Off-Nominal - 60 - Soviets Invented the Boostback

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Jake and Anthony talk about the best/worst/most cursed rockets of all time, why they love them so much, and why you should, too.DrinksHop Horizon IPA - Tröegs Independent Brewing - UntappdBlonde Ale - Cerveceria Jurásica - UntappdPilsner - Cervecería Mastache - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 60 - Soviets Invented the Boostback - YouTubeReptar - WikipediaRex | Disney Wiki | FandomProton M rocket explosion July 2 2013 slow motion full HD - YouTubeProton accident with GLONASS satellitesVega flight VV17 - WikipediaFull Arianespace Vega VV17 Rocket SEOSat-Ingenio And Taranis Launch And Anomaly / Loss Coverage - YouTubeENERGIA - First Flight with Polyus Military Prototype (1987/05/15) - Soviet Launch Vehicle - YouTubeAriane 5 rocket launch explosion - YouTubeAriane flight V88 - WikipediaAriane 5-25/01/18 - iPhone X 4K à 30 ips - YouTubeAriane 5 VA241 - SES-14 - iPhone Stabilized - YouTubeAriane 5 VA241 Anomaly Analysis – Ariane 5 VA241 | Spaceflight101The Worst Computer Bugs in History: The Ariane 5 Disaster | Bugsnag BlogTitan IV Explosion at Cape Canaveral 8-20-98 (High Definition) - YouTubeTitan IV A-20 explodes over Cape Canaveral (8-12-98) - YouTubeDELTA II ROCKET EXPLODES AFTER LIFTOFF! - YouTubeDelta II GPS IIR-1 Launch and Explosion, January 17, 1997 (Mild Profanity) - YouTubeDelta-II rocket Launch failure 1997 (GPS IIR-1) 17 January 1997 - YouTubeGoPro Hero Camera Captures Awesome Sight Of Antares Orb-3 Rocket Explosion - YouTubeRemote Camera Footage of Antares Rocket Explosion - YouTubeFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, Jake. Hey, buddy. It's a big day down in your neck of the woods. Not so much, no. To Jake's surprise. It turns out Cincoa Mayo, not really a Mexican thing. I mean, it is, but it's more of a Gringo to Mayo.

Yeah, Gringo de Mayo, yeah. So if you're a Mexican-American, big day, I guess, for tonight, maybe. I don't know. But today is just a work day. It's just a Thursday. Are here. Quieter than the average Thursday or just as noisy? Just as noisy.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, it's a normal day. But good. So how you do, man? How's, how's Philly looking today? A little toasty? A little what?

A little toasty, a little warm? Oh, it's moderately warm. I will tell you this, though. I'll be honest. I tried to go out and buy a Takate. That the store was not selling singles today, and I didn't want to buy 30. So. That is just a lack of ambition, man.

So that's indicative. I didn't know 30 tecate is like, I think the conversion rate is like maybe 12 or 15 normal beers. So I think you would have been okay there. What a power hour to entire case. Oh, man. Yeah. All the singles were sold out on Cinco de Mayo. I mean, yeah, that means a lot of people were buying.

It either means everyone already bought the singles or they're only going to sell 30s. And I feel like it's the latter. Yeah, they got rid of it. I took them off the shelf. No, it's a minimum purchase order law today. I am very excited about this show, Jake. This is a great one. It's funny because like when we do these kind of shows where we don't have a guest

and we kind of like pick a weird thing to talk about, sometimes it starts as like, well, we had nothing else to do this week, so let's do this. And then we like go in and do it. And then at the end of it, we're always like, oh, man, I'm so excited for the show. We should do this every week. We write down these ideas and never. get to him and then when we do it, we're like, this was a great idea. Why didn't we do that earlier? I'm pumped. What are we doing? We're doing cursed rockets. Yeah, we do already drinks first,

though? Yeah, we do. I just was doing a little teaser, just a little teaser. Okay. All right. Keep the intrigue. Well, I already started my drink thing because I planned on getting tecates, but I'll be honest. I'm still finishing off this case of hop horizon from trogues because it's so delicious. And I had these on standby in case the tecate incident went as as it did. So is this like three weeks in a row now you've had that one? He did the last two. Yeah. I'm really impressed with your, uh, your, uh, discipline to keep an entire case of beer in

your fridge for like three weeks. It's pretty good. It doesn't, it doesn't work like that for me. No. It's been a busy couple weeks. I've been, I have not been here on the weekends as much. So, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, what do I got here? So, um, you told me to go back to the beer company. So I did. I took your orders. Um, I got this one first. This one is awesome. this out.

Tarasica. So hard to do. That looks like Reptar, dude. Yeah, it's like a Tyrannosaurus. Do you know Reptar? I do know Reptar. Okay. You had no reaction to Reptar.

I was a little worried. I don't know if it looks like Reptar, man. It looks like a T-Rex. I'm pretty sure that looks like Reptar. Yeah. I'll fact check that. Tell me about this. If you could look really close, it's chasing two little beer people.

Can you see that? Oh, yeah. Look at that. It's pretty good. It looks terrified. Yeah. So this is a, This is a local one, brood right here in the crater, the dinosaur killer crater.

All right. This is what Reptar looks like. Yeah, that's not what this looks like. This is how I remembered Reptar. I mean, other than both being green lizards, it's not. I guess Raptor was not a dinosaur. Hmm. Oh, yeah, it was he like more like a Godzilla type?

Seems more Godzilla. Yeah. That's what Bradley's Tommy. I have a backup too. This is a brewery called. It's the, it's the dinosaur from Toy Story. There you go.

I will accept that. I will accept that. Back up here, I got a mustache pills. This is a, this is a brewery that has a, like a tasting room, like right by my house that we just like,

it was on a main road, like two blocks from our house, and it took us like months to notice it. And now we can just walk over there and drink in the outside beer guards. Oh, yeah. So it's great. There it is.

There you go. Yeah. That's the one. Yeah, that matches. That matches. That matches. That matches. that matches. Reptar.

That's not Reptar. It's Rex. Rextar. Rextar. All right. So, cursed rockets. Do you want to preface? I love the horn. In your background. Yeah. Can you? Don't you? Cinco to my own.

