- Hi it's me Tim Dodd,
the Everyday Astronaut! Space is hard. There's a reason we use rocket science as a benchmark for anything
extremely difficult. I for one champion all things space and eagerly await every
single upcoming space event. But, in order to move forward,
we'd better have a look back at some past failures and see
what we've learned from them. What better way to do that than
to watch some of the biggest booms in spaceflight history? But as always on my channel, this isn't just some random
compilation of crazy explosions nope sorry, you're gonna learn something. I'll be teaching you what went wrong and other random facts about
each mission so we can learn while we watch some fireworks. After all, mistakes are only mistakes if you don't learn anything from them. That being said, it's time for some of the biggest
booms in rocket history. (upbeat music) Now before I start, I do want
to mention that I omitted any mission that had loss of life. Those are tragedies and they
need to be treated in a way that honors and respects the lives lost and the families, friends and the people who deal
with that reality every day. After you watch this video, let me know if you want me
to do any more of these. Maybe biggest face palms or
funniest moments, closest calls? Maybe all of 'em. Let me know. Oh and one last thing, these are in order of what
I think are spectacular and not necessarily in the order of actual magnitude of explosions. Okay, enough talking, here we go. So let's start off with
perhaps my favorite booms to come out of recent space history. Of course, I'm talking about
SpaceX's landing attempts with their Falcon 9 rockets. We saw plenty of rapid
unscheduled disassemblies as SpaceX honed in on the
once thought impossible. Propulsively landing and reusing an orbital class liquid fueled booster. Starting with their first
attempt at landing on their autonomous spaceport drone
ship on January 10th, 2015. After a successful stage separation, the booster homed in on
its landing platform. It fired up it's center
merlin engine to perform the final landing burn. Woah, okay what went wrong there? The booster ran out of the hydraulic fluid that powers the grid fins
which steer the booster through the atmosphere just
moments before it touched down. They then remained stuck
in a fixed position, causing the booster to go out of control just before touching down. The engine gimbal
couldn't correct for this and it made the booster
come in all sorts of wonky. And don't forget while watching this the ship its trying to land on is the size of what some people call a football field. - [Man] 'Murica. - And the booster is 45
meters or 150 feet tall. In other words, that's a 15 story building crashing down on the deck, woah. But this was a great
first attempt at landing, I mean after all they hit their target from over 100 kilometers
or 60 miles in altitude, after traveling over 7500 kilometers or about 4500 miles an hour while going about 300 kilometers or 185 miles downrange from the launch site. The next attempt was
also pretty spectacular for mission CRS-6 on April 14th, 2015. Their second attempt at
landing on the drone ship got even closer. It even kisses the deck
then touchdown, yeah. Oh wait, no, wait no, no. No, no, no (crying) gosh. That one was so close it hurts. Oh and watch this, this
is my favorite part. Check out that tiny
little nitrogen thruster trying its absolute hardest
to keep the Falcon 9 upright. You almost had it little buddy. Just before touchdown, the
center Merlin 1D engine that performs the landing
burn experienced stiction, a word I was unfamiliar
with until I heard it in this context. In other words, it had
a sticky throttle valve. This caused a delay in throttle inputs, which made the rocket have
too much horizontal velocity as it touched down, and
subsequently tipped over. There are a few other great booms as SpaceX figured out
how to land the Falcon 9. I definitely suggest watching
their hilarious video titled, how not to land an orbital class rocket. And don't forget, these
were experimental attempts at doing something people
thought was actually impossible. The primary mission on these
flights were still perfectly successful, so these are
probably the biggest boom to success ratio ever,
since it was just a bonus that they landed, which
they now do all the time with great reliability. On June 11th 1957, the
United States Air Force launched the first ever Atlas Missile, the Convair SM-65A from Launch Complex 14 in Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station in Florida. Like all rockets in this video,
it was of course uncrewed. This first version of the
Atlas only had two engines instead of the famous three engine Atlas that had that sustainer engine
and stage and a half design like the one that eventually
