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NASA's Morpheus spacecraft explodes on test flight (VIDEO)

Published time: August 10, 2012 00:34
Edited time: August 10, 2012 06:05
Video from NASA.gov
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Accident, SciTech, Space, USA

The Project Morpheus vehicle has “experienced a hardware component failure” during a free-flight test and exploded after hitting the ground, NASA said in a statement.

­The resulting fire was extinguished by firefighting personnel of the Kennedy Space Center, where the test flight took place on Thursday. NASA engineers are examining the test data in order to reveal the reason behind the failure.

The agency will release information about the cause of the crash as it becomes available, NASA said in a statement on its website.

Morpheus is a NASA-designed vertical test bed vehicle. It is aimed at demonstrating new green propellant propulsion systems, autonomous landing and hazard detection technology. According to NASA, it is large enough to carry 500 kilograms of cargo to the moon, such as a humanoid robot, a small rover, or a small laboratory to convert moon dust into oxygen.

Comments (17)

Anonymous user 03.05.2013 16:20

peterpetrov, I hope you use your insights and work towards solving the problems you have spotted.

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peterpetrov 04.09.2012 23:52

Well yet another failure because of poor design, there was NO failure whatsoever - this is a classic example of 'how not to design a spacecraft '. Basically what you see in the video is that the conventional propulsion methods do require stabilizers for a craft to reach stable lift off. This craft exhibits no stabilizers at all, additionally may I add, the engine output is insufficient to stabilize the craft after takeoff, gravity took over because of the poor design - it crashed and burned, most importantly I do not need a degree and supercomputers to analyze the data provided by the video - the answer is at hand.

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Kermit Frazier (unregistered) 23.08.2012 16:20

NASA - Giving 'Rocket Science' a Bad Name, once again...
(still, this is why they test the things, isn't it?)

Maybe someone can tell me again, why NASA did not order a full inspection on the Shuttle that burnt up, BEFORE it re-entered?

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