Yeah. So I don't know how you want to explain this? We were just like, let's pick like weird. Weird failure modes was really our thing. Because like there's some there's some obviously cursed ones that like aren't honestly aren't that interesting to talk about. Amo 6, CRS 7, recent. Yeah. Even like Starliners launch, right? Like that was pretty, pretty screwed up.

In the world of all the rockets that have screwed up, there's a pretty high bar you have to meet to hit the off nominal standard for for talking about it. So we picked. And I think we're doing historical mostly. Yeah. I mean, they're all in the past, I guess. They're all historical. But some are very, the way I was putting it was like historical meaning like pre off nominal studios existence. Sure, sure.

The ones that are within that window are forgotten about ones. That's how I was thinking about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so we just wanted to like have some fun with this and pick some bizarre stories. And I don't know, I don't know about yours, but the couple I researched, they just got weird and weirder than more I read. Like even things that I, like I already. knew them and I was like oh yeah I'll just go and get all the details now I'm reading I'm like what what what there's also way more launch anomalies than you think because there's not like a

I don't I didn't find like a list of all the launch anomalies on Wikipedia because there are so many especially when you look into like the Titan line of vehicles there's like ones that have one paragraph on Wikipedia but probably look at looked epic in real life that there's just no video of yeah a lot of those kind of things like you know 70s to 80s era where the stuff went wrong but you don't know about it. Yeah, yeah. That's like it reminds me the early, when they were working on the precursor to Atlas, you know, there was like that weird like sounding rocket style test bet that they did.

And one of them just went up and came like right down on the bunkhouse and people were running. And there was craters and dust and like just shit like that. There was no no video of that kind of stuff. You know, it's just a story in our heart. But yeah. So I don't know. Who do you want to go first? How do we decide?

I don't know. I didn't really do a theming here. I don't know. We should start with the one that everyone's thinking of. Right? Which one is everyone thinking of? Proton. Is that what everyone's thinking of?

Probably. I don't know. Proton's such a good one. I'll take it. It is a good one. Yeah. It's one of my favorites because I am like an unabashed proton fan. And so, you know, I wanted to make sure we covered this one.

So let's just watch it first. This is 2013. This is a slow-mo video, which is fantastic. It's like a really good, really good video. But like immediately you can tell something's wrong. Yeah, it starts tipping before it clears the tower. You're like, oh boy. Like it's like, oh oh, fix it, fix it, fix it.

Every bad KSP launch you've ever had. Like, oh, you're already mashing the keyboard. Oh, no, the other way, don't oversteer, don't oversteer. When you forget to put the fins on and it just not aerode, dynamically stable, so it's like bouncing on all over the place. So can you narrow it a little? What is the plume situation there? Is that a leak?

Is it a fuel leak? What's going on? It's a fire in the engine, yeah, yeah. See, so the first thing to know about this is, like, more than one thing went wrong. You don't say as it flies sideways. Yeah, and the thing that, like, the big thing that made it, now it's spinning, right? The big thing that made it go wrong was, like, if that hadn't happened, the other three things would have been really big news, but because, because.

they're not they're just like faded in the background and nobody cares that look at this spin the spin on it and it gets to this point too it's just yeah it's fantastic oh my gosh what a glorious video oh and there it goes the whole thing starts tearing hairs up i mean props to proton for making it this far into a complete U-turn and staying together oh man and then boom and whoever's filming this is like oh my lord this is about to be number one, the most epic shot I've ever taken my life and the most terrifying shockwave I will ever get hit with. Yeah, because that's like the big thing about this one is it did not get very far.

Like, as you can see, like there, you can see the liftoff plume on the left there, right? Like, it was only, I think it ended up being about a kilometer and a half from the launch pad. And this like, wow. Super. Okay. Okay. So, um, so I was reading about this. Okay, so let's talk about that.

So, like, 2013, yeah. So they had lots of modern review boards to deal with all this and all that kind of thing. But the, the biggest problem that ultimately causes was it as the IMU. So inertial measurement unit, this is the thing that measures, you know, forces of the rocket and tells it which way is going, you know, how far it's turned, which way it's going measures gravity, gradient, all that kind of stuff. And the one on the yaw axis, so they have like some for pitch and some for, for yaw all the yaw ones were upside down like that's ultimately that that's ultimately the problem with this is it is it the rocket thought it was upside down which is why it flips over so like that's just if i told you nothing else about it that would be really funny just to listen to that they put

them in upside down but when you really dig into like what that means it gets even worse so first of all there are three IMUs in the pitch axis and three in the a axis. All of the three in the a axis were upside down, not just one, all of them. And so the first one went in and they were like, yes, do they all go like that? Oh, you think so, but there's more on that to come. So just hold on to your, hold on to your hat there. So first of all, normally they can do a thing where like if one of the IMUs bugs out and gives weird readings, the other two can like override it and they can figure out the right thing.

Not in this case, because all three of them were upside down. So I was reading that. I had this quote here too. Well, we can get to that after. But the, you know, the first thing I asked when I like think about that,

I was like, well, why would you make it possible to install them upside down, right? So first of all, there's an arrow on each one of them that points up. And that was ignored. They just turned down to all three of them were pointing down. Literally the one pointy end up is the single rule.

The one, The one single rule, I can't believe they did that. Second of all, I was like, okay, wait, just let's linger on the arrow situation. So that is the arrow is pointing up in the direction of flight, but is it installed, like are they putting this into a thing, right? It's like some weird little hatch on the side and they mount it. I don't know. But I'm saying if it goes, like, I wonder if the people that were doing this were reading

that as like put this direction in for. first. Oh, maybe. Rather than it goes up. Because I think that's a, now, the other issue is like, there probably should have been people that have done it before that I could tell that it was not pointing the right direction. Anyway, continue on. So, yeah, so that's your first issue.