put John Glenn into orbit less than five years later. Engine start went great followed by a successful let go of the launcher release system. - [Announcer] The missile
was launched successfully and the flight proceeded according to plan for some distance. During this time the
missile was stable in pitch, yaw and roll. - [Tim] All was going well
until T plus 26 seconds when the B-2 engine suddenly lost thrust, followed seconds later by the B-1 engine. The Atlas tumbled end over end with a maximum altitude of
2900 meters or 9800 feet before being remotely terminated by the range safety officer, who I swear had to be sleeping on the job. I mean, look how long they let it fly before they finally
hit the bye bye button. Come on, any day now Steve. Uhhh Steve? Steve? Any day, come on! Hey Steve? Steve! Steve! Finally, geez. - [Announcer] Debris from the
missile fell on the test base and in the sea just
offshore from the base. - So what went wrong? Well, it turns out hot exhaust
gas from the thrust section was destroying propellant lines, and the remedy to this
was just a heat shield which protected the engine area. Although this was a pretty
big scary looking boom, since this was the first
ever flight of the Atlas, it was actually considered
a pretty big success. On December 12th, 1959 the United States awaits its sixth attempt
at launching their newest and most advanced rocket
at the time, the Titan 1. The Titan 1 was the US's first multistage intercontinental
ballistic missile. This was also the first time the Air Force would be utilizing their
brand new launchpad, Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station in Florida. The rocket was fully fueled
up, and upon engine ignition, the rocket suddenly began
shaking pretty excessively. Uh, what? So excessively in fact it actually set the flight
termination system off while it was still on the pad. There goes that brand
new Launch Complex 16. Actually believe it or not, the launch pad became operational again less than 2 months later. It must have been thanks to those wonderful little sprinklers
gently hosing down the hellish landscape that
once was a launch pad. Convair, the manufacturer
of the original Atlas rocket was developing an advanced
upper stage for their rockets. This upper stage was the
first production rocket stage to use liquid hydrogen for its fuel. The centaur upper stage would
go on to do incredible things and is arguably the best
upper stage in the world still to this day. As a matter of fact, as of January 2018, it had been used on 245 missions. But on March 2nd, 1965,
it wouldn't get a chance to spread its wings,
or I guess I could say didn't get a chance to fire its engine. Engine ignition looked good,
but then right after liftoff. So, what on earth happened here? Well, at T plus .88 seconds, there was a sudden main fuel valve closure causing the entire Atlas booster to come straight back down on the pad. This created quite the boom. As a matter of fact, it was the biggest on pad
explosion at Cape Canaveral for over 5 decades until
our next boom happened. Rockets blowing up on the launch pad was fairly common in the
early days of spaceflight, but even modern rockets
sometimes experience failures on the launch pad. On September 1st, 2016,
SpaceX was preparing to do a hold down static fire of one of their Falcon 9 rockets. This was a pretty routine
mission for SpaceX, preparing to put a 5500 kilogram or 12,000 pound satellite into
geostationary transfer orbit for Spacecom with the AMOS-6 satellite. SpaceX does a static fire
of all their rockets, multiple times even. If you want to know more about how or why SpaceX static
fires, I have this video that goes into super
deep detail all about it. The fueling leading up to static fire was going completely as planned
until out of the blue... No more rocket. No more 244 million dollar satellite. No more launch pad 40. This instant failure
baffled SpaceX engineers since everything was
looking completely normal during the fuel up with no
initial known cause of failure. Despite what the internet thought, surprisingly it wasn't from
a sniper on a nearby rooftop or a UFO. Or was it? No, no it wasn't. After months of testing, a new
failure mode was discovered. Something that had never
even been experienced on any other rocket. This is due to SpaceX
utilizing super chilled fuel and oxidizer, they found
that the liquid oxygen was getting inside the carbon fiber bonds of the internal helium tanks
which maintain tank pressures. Once the liquid oxygen came in contact with the even colder helium tank, it would turn into a solid, expand and then break apart
the carbon fiber weave of the COPV or composite
over wrapped pressure vessel that holds the helium. This caused the helium tank to release all of its pressure instantly, which then over
