shortage of launch vehicles was irresonsible!
Taurus/TaurusXL first launched in 1994 and in that time has only had 12 flights,this is its third failure.

Taurus is built by a company called Orbital Sciences,they receive funding from the NASA COTS programme.COTS is a neat aconym for the private space industry to be subsidised from the NASA budget as it,Space-x and others attempt to build crafts that will safely launch humans to the ISS and beyond.

NASA Administrator C Bolden in an unguarded moment said about COTS;
"You know we could be handing out subsidy for ten years and still have no safe vehicle to fly"

below two short video's of the launch and explanation of what went wrong.

slade_x

just brilliant, another setback

Beeker

slade_x wrote: »

just brilliant, another setback

Never good to see a failure like that and what a loss of potential science:(