And the second thing I ask myself is like, wouldn't you, like, I'm not an engineer, but it seems to me that what you would do is like you'd build it in a way that you physically could not install it unless it was in the right way. Like you key the interface somehow, right? like just it's like a like a USB port basically yeah something you can't put the USB port in upside down because it's got that little plastic tap every camera battery in the world has like some sort of thing yeah exactly yeah I got I have a GoPro camera battery right here there is right there so I was like there's I'm like okay the Russians really do that and no

they didn't they did key it it has five little pegs that only go in in a certain way and so how do you get something key to go in the wrong way? Same way they put their Sawyer's boosters on for the Nick Hayden flight. You hit it with a hammer, man. It's like the same old Russian story over and over again. They recovered the one from the wreckage and it had all this damage on it that wasn't from the blast. And they're like, how did that happen?

What NASA astronaut was in here hammering our IMUs? It's Serena on Chancellor get into the bike in our cosmetrome or something? So basically It said Serena was here WUZ On the IMU's You've been serenade No

So basically they had this review board And whoever like you know The Richard Feynman of the Russian review board was Basically Basically like took the the samples And he hit it with a hammer He's like look it's the same damage Oh my God he did the fineman bit

You did. It did. So, so that's your second thing is that the arrow pointed up. They wanted to put it down and they had to use a hammer to do it. Now, is there video of this guy doing the Feynman bit? No. So. That would be epic. If he did, if he styled it exactly the same way, I thought to myself. Yeah, I know. And then they had this issue where basically they put a young, some young engineer, they found the guy that did it. Right. And it was like, another problem is that it was installed two years earlier and the whole thing was sitting in storage. That's another thing. We can talk about with, you know, putting stuff in storage. Boeing, listen in. This doesn't work. And so they did that. And they found the guy and his supervisor as well as a quality control person were supposed to visually inspect it. And neither one of them did. And they all signed the paper that they did.

They totally pencil whipped it. So, yeah. So there's some, you know, there's some pretty crappy quality control. And they got kicked out of the proton line. They went right over to Soyuz. They were. Yeah, exactly. ended a drill.

They said, no longer shall you be trusted with a hammer. Here's a drill. Get to work on the Soyuz. Not even like examples after like you're talking about. There's some before too. Like the original Soyuz flight, Soyuz 1. I don't know if you know that one. Had a hammer situation.

So Vladimir Komorov was the single pilot on that and he died because the parachute didn't come out. And when they figured it out is that they'd like they had measured the canister for the parachute and then they very precisely cut it into the thing and then it could fit the parachute, but they didn't account for some like spray insulation coating that they put on it. And that like extra millimeter thickness kept the parachute not fit. And they used a mallet to put to get it in. And then it wouldn't come out. So maybe maybe we should just be taking the hammers out of the Russian rocket factories. It might be it might be beneficial. Nothing was ever improved with the hammer.

Is the issue is like how many how many missions flew with some sort of hammered hardware? that worked. A lot. Surely a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So another cool thing about this. I don't know if you can,

I don't know if I can give you a link to this, but if you pull up Google Maps and go to my team. Oops. What am I pulling up? Google Maps. Yeah, you can actually see the crater stuff. I was going to look at this one that, yeah, it's totally Zach has real quick.

Yeah, I found it. I was like, man, it's a big crater. It was like, uh, this is, this is the, stuff that I saw on the site there, right? So, but you, what do you got? You got some, is it evident if I go to Google Maps or do you have, do you have some coordinates? No, no, just go to Bikinor and I can walk you over to it. Well, this is, um, because I don't know if I can send you one with coordinates, can I?

I think so. Let's see. We're going to do it live. Let's do it like this. This is more fun because I want to know if you remember. So here's the cause of John. Yeah. So zoom out because it's kind of way off to the left.

Follow that road up to the left there. Zoom out a bit more. Zoom out a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. Because it's near the launch pad. Well, it's like the proton launch. Yeah, that way. Okay, so there you go. Yeah.

So you see pad 200 there. Yep. Where your cursor is. So that's the right proton one. And then the left up to the top left. That's the left one. So there's two launch sites. Proton? Yeah. So this is the one where it launched from. And it launched down into the right.

And you can see it's not far. So it's like, so zoom in kind of right where it's like center bottom there kind of, there's a whole bunch of tire tracks south of the rail line and north of the other rail like in between right there. That's like right. Yeah. And you can see it still has all the truck marks when they went to. And it looks like it's been like scraped over and stuff. But yeah, that's that's the impact site. So you can still see this. crater from the 2022 Google satellite view of the thing. If we ever get to Bikina, we're going to do a live show from the proton crater. That's what we're going to do.

Ophnominal from the most ophthalminal crater. Oh, man. That's a great one. Wow, nice. I love Google Maps and stuff like that. That's great. Yeah, it's pretty good. Boy, that was heading in a really bad direction.

Have you look at the heading of that? Somebody brought up FTS earlier in the chat, and this really makes you think, why did this, why was this allowed to a long time? Continue. I keep hitting this button. Yeah. So I was reading about that too.

And I told him, Zach, who's got the best coverage of this, of course. So we'll put the, we can put the link in there. But he says that because they're worried about the rocket clearing the site and all the different things nearby,

you cannot turn the engines off until T plus 42. So that's why, even when it starts like spinning, the engines are still firing because they can't turn them off in that window. So this whole anomaly happens inside that window. And so the engines fire all the way to the end. Isn't that insane? Like, why is there not?

Like, I don't know. I don't know, man. I don't know who designed this stuff. That's hilarious. So, yeah, it's pretty crazy that that's a thing that can happen. But yeah, and there was all this other stuff that happened. So like it took off early. It didn't reach full thrust before it took off.

It was like a half second early or something, which is like not good. and then it had an engine fire, which you saw, and that caused some problems for that one to turn down. And then, yeah, as the IMU was spinning, it was trying to make up for it. And eventually you just saturate it and then it can't. So that's why it just started rotating because it was trying to, it was trying to like turn the,

it does a roll maneuver to go down range properly. And it was way off by then. And so it just kept rolling and rolling. This is the perfect one to start with because all the ones that I want to talk about have one of those failures in it. Like all of them contained all of the failures. modes, right? Like, there's the Vega flight that happened. When was this? This was 2020. This was like pandemic era, but they, there was two cables that were installed, inverted,

and that was, that switched the direction of engine gimbal control. So when it tried to steer up, it was aiming down and it ended up tumbling. And so it's like not that interesting of a failure mode, but I did find this video of, you know, area in space in the launch streams, they always like cut away to interviews and stuff while people are trying to watch the rocket. There's a couple good moments from that one that were like very subtle, but for space nerds was like, well, that doesn't seem right. So first up, this one guy is talking, and it's very hard to see while he's doing this interview, but in the back, if you look very closely, you can just start to see the hint of a problem,

the underperformance of the trajectory is just starting, right? The X is a little low. So you're like, something must be up. But the real best part of this one is this guy who's doing an interview at the desk. And you can see the upper stage is finishing its burn. Now, I don't know for sure that this is related to the anomaly.