pressurized the oxygen tank that it lies inside, which then caused the
entire vehicle to explode. SpaceX learned from this lesson and changed their fueling procedures until a newly designed
COPV 2.0 goes online. NASA made an awesome decision
to hire private companies to deliver cargo to the
international space station after the Space Shuttle
program ended in 2011. This decision made for great competition and brought the cost of delivery
down to an all time low. These missions known as CRS, or commercial resupply missions were won by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, who later was known as Orbital ATK who just recently got
bought by Northrop Grumman and is now called Northrop
Grumman Innovation Systems. Yeah. The program was looking fantastic with four successful SpaceX launches and two successful Orbital ATK launches already in the books. On October 28th 2014, Orbital
ATK was poised to launch their third Cygnus spacecraft on top
of their third Antares rocket destined for the
international space station. The Antares rocket took off at 7:22 and 38 seconds
p.m. local eastern time from Orbital's launch pad, the Mid-Atlantic Regional
Spaceport Launch Pad 0, or MARS LP-0A. - [Announcer] Mission to the ISS. That main engine's at 108%. - [Tim] 15 seconds after liftoff, the vehicle suddenly falls
apart from the bottom up. The vehicle fell right back
down on the launch pad, resulting in a huge, huge boom. - [Announcer] And launch team, launch team be advised stay at your consoles. - [Tim] I personally know
several launch photographers that were there and felt this one from only a few miles away. My favorite quote comes from photographer Matt Travis exclaiming... - [Matt] It's gonna be loud. It's gonna be loud Holy shh. Geez! - Yeah, geez that looks terrifying. I can't even imagine. So what happened? The liquid oxygen turbo
pump suddenly exploded on one of the vehicles AJ-26 engines, which are just refurbished
leftover NK-33 engines from the 1970s Soviet Union
planned but never completed second generation moon
rocket, or the N-1F. Luckily, of course, no one was hurt and the failure made Orbital
change the Antares engine to the RD-181. Which ironically is the exact same move the Russians made with their Soyuz 2. On July 16th 1959, NASA prepared to launch
their third Juno II rocket. A rocket initially derived
from the Jupiter missiles, the Juno featured solid
rocket booster upper stages capable of putting about
41 kilograms or 90 pounds into low Earth Orbit. This particular mission,
Explorer S-1 was the sixth flight of the explorers program
whose objectives were to measure the Earth's radiation balance and other cosmic and x-rays. At 12:37 p.m. local eastern time, the Juno II took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station's Launch complex 5. Immediately after leaving the pad, the rocket suddenly veered off course. 5.5 seconds into the flight, it was terminated by the
Range Safety Officer, but it barely had a chance to detonate before erupting in an enormous fireball 76 meters or 249 feet
northwest of the pad. A short circuit of the
rocket's guidance system made the Rocketdyne S-3D engine gimbal in the wrong direction, pointing the rocket west in an instant. The following investigation led to adding a conformal
coating to the circuit boards that helped protect the
Juno II and similar rockets from a similar fate. The Juno II ended up
flying a total of 10 times, with only four successful flights. I'm pretty glad we're beyond those odds of success these days. On June 4th 1996, The
European Space Agency was ready to launch their
newest rocket, the Ariane 5, which was an indirect follow up to their wildly successful Ariane 4. One of the most exciting features was this was designed to be
able to fly humans as well. The Ariane 5 launches from
a beautiful launch pad located at the Guiana Space
Center in the French Guiana, an overseas region of France located on the north east
tip of South America, and situated very close to the equator. Speaking of launching from
the equator this is something we need to talk about
in an upcoming video. Why it's advantageous to
launch near the equator and why it's not more
common to actually do so. So, on a beautiful
Tuesday the world watched as an exciting new heavy
launch vehicle sat waiting for its maiden flight carrying four Cluster spacecraft for the European Space Agency. The Ariane 5 first powers up its Vulcain 2 cryogenic main engines and then it sits on the pad
until it achieves full thrust. Then the two massive solid
rocket boosters ignite and the vehicle leaps off the pad. All was looking really quite
good, but then suddenly around 30 seconds into the flight, the vehicle takes a hard 90 degree turn and disintegrates from