But as the interview continues, the graphic is behind them and it just starts spinning in the background. Like, you know, over the next couple minutes, it's just spinning there. And after this, they go to like the, Well, we're going to take a minute to figure out what's going on here. But this seems like unrelated because I think they had already lost connection to the vehicle at this point. I think it was already dead.

I think it died during that upper stage burn or something like that. But I just appreciated this guy blissfully unaware that there's like an unfolding anomaly behind them. So like the failure wasn't that interesting, but that part of it was. But the one that there's a couple good area in five launches that there's two good ones. I want to hear this. I want to hear this. And they both were similar to what you were just getting on about with Proton. The first flight of Aryan 5 was atrocious.

It's a completely horrible flight and I don't feel like anyone really remembers it much. Let's just watch it real quick. I don't remember it at all. First flight of Aryan 5. Here's the entire thing. That's going to be very loud. This is the entire first flight. Oh, we're doing narration.

I'm going to jump to the actual launch. All right. Here we go. You can let me know how the volume is coming through for you. Looks good, yeah. Okay, great. This is the entire flight. How long do you think this flight is, Jake?

I don't know. I don't remember this at all. Just take a guess. It looks good so far. How far into the flight do you think we are? 20 seconds. Okay, you think that's where we're going to make it? I have no idea. I feel like you're leading me on to a joke that I don't know.

No, you're not leading on anything. I'm just curious how long you think this first flight looks great so far, right? Like everything's looking good. It's nominal. Looks great. Going down range, doing a little pitch there. Solids look good. Oh, that's nothing. There we go. Okay. Boom. So there it is. Now you might wonder similar to Proton. This didn't make it very far. No. Unlike Proton, what does the Arian 5 launch? over ocean well it has to go over a very dense rainforest first okay and there's a lot of flaming solid propellant that is now heading down to the they made an automatic oh no traumatic how much catches on fire from this like

the the smoke plume at the end of this video here's all the people on the beach infamous beach we'll get back to that beach in a hot minute about the second launch return a return to the show later totally I want to see if they get to the smoke plumes here. Oh, this guy's awesome. Maybe you can translate for us. Listen to this police guy. Oh, wait, I missed it.

I missed it. He's like yelling at this one, dude. Did you catch any of that? What was going on there? No, okay. Circulae, I think, was, you know, get out of here to circulate, you know? Look at this. Look at this forest fire that was kicked off at this thing.

Wow. Horrific. Okay, so this is the most of nomenalmy. failure, I think, because it is not a hardware failure. It is a complete software failure of epic proportions. Maybe one of the worst software errors of all time. Okay. All right. All right. So first flight of Arian 5, right?

A lot of heritage here. Reusing a lot from Aryan 4. Okay? Such as the entire code from the inertial measurement units. Oh, IMU is not doing so good so far this. No. Not great. So, Aryan 4 was, what era did that come about? I don't know.

It was, when was that? 70s, 80s, 90s kind of thing. Something like that. Like, Ariane 1, 2, 3, and 4 were all pretty similar, right? Yeah, they were like versions of each other, basically, right? And then 5 was a major departure. So whatever. That stuff existed for a very long time.

So they switched to Aryan 5. They reused the code for the IMUs. And I think more of the navigation, hardware than just the IMUs. But importantly, there was major differences between Ariad 4 and 5, such as the flight path was entirely different because it had two gigantic solid rocket boosters now. The, importantly, the horizontal velocity that Arian 5 picks up early in the flight is way more than Arian 4 did, which had a much more straight up trajectory on that initial phase.

Like a more wafted? Yeah. So there was a piece of code in there that handled, you know, keeping it in control. Very important on Aryan 4, completely unnecessary on Aryan 5 after liftoff. It was used for like early, you know, early in the countdown, getting all of the navigational stuff set up,

but it wasn't necessary when it was actually flying. It had other stuff to handle that. But it was still active. And it was coded with 16-bit integers. But the rest of the hardware in Iron 5 was using 64-bit integers. And importantly, the thing that fed horrible, horizontal velocity into this reused piece of code was sending 64-bit integers into a 16-bit integer variable. Once it got 37 seconds into flight, the horizontal velocity was greater than

what can be controlled or contained within 16 bits. So they started sending in, you know, more than it could actually understand. So what it did was an exception, an uncought exception, happened in the actual software. And one of the debug codes was then read as flight data. So it was an error code for this exception that was read as flight data, which made the rocket think it was 90 degrees off of where it was actually pointing and it went, oops, got to correct this. So this exception led to, oh, the exception also momentarily led to a complete shutdown of both

of the inertial reference systems and it put in that faulty flight data. So it did a hard, hard gimbal, solid rocket boosers and the main engine, all gimbled over, and that's why it did such a hard turn. And then it completely

came apart, as you could sell. They had a starliner like failure here where they, when they did all their testing on the ground of this hardware, they didn't use Aryan 5 trajectory data. I don't know what kind of data they used, but they didn't use anything based on the Aryan 5 Area 5 trajectory.

Oh yeah, and there's some more info here that they were using the same code on everything, so everything crashed at the same time. Whereas on shuttle, all the backup systems use different versions of the code so that if something crashed in one, if there was a bug, it would probably not be the same kind of bug as the other one, on and on.

So I just loved it. There was an uncought exception that led to debug code as being presented as flight data leading to a 90 degree gimbal on a vehicle. I'm like kind of, I'm trying to process all that, but that's like, it's like, that's basically like a Y2K, but in space. 100%. Yeah, it totally is.

In fact, I'm pretty sure, oh, no, it was a different. Lock picks over. I got on a different thread about a centaur issue that there was like, I found like a forum from the 90s and it was about, was this centaur issue a Y2K bug? And I was like, man, this reads really funny now that we're in 2020. too. So anyway, that was a horrible, very similar, you know, IMU situation there with, you know, I feel a lot of sympathy for that, though, because I have a ton of uncought promises in my code. Totally. Oh, my God. Well, that's why I felt like the other ones. We can laugh at

hammering stuff in, but this I was like, shit, man, I could be there. Like, that could be me, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you're just trying to get to, you know, to like some sort of MVP. You just want the software so you can show your boss, not going to waste your time with all those catch statements, we can buy those in later. But honestly, like, these are the kind of things that you would expect today on, like, Starship, right? Oh, we reuse this thing from Falcon 9, but we didn't actually test it. And this happened. Big deal in Aryan world.

There was one of these compilation videos contained, like, some of the Sunday cartoons in the UK, and it was pretty horrific, like, you know, Issa killing itself cartoons. I was like, Jesus, this got escalated quickly. Yeah, no kidding. The other good Aryan 5-1 I can do real quick. This is a quickie. Sure. We don't remember this one as well.

Like people just, I feel like scrub this one from memory. So this one time, this one's really hard to explain. Every time we start, you're just like, here we go. I've got to pull up the video too. That's a terrible song for this. All right, so this was in 2018. They were launching two satellites.

SES 14 and Alia, was it Alia Sat 3 or something like that? Alia 3, yeah. Late in the launch campaign, Alia 3 requested some weird, that were going to launch to super synchronous geosynchronous transfer orbit, right? So much higher Apogee than typical geosynchronous transfer orbits so that you, it's basically to save, you know, Delta V and whatever. And late in the game, Alia, three requested that for whatever reason.

I can't, it's tough to find a lot of info in this one because they never actually released the full investigation of this. They just released the recommendations that came out of it. But they requested that, or not requested, but they basically demanded that when they were released from the vehicle, they had to be released in a right angle perpendicular to the line of flight, right? So they had to be, instead of like, separating in the direction that you're traveling already, they needed to separate 90 degrees to the right.

which was incompatible with Aryan 5's software? Like, this is where there's, why that was incompatible, no one can figure out. There's like flame wars on NASA spaceflight forms about what was actually the issue here, but was it gimbal lock, was it, laser lock, was it this, that, or the other thing. Nobody really knows, and they'd never said.

But whatever it was, they couldn't, in the standard configuration, launch All Ya 3 to the right. So what they did was, they then made the rocket think it was flying 20 degrees different. different than it was. So they had to use a special launch azimuth to tell the rocket that it was aiming 70 degrees out of the launch pad when it was in reality, because they've set all the parameters correctly aiming at 90 degrees, like it's typical for directly east, which is typical for their geo-launches. So they were going to set all these variables different so that the rocket was tricked into flying.

And I believe, based on how this reads, was it like roll, maybe, that they needed it to be rolled into a certain orientation so that when Aryan's upper stage yalled, they could yawl and end up perpendicular to the flight. That's like the best reading I can figure out is that they needed to just be, that role program needed to be done differently so that when they end up in orbit, they can point differently than they normally do. I don't know. This is where it's hazy. So I know there's some people out there in Aryan Spaces launch team that might listen to this. So send us some info if you can because I'm very nice, whatever. They're like losing their minds right now. Yeah, totally. You're getting it is all wrong.

Here's where I know this is right. There were two places they had to set this offset. There was two different pieces of the software and hardware that needed to be set for the 70 degree azimuth. They only set one of them. So it launched and took a hard right 20 degrees. And this is where this video from somewhere near Kauru takes over. If I can play it.

This is a little time lapse of where this rocket is flying. You know, it looks pretty typical so far. You're standing at a launch site. Everything looks fine. Here's where you start going. Hmm. Okay. It's going up.

Definitely going up. Not going out a lot. Not going necessarily away from the people. It should be pitching right about now, right? In the direction of where the waves are coming from is that in my assumption when there's the ocean nearby. Oh, this isn't the time left. I thought I was looking at the time lapse.

I might need to do the time lapse one, so you really get a sense because this guy gets a little... Hold, let me switch to the time lapse one, because this will make more sense. Oh, it's a YouTube short. That's great. Okay. Can I full-screen this? I don't know. Just deal with it. It's a YouTube short. So this is that video tracked

so that you can tell that it just starts arcing directly over their heads. That moon, the moon right there, is 83 degrees up. Oh, my goodness. From where they're standing. So that flew about 83 degrees above people, right? Which is basically directly over everyone's head. So can you imagine being in like Miami and having that happen to you?

Like, oh, a minute. That's weird. A minute. Well, so this is the, here's the map, right? green is the places that they can launch out of Kauru. That is the safe zone to launch, right? From north, basically, straight east. Red is where they went.

If I zoom in, you'll see Kauru. They were probably standing, you know, somewhere on the beach there. Like, I think they said it was about, it was closer to Kauru than Proton was to its launch site. Like, it was at 1.1 kilometers from the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now what's really bad, again, let's talk about FTS systems, flight termination systems. Jake, why wasn't the flight termination system used on this flight? Because they would have just rained debris down on all those people.

Honestly, that is exactly the case. Once they realized it was off course, the range safety officer realized that Kauru was in range of all the debris and the rocket was doing fine. So the safest course of action at that moment was to let it continue past the city. So like it didn't get caught early enough and it and once they realized it was it was too late to do anything about it. So, you know, not to say there's something in that report that they don't want to get out there, but it is pretty weird. They haven't released the full thing. At least I haven't seen it. Maybe it does exist somewhere.

They quietly released it a couple years later. But that one was, that's a rough one. Wow. Yeah. These software errors are like just there. They're both very painful. and also so relatable. It's like, man, I can't figure out of this.

Much like the different than the proton one, right, where the experience people should have seen the arrows pointing the wrong way. When the people looked at this to verify everything was set up right for the launch, the thing that was still set to a 90 degrees is what it typically would be. And if they didn't know the weird quirk that it needed to go to 70 because, you know, like if they were compartmentalized on that info, enough, they wouldn't know. It just looks regular.