the aerodynamic forces. The resulting fireball was the automatic flight
termination system which broke the vehicle apart. It was found that a malfunction
in the control software caused the vehicle to think
it was 90 degrees off course. The reason's simple. The internal SRI software exception was caused during execution
of a data conversion from 64-bit floating point to
16-bit signed integer value. The floating point number
had a value greater than what could be represented
by a 16-bit signed integer. This resulted in an Operand Error. This unexpected high value for
internal alignment function result called BH, or Horizontal Bias, related to the horizontal
velocity sensed by the platform. The value of BH was much
higher than expected because the early part
of the flight trajectory of the Ariane 5 differs
from that of Ariane 4 and results in considerably higher horizontal velocity values. Duh. In other words, this was
one of the most expensive software bugs in history,
costing 370 million dollars. This launch is definitely fodder
for the biggest face palms of spaceflight history because
they used the same initial reference system as the Ariane 4 but they didn't test it before hand with the Ariane 5's flight profile. The data overwhelmed the
computer causing it to error out. It would've been easily
avoidable and discovered with a simple ground simulation. Whoops. But since then the Ariane 5
has gone on to launch 97 times, with one more boomy failure and three more not so boomie failures. Not bad, not bad. I still think it's a super
cool looking vehicle. On July 2nd 2013, Russia
prepared for a fairly routine launch of their Proton-M rocket to put three new GLONASS
navigation satellites into space. As a matter of fact, it was
going to be the 388th launch of the Proton rocket, so this is about as routine as it gets. The launch went off right on
schedule at 8:38 local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
site 81 pad 24 in Kazakhstan. Almost immediately after leaving the pad, the rocket began to veer
off in one direction, and then some of the six RD-276 engines would gimbal in the other direction as it began to clearly go off course. Now hold on here. At this point, wouldn't you
think the Russian Space Agency or ROSCOSMOS would terminate this rocket? I mean it's 90 degrees off course and that's a giant 19 story
tall, 68 metric ton missile. Well unlike pretty much
the rest of the world, Russia doesn't believe in
self destruct explosives. Let's see how this one goes. The payload fairing and
upper stage gets ripped apart by the aerodynamic stresses as the vehicle plummets back to earth, engines still firing full bore. The rocket didn't release
all of its explosive energy until impacting the ground,
resulting in a huge fireball. There are so many videos
of this particular crash from varying terrifyingly
close vantage points that shakes spectators
when the boom hits them. - [Man] Is it coming this way? - Investigators found out that three of the first stage angular velocity sensors were
installed upside down. And this took some
serious physical effort. In fact there's arrows that
are pointing up on the sensors that were installed pointing down. The sensors are only designed
to fit in one direction, so it sounds like the
technician potentially hit them in place with a hammer and this somehow went unnoticed by quality control and supervisors. Okay, so again, this is another
massive massive face palm. But, this one is also such
a big and dramatic boom. Due to the Proton utilizes
super toxic hypergolic fuels, this event is considered by some to be the largest amount
of ground pollution ever caused by a rocket. The United States National
Reconnaissance Office was set to launch their
seventh secret satellite to geostationary orbit launching
on top of a Titan IV rocket from Cape Canaveral Air
Force Base in Florida. The Titan IV comes from a long family tree of rockets and this is the
most powerful and most capable version featuring two
massive solid rocket boosters on either side of the rocket. August 12, 1998 was a
picture perfect morning, and the Titan IV had a successful lift off at 7:30 a.m. local time. - [Announcer] Liftoff
of America's silent hero the Air Force Titan IV. The is the final Titan IV to be flown. The vehicle has rolled to
the proper flight admin. We're at T plus, 18, 19, 20 seconds. Currently the twin solid rocket motors are performing nominally. T plus 40 seconds. Oh no. - But sometime just before the vehicle reached maximum aerodynamic
pressure or Max Q, it suddenly burst into a
dramatic fireworks display. The cause was an electrical short which made the guidance
computer momentarily shut down at T plus 39 seconds. A mere second later its power was restored but the computer overreacted