That's just hard coding in an off by 20 error so that your code works. Yeah, totally. Crazy. Oh, my goodness. Okay. All right. What else is your favorite? Yeah, this one is definitely my favorite.

So we're going to go back to Russia. I'm just making fun of Russia, old Russia launch vehicles today. So I'm trying to think out the best way to tell the story. So maybe I got a picture of the space shuttle there. Can you open that one up? Okay, so everybody knows space shuttle. You got, I'm assuming that everyone watching this is familiar with the space shuttle. You got a big orange tank, you got some solid rocket boosters, and you have the engines on the orbiter.

So critically, the engines on the orbiter are taking the fuel out of the metal tank. All right. Everyone knows that. So other than also knows that Russia tried to copy this with the with the Buran shuttle right. So here's the Buran. It looks pretty similar. But if you pick up the picture I have there of the engines, you can see it's a bit

different. So the big critical difference between these is that the engines aren't on the orbiter. They're actually on like where the the shuttle's orange tank basically. It's like an SLS core booster in a weird sense. So that's the one of the big design difference between shuttle and Buran. And what makes that interesting is it means that you can launch whatever you want on the rocket, on the stack is it inert?

How do you say this? Energia. What's the, what's the Russian G? I don't know. What is the Russian G pronounced you? I think we debated this once when we did the logos episode. Maybe.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So yeah. So you can launch whatever you want on that. And if you're developing Energia and your test rocket is ready to go and you want to do a test flight. but the people over at the other design bureau who are making the Buran orbiter are way behind schedule

because orbitors are very hard to make. You can launch something else, such as they did, which is the Polyas spacecraft. So this is like one of my favorite stories because this thing is just bizarre. Okay. So ultimately what this is is a like, it's a weapon. Okay. So it's a big space laser, like not even. not even making that up. This literally is a space laser. They quickly cobbled this together because

they wanted to, this was when this strategic defense initiative, is that the SDI? It was Star Wars, right? It was like, was it Reagan was doing that, right? Or they're like, we got to shoot down the missiles coming from the Soviets. And so Reagan was going to make all these scary things. What's old is new again. What's old is new again. And so the Soviets are like, well, we got to find a way to fight the thing that's going to fight our things. It's, you know, just escalate it. And so they, like, threw together this plan to make this giant space laser. And they launched it on the first energy of test. We got to talk about this picture of it, though, because this is. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's such a ridiculous looking, like, this is the kind of shit that you would do in a James Bond movie in that era.

Right? It's so James Bond. Yeah, it's totally like. And it's huge. It's enormous. So that thing is like four meters diameter. It's like almost 40 meters long. It's almost like a Falcon 9. It's a whole rocket. That's how big it is. It's an entire thing. But it's not a rocket.

It's a laser. That's how big this thing is. Because that stack is, is, like that, the energy of rocket is, like, it's a super heavy lift. It's like 95 tons to lower Earth orbit. It's like Saturn 5 class of a rocket. Okay. Like big, big, big rocket. And so, yeah.

So keep that picture up, though. I want to keep talking about this for a little bit. So, okay, so you look at the laser. That's the black part, right? Looks pretty aerodynamic, right? You can see like the nose cone on the top and you got all this thing. So that's the correct orientation to launch it. The weird thing about that, though, is that how this is built.

And if you go back to like the diagram, I told you this thing was like quickly cobble together, right? It's like a very quick test flight. So let me tell you what that means because it's insane. So the top part of it, you can see like the solar panels and the body there. That's a functional cargo block. That's like the Zaria module on station, right? It is.

Their normal. It's literally their state. It's the same thing. It's the same like week that Zaria was made. Probably. Yeah. And now it's all the salient stations. So they just grabbed one of those and said, hey, this thing knows how to fly in space,

stuck it on the on the laser. The whole bottom part's the laser. But the problem with doing that is you get a cool shortcut because you don't have to invent avionics again or whatever and solar panels. But the functional cargo block is not designed to handle launch loads right next to a rocket engine. It's meant to go at the top of the proton, right? Very far away from the engines. And so in order to put the engines for Zaria or the functional cargo block, which are, by the way, this this, this laser has to finish its orbital insertion on its own.

It's got its own propulsion from the functional cargo block. So they want that on the bottom because it's a rocket engine, but it can't be near the engines. So they literally flip the whole thing upside down and launch it upside down. So the engines that finish the orbital insertion are facing up during the initial boost phase, all because the functional cargo block will get vibed to death. It's real bad vibe at the bottom of the rocket. Real bad vibes.

I could see also the ridiculous amount of engines on these things. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty big rocket. So, you know, you kind of guess that. So yeah, that is the key thing to understand there. Yes. Is that the polyas rocket, though it looks like the laser, it looks like it's aerodynamic and point in the right direction. It is in fact upside down. The laser is pointing down and the rocket engine's pointing up. So that sets you up for the big problem. And we can watch the launch. It's very quick. You don't get to see the anomaly because the anomaly happens later. But I do like watching the video. May 15th, 1987. What a time. Yeah. I do like this video because... I'm pretty sure the Flyers were in the Stanley Cup around then and they think we got swept by the islanders, I think. Watch the, watch the, you know how the shuttle had twang when the engine started?

Oh, yeah. So they just kind of like go for it on this one. And so twang happens in flight. It's pretty crazy, right? Is there audio on this? I need to be turning it up probably. Oh, yeah. Because the engines aren't on the orbiter, right?

I don't think just looks so ridiculous. Look at. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. And I'm pretty sure Baran did that, too. It's just how energy it works. Man, the launch video from these, though, are just terrible. I wish these two launches had better video.

Cool. So, that was the launch. Now, let's talk about why. The important context that Bradley's put in the chat, the side boosters on this, are essentially four Falcon 9s. Like this is the ridiculous. Let's strap four Falcon 9s to the end.

It's like a shame that this never like carried on and did cool stuff because it was like amazing. Okay. So the anomaly that it basically happened. So we talked about the thing being upside down. So the nominal course for this was to first stage would go up. The side push was come off and then the core stage would come off. And then it would do a 180 degree yaw. the polyus laser would, and then it would fire its engines and insert into orbit.