and sent commands to aggressively pitch and yaw the rocket to correct its course. The rocket couldn't handle
the significant change in course as it approached Max Q, and the forces ripped one
of the solid rocket boosters right off, which triggered
the self destruct sequence of that booster, and subsequently
the rest of the vehicle. An investigation showed that
this particular booster, the last Titan IV-A to launch, had been sitting around for several years. It had dozens of damaged or chafed wires that should never have been
launched in the first place. The Air Force was pushing for
a launch on demand program for the DOD, and this particular failure made them reevaluate how to
handle such tight deadlines. Oh, number two huh? This better be good. Well, this one is something
special I can tell you that. On January 17th 1997, the US Air Force was set to launch their first
GPS version II satellite on top of the most Kerbal of all rockets, of course I'm talking about the Delta II with nine strap on solid rocket boosters. You can never have too
many boosters, or can you? Dun dun dun. Well at 11:28 the Delta II
had a successful lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 17A. - [Announcer] Delta II launch vehicle carrying the new GPS to our satellite. We have had an anomaly. - [Tim] Next thing you know the rocket turned into a giant firework raining fire all over
Florida's Space Coast from only about 500 meters or
1600 feet above the ground. - [Announcer] We need to secure the area. - 250 tons of debris rained
down within a full kilometer of the launch pad, even
destroying around 20 cars parked outside the blockhouse where ground crew were safeish. This led to some interesting
insurance claims, like Brian Modsell, having
to tell his insurance company that his truck got hit by a rocket. The explosion was the result of a failure of one of the solid rocket boosters. The casing was damaged
during the transportation on a newly introduced system. The rocket casing of
the number 2 GEM-40 SRB started to grow at T plus six seconds and eventually ruptured,
causing the number eight SRB to fail which then
caused the entire vehicle to automatically self destruct. And even so A few seconds later, the range safety officer sent commands to destroy the rest of the vehicle in case there were any
large pieces remaining. To me, that has to go down
as one of the most epic booms in all of spaceflight history. But not quite the most epic. That has to go to. You had to see this one coming right? Well if you didn't get ready. We definitely saved the best for last. In the late 1960s the United
States and the Soviet Union were deep in a space race with the new end goal of
putting a human on the moon. This led to the most feverish
paced rocket evolution in spaceflight history
going from just launching small sub orbital missiles to the largest rockets
ever made still to this day in less than a decade. It's easy to remember the
wildly successful and iconic Saturn V that the United States developed, but did you know there
was a Soviet counterpart that was even more
powerful and in my opinion way, way crazier. And maybe the craziest thing
is we didn't really know much about the Soviet's lunar program until after the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991. Welcome the N1. Although slightly
shorter than the Saturn V the N1 was insanely massive. The bottom of the vehicle was an insane 17 meters or 55 feet wide and
had 30 NK-15 engines on it. Yeah, and you thought the Falcon Heavy's 27 engines was a lot. Now imagine trying to
control 30 relatively new and not well very tested engines using a 1960s Soviet era flight computer. You get where this is going. The first launch went fairly well, I guess considering two
engines were shut down by T plus 6 seconds, propellant
leaked, a fire started, electrical shorts happened. And by T plus 68 seconds the first stage was automatically shut
down by the computer. Not bad actually. Well on July 3rd, 1969 the Soviet Union was set to
launch their second N1 rocket. So this second launch had
some big shoes to fill. The Soviets were hoping to do a moon flyby to take pictures of possible
crewed landing sites. So at 11:18 p.m. local time, site 110 at Baikonur
Cosmodrome roared to life with the ignition of all 30 NK-15 engines. For the first few seconds
everything looked great. Until. You just witnessed the
largest known non-nuclear, human made explosion in history. Over 2000 metric tons of
propellant blew up in an instant and some fuel even managed to
rain down on the launch pad for the next hour and a half. So what happened? A lot. As soon as the rocket cleared the tower we saw a large flash and a bunch of parts of
the rocket falling off. Um we might need those. All but one engine, plucky ole engine 18, shutdown in an instant. But due to number 18 staying on, the entire rocket pitched
over to a 45 degree angle when it hit the ground. The problem arose when before liftoff the number eight engine
had its LOX turbo pump explode which then severed
the surrounding prop lines. The KORD computer system
that controlled the engines automatically shuts down the
opposite engine if one fails, so right away, number eight's
opposite engine shut down, number 20, followed by number
seven, number 19, and 21. But perhaps the biggest failure is that the Soviets didn't
have a way to test the rocket without launching it. The first stage was so big, it couldn't be sent to the
launch pad in one piece and instead it had to be
assembled with each launch. Worse of all, they only tested about two out of every six engines and
none of those engines tested were the actual flight units because they used pyrotechnic valves that could only be used once instead of hydraulic or mechanical valves. This in my opinion is where
they truly went wrong. With the pressure to keep
up with the United States, and a lack of funding, they
pushed their luck too far. This launch destroyed
the launch complex so bad it took 18 months to rebuild it. By this point there was
little motivation or funding to continue the N1 program so it only launched two more times before ultimately being canceled. Dang it, I really really
want to see an N1 succeed. There were even three other N1's that could've flown that
wound up being scrapped. What a shame. Let's start a Kickstarter to build a full scale N1
replica to put somewhere. Maybe my backyard. So there you have it. We had some pretty
serious booms there, huh? I hope you had some fun watching this, but more importantly I really
hope you learned something. Let me know if you enjoyed
this style of video. I haven't really done
a countdown like this so if you do like it perhaps
I could be talked into doing the biggest face palms, the funniest moments and closest calls in space flight history What other questions do
you have about spaceflight? Well, let me know your
thoughts or comments or video suggestions
in the comments below. What'd you think about me
wearing just a spacesuit tee shirt instead of my
spacesuit the whole time? It's so hot and uncomfortable up here I couldn't imagine wearing that spacesuit for the hours, and hours,
and hours that I recorded this video. Take this poll here, let
me know what you think. As always I owe a huge thank
you to my Patreon supporters for helping make this and
every other everyday astronaut content possible. I owe a super special
thanks to those Patreons in our exclusive discord
and exclusive subreddit for helping me script and research. If you wanna help contribute please visit patreon.com/everydayastronaut. Thank you. Don't forget to check out my web store for shirts, hats, mugs,
prints of rocket launches or other original artwork at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody, that does it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut bringing space down to
earth for everyday people.
Loved the video as always Tim but my favourite RUD has to be the Apollo launch abort test for working when it was being tested to do what it did, probably not the biggest boom.
Will the crew Dragon in flight abort test utilise a RUD in a similar manner, to test the issue detection system, or would it trigger the abort, then have the remaining rocket tear itself apart with aerodynamic forces once the capsule has cleared the launch stages?
Hey Tim! Another great video. Thanks!
To clarify the Amos-6 failure, the metal body of the COPV had tiny wrinkles. This created spaces between the composite overwrap and the metal. Liquid oxygen intruded into this space and froze. The increasing pressure inside the COPV from the filling of the helium tank caused the wrinkles to flatten out. This pushed the frozen oxygen outwards against the composite. This created friction between the solid oxygen and the overwrap which either caused strands to break or was enough energy to cause a flash to ignition with the composite as fuel source.
Hi Tim, that Proton failure always reminds me of a Russian joke:
Good video as always, Tim! Thank you for your effort and valuable contents!
Would the Pepcon disaster have counted as spaceflight-related? Of course still excluded from this vid for loss of life involved.
I feel the Long March 2 disaster deserves an unhonorable mention. It did take out a city.
The other lists suggested? DO THEM!
Great video Tim!
The one I missed
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
GTO comsatPre-launch test failureDecronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 52 acronyms.
[Thread #1462 for this sub, first seen 25th Jun 2018, 22:58] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]