But they had real bad software, and we're going to come back to software issues every time on this. It's an important lesson. Everyone thinks their hardware issues, but pretty much all this is software. So they basically reused a command. So there is like a command code they would send to it to do stuff, and they reused it for the yaw maneuver. So before they told it to yaw 180 degrees, they told it to ditch the farings using the same command. And so it yawed 180 degrees with the farings. And then they sent the yaw again.

And it kept going another 180 degrees to do a full 360 degree rotation. And because these things are completely automatic, it fired its engines. And well, let's just say, I guess the Soviets invented the boostback burn that day. It worked. Did their best Falcon 9 impression and just gunned it back for the launch site. And so the, yeah, the whole thing just went down in flames because it didn't have any orbital velocity.

So that was the end of the space laser. Yeah. That's such a good one. That thing just, I can't get over it that that existed, that that thing ever existed. Is there any flight backup or anything? Because I really want to, I wish that existed in a museum. It belongs in a museum. I don't think so.

Because like it was literally like it was a subscale model. Like they literally like were, we got to test a rocket. What do you got? And it's like, oh, let's and they cobble it together. How big was the real one supposed to be? I don't know, man. But like this laser is intense. So I guess I don't know.

I'm not like a laser expert, but they had this. Some thing with it would like expel a bunch of carbon dioxide gas. Because it was a CO2 laser, I think. Carbon dioxide laser. Yeah, and it would like shoot out all this gas. And then one of the big design problems was like that gas would be propulsive, like it would move the laser, right? And so they had to invent this whole thing that would like churn the gas inside of itself

before it like dissipated kind of like, you know, cleanly and it moved the whole thing. But they were also worried that all that gas release would be visible from the ground. And so if you were like, American military officer, you'd see the space laser firing and then you'd come after the Soviet. Like, that's the point of a space laser is that your enemies are looking up in fear as star killer base destroys half the galaxy or whatever. Like, that's the point of a space laser. Yeah. So they added this like other gas like Krypton and Argonne release or something. And then they were, their plan was they were going to release that at the same time. And they go,

oh no, it's just Krypton and Argonne. We're doing a benign science experiment. I'm just like, I read that after. I'm like, no one would have bought that, man. Like, zero people. Like, there's not a single American citizen

would have been like, oh, yeah, that sounds legit. Like, in 1987, are you kidding me? Like,

that would not have, that would have not have happened. It would have been a laser, man. Like, incredible. Yeah. That's a good one. And apparently,

um, uh, uh, I think it was it was a Gorbachev at the time in 87 was the, the president. He like went to the launch site beforehand and, gave very explicit instructions not to test the laser in space because he was worried that you guys you guys would would interpret it as weaponizing space.

I'm like, why are you launching this then? Yeah, we sure would. I was like, that seems like a really kind of like half-assed like direct like, hey, yeah, you can put the giant space laser in space. Just don't space laser anything. Don't use it yet. Yeah. Wait until I'm out of here. They might realize it's a weapon.

So, yeah, that's probably. It's one of my favorites. Very, very bad space platform. You know, all the cobbled together. It didn't work very well. Yeah. I got two good ones that close us out. I've got epic firework-looking launches that are just some truly fantastic videos.

Yeah. They're not that interesting of failures, but they're just. just fantastic videos for a handful of reasons. So let's just do a little, like, a little viewing of this first masterpiece, which is Titan A20. I think this is the one with the really important audio, right? Yeah, we're listening to this launch commentator.

Two, one, zero. Great rocket, over. This is the final Titan four to be flown. That's not exactly. The vehicle has rolled to the proper flight asmen. Plus 18, 19, 20 seconds, warming nominally. Of course.

3 plus 40 seconds. Oh, no. I love that. Oh, no. An epic, epic explosion. I think I've got another one that's also great. This is way worse audio. I'm going to mute this one and watch it.

But better video, because you can see, this is one of those like Discovery Challenge in Cape Canaveral, you know, one of those shows. Oh, yeah. But the video coverage on this one is fairly epic looking. So Titan 4 was an epic launch vehicle. Oh, I love this rocket, yeah. It's kind of a, like a lot of these early rockets, again, it was kind of a Frankenstein, but it was lovely.

Yeah, I love the multiple angles on this one. So what happened on this was an electrical short happened, and it momentarily lost the guidance computer. Guidance computer clicked back on, but when it powered up again, it sent some random pitch and y'all signals, which just, was just enough to completely dislodge one of the solid rocket boosters. So once those are free, vehicles with solids often have this auto-termination thing if one of them loses contact to the vehicle. So it auto-destructed because one of them was falling off with the other side. Now, what's interesting about, so this delayed the Titan 4 program for a while.

The next Titan 4 launch was like a year later, slightly different variant. But that used the inertial upper stage that they used on shuttle a bunch and they used the little on a lot of Titans. Oh, yeah, yeah. This was carrying like an early warning satellite for the Air Force or something. But it failed because the inertial upper stage is two launch stages, right? It's a solid booster stage and then there's a second stage on it. They didn't separate. The two stages didn't separate.

So it got stuck in a bad orbit. But it didn't separate because they found that. the, a wiring harness between the two stages was wrapped with electrical tape too tightly. So when it tried to separate, the wiring harness was stuck with the electrical tape and the two stages stayed together, which is like, I need the name of that electrical tape because it sounds completely indestructible. Yeah, we should be building a lot of stuff with that. Yeah, that's some great tape.

I just thought that one was such a unique. And also, like, how do you figure that out? Wow. Yeah, no kidding, right? How do you figure out that that's the... I mean, I guess plausibly they figured... They had like some telemetry on what happened when the separation command was sent, and they saw it kind of go wonky,

and what they figured out was the only way that that would still be connected is that particular wire. It's like bobbed a little bit, right? Like, how they'd punk together, is it? Huh. Yeah. So let me pull up this other one. So that's very similar-looking failure mode. That is also a very famous one was this Delta 2 launch from January 1997 or something like that.

Delta 2 out of Cape Canaveral. Very similar era, a lot of solids. Is that a shark mouth fairing? This is a shark delta 2 right here. Launching some GPS satellites. Oh, I love the yells to hear the yells. Let's listen to that again because the gas is from the control room. Sad, but fantastic.

Oh, just an epic explosion. Very close to the launch pad, you know, much... Yeah, real close to. Much closer than the other one was. So the other one mostly rained down over the ocean. This one, as you can see in the later half of this video, the debris was all raining down on Cape Canaveral, right? It didn't get downrange at all.

Look at this. Like, terrifying. I hope this guy's really zoomed in on that video. and not anywhere close. But just a ridiculous amount of stuff raining down in Cape Canaveral. Yeah. So this video doesn't have a lot in it, but I just want to pull up this YouTube video real quick because this is from the Air Force Space and Missile Museum Foundation, and this title is

mild profanity. Is that the end of this? Launch an explosion, mild profanity. Which is incredible. but I think this video has some like helicopter footage Wow look at that The shirt

Yeah so the interesting thing I guess I should explain the failure mode here Because that yeah let's look at that real quick So the There was a crack in one of the solid rocket boosters That developed and then grew And so it eventually ruptured Debris struck another solid rocket booster right next to it

That motor also failed and then a second after that the range safety triggered. So it blew up the first stage and the boosters. But the upper stages were not on the same flight termination system, so it actually broke free for a second, which is why you see the upper stages continue on their way. And then after another couple seconds, they terminated the upper stages. Now, this caused an issue because there was then two clouds of toxic everything.

Right? There was two different explosions that then blew all over Cape Canaver, which is horrible. But look at this footage of everything landing at the Cape. And then I think this one also has like flyover of the parking lot as well, which had something like 20 cars and trucks completely destroyed and melted from all this stuff. Landing in the parking lot of the people working on this thing, which is making a bad day worse. Whoa. Yeah. It's crazy.

This is a nuts. There was, yeah, here's the flyover. is just like how destroyed all this was. The explosion was felt like 40 kilometers away and there was damage like 16 or 17 kilometers away just from the overpressure. But you could see like where the debris was falling was in the parking lot and there's craters,

there's melted trucks. I think there was, Tim Dodd had a video that referenced this stuff. I'm trying to, he had a good image that oh there it was this is a nice image of these cars just totally melted geez in the parking lot so it's that's a heck of an insurance claim man was that work is this like a workers comp thing or what how does this work so that one is at that point you kind of hope the Air Force just buys everybody new cars yeah probably

probably could put that in the next budget yeah they had room back then wow good launch failures. A couple of good hardware ones, but a lot of software. A lot of software. A lot of software issues. Unit tests, guys. That's how they get you. That was the thing with the, with the first one I talked with the proton. They did a unit test, which is an electrical test to see if it worked. And they're like, yeah, I am user on. Move on. Check. They are on and they are plugged in. We did plug it in. Oh, man. All right. So yeah, that's cursed rockets.

Cursed rockets. And if you liked the cursed rockets and would like us to do more research-heavy episodes, which I think are particularly fun, you should come on over to YouTube.com slash off-nominal and join. Get the YouTube membership. You can get in the Discord, which we haven't really like done a lot with that thing yet. But we got some people in there now. So I think we should start putting some stuff in there for Off-Nominable peeps.

Despite forgetting to talk about it every week, we have some people. We've been dutifully joining. Totally. So thank you all you members. Yeah, yeah, it's been fun. Discours, we've been debating lots of interesting, weird pedantic points. So the big one right now is whether the rocket lab helicopter successfully caught the stage or not. This is an SN10 class argument.

SN10 class argument, for sure. So it's been a lot of fun hanging out with everybody and talking about that. Yeah. Next week, Anthony, we got a guest coming on. We do. Brian Whedon of the Secure World Foundation is coming on. We're going to talk about the anti-satellite test ban that Vice President announced a couple weeks ago.

And you want to talk about commercial imagery in Ukraine. Not necessarily commercial imagery, but just more like generally, like the role space is playing in this like ongoing conflict that we have, right? So I figured just like I know it was like literally. nothing about it. So I was like, we just need to find someone who's very, very smart about this stuff. Brian's got all that on lockdown. I'm going to just sit quietly and have him tell us stories for an hour. It's basically what it's going to be. It's going to be great. Yeah, he and I, he was on Miko a couple of months ago. I guess right after the Russian ASAT thing happened in November. And we talked about the fallout

of that. And then at the time, we were talking about some paperwork that he was also signing that was trying to get an ASAT ban globally. And this US thing is like the first one of those. So I feel like we'll probably have some good insight now that we've got the other end of that story. So it's going to be fun. Yeah, yeah. So we'll get our mill space groove on. So yeah, like I said, I know nothing about it.

So we'll see how that goes. That's going to be great. I don't have any Miko things to talk about, but you have a lot of WeMarshans thing to talk about. Oh, man. We did a gauntlet, Decatal Survey. So we tease this last week. We talked to Casey Dreyer. So Casey came on my show.

We did an hour and 45 minutes. I broke it into two episodes. So he's now episode 120 and 121. This is like the podcast of record for the, like if you ever need an audio version of the Decado survey, you can always come back to this because we cover almost everything in it. It is like, it's really fun to talk about all the different things. Yeah.

So if you don't want to read it. the 780 page report. You need to go and check that out. That was really fun. And then in honor of the Decadal Survey's top recommendation to explore Planet Uranus, I made some bad merch. It is not good. So if you want to wear a shirt that says, you know, to show your support, if you want to

stand behind the Decadal Survey and, you know, explore the mysteries of Uranus together, You can now get a probe mirror and a shirt. So that was a fun afternoon. This is in the wrong shot. Yeah. I made the shirt and I was like, not everyone's going to want to put that on their chest. So then I made the mug and I was like,

do people really want to put that on their lips? I don't know. We'll see. Too good. Too good. It's funny because like when it was hell happening, you know, the planetary scientists on Twitter were like,

oh, I'm not looking forward to all the jokes for the next like 30 years because this mission is going to be so long. But Emily Lockdewa made a great point She's like, we just got to lean into it This is the best free advertising that NASA is going to get Is everyone talking about your name? Late night jokes

Yeah, it's going to be on all of them So I'm taking her advice And I'm leaning into it Yeah All right, everybody Thanks for hanging out We shall see you next week, I guess, huh? Yeah, thanks everybody

See you Pop on by next week One, two, three, four, five