Deep Blue Aerospace Hop Test Suffers Anomaly Moments Before Landing (spacenews.com)
- Reference: 0175119053
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/24/0410259/deep-blue-aerospace-hop-test-suffers-anomaly-moments-before-landing
- Source link: https://spacenews.com/deep-blue-aerospace-hop-test-suffers-anomaly-moments-before-landing/
> Chinese commercial rocket firm Deep Blue Aerospace conducted a first-stage rocket hop test Sunday, [2]experiencing a partial failure during the final moments of landing . Deep Blue Aerospace carried out the test at 1:40 a.m. Eastern (0540 UTC) Sept. 22 at the firm's Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia using a Nebula-1 rocket first stage. Footage of the vertical liftoff, vertical landing test shows the rocket ascending to a predetermined altitude before shutting off two of the three engines used for the 179-second flight. Landing legs deployed as planned, and the stage hovered above its planned landing spot. However an anomaly during the final engine shutdown phase led to a higher-than-expected landing altitude, leading to partial damage.
You can watch the landing attempt and explosion [3]here .
[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1
[2] https://spacenews.com/deep-blue-aerospace-hop-test-suffers-anomaly-moments-before-landing/
[3] https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1837855770823561257?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837855770823561257%7Ctwgr%5E1f64a53245bbc43157b9022b0289dd9f053c4a54%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fspacenews.com%2Fdeep-blue-aerospace-hop-test-suffers-anomaly-moments-before-landing%2F
Is that drone or CGI? (Score:2)
The colours are different to the still camera video and the explosion at the end with all the shrapnal looks a bit too movie like even without the slow mo. Maybe I'm just being cynical but its hard to tell whats real and what isn't now.
Re:Is that drone or CGI? (Score:4, Interesting)
> The colours are different to the still camera video and the explosion at the end with all the shrapnal looks a bit too movie like even without the slow mo. Maybe I'm just being cynical but its hard to tell whats real and what isn't now.
They're not going to pay for the production of a highly detailed, photo quality animation of their rocket crashing and blowing up.
Re: (Score:2)
> They're not going to pay for the production of a highly detailed, photo quality animation of their rocket crashing and blowing up.
Highly detailed? These videos are 240p and 360p. I checked twice, those are the only resolutions available. You don't need anything highly detailed for that.
Re: (Score:2)
The GP demonstrates just how bad things have become. Despite there being no reason to fake a video of a failure, and that being obvious, because of the source the suspicion overrides common sense. This is actually an example of a Chinese company doing the thing people keep demanding - being open, publishing their failures, not hiding anything.
Bad times.
Re: (Score:2)
I never suggested they faked the actual failure, that would be absurd. I suggested maybe they faked the drone video because filming it for real might not have been possible.
Re: (Score:2)
Remember that China has the best drone tech. DJI in particular are market leaders. This is well within their capability.
Re: (Score:2)
> Remember that China has the best drone tech. DJI in particular are market leaders. This is well within their capability.
Please watch the end of the video again and pay attention to the flight path of the drone while the blast shockwave and debris flies past it.
I see no shudder or shake or change in its distance or path. Maybe that's possible, but it seems unlikely, and the video feed remains incredibly clear for something within that range with all the dust cloud and debris around it. IMO, there's no stretch of the imagination required for this to be a visualization based on the telemetry info and external video sources. If
Re: (Score:2)
> ...maybe they faked the drone video because filming it for real might not have been possible.
Any high end drone owners want to chime in?
Especially near the end of the video, what drones do you know of that could maintain a stable flight path while the rocket exhaust is blasting everything else past them, and then the explosion and everything exploding on past it while it remains stable? If that is real footage, I'm sure some of that stability can be chalked up to the impressive image stabilization in modern action cameras and such, but it seems absurd that it wouldn't react to some of that shockwa
Re: (Score:2)
> The GP demonstrates just how bad things have become. Despite there being no reason to fake a video of a failure, and that being obvious, because of the source the suspicion overrides common sense. This is actually an example of a Chinese company doing the thing people keep demanding - being open, publishing their failures, not hiding anything.
> Bad times.
The video definitely looks CG. However, and alternative explanation of why that would be done is not attempting to deceive people.
Telemetry. Most every thing on a rocket has telemetry sending back to launch control. So it is an actual tool to take and use that telemetry as inputs to making a CG animation. I've done that back in the day, when, when making a visualization of positions of traveling objects.
So they would have figurative tons of data with which to make a visualization. And visualization
Re: (Score:1)
If you wanted to fake something with CGI wouldn't you fake success rather than failure ?
Re: (Score:2)
If they're trying to fake the process SpaceX went through in order to make it look plausible, yes you would.
If you were trying to dupe tools who would think they wouldn't fake failure, yes you would.
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They've gotten money from investors and all that. If they get caught with this fakery they'll be executed. It's China. They've previously had a successful test as shown at this link:
[1]https://www.scmp.com/video/chi... [scmp.com]
[1] https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3239328/china-launches-12th-manned-space-mission-shenzhou-17-crew-en-route-tiangong-space-station
Re: (Score:2)
If it was CGI it would be high def and look way more realistic
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> The colours are different to the still camera video and the explosion at the end with all the shrapnal looks a bit too movie like even without the slow mo. Maybe I'm just being cynical but its hard to tell whats real and what isn't now.
The drone camera likely has image stabilization and digital enhancement. A lot of drones footage looks slightly different to handheld cameras due to the differences in their post-processing routines. I do have to say, it's really cool imagery and would be even more impressive had the rocket not went kablooey.
Isn't that backwards? (Score:2)
"higher-than-expected landing altitude."
Looks to me like the land was _lower_ than what the rocket expected. It didn't land in the air.
No Grid Fins? (Score:2)
Impressive - super close.
I don't see grid fins on the rocket - I gather it must keep the rockets running full time during the descent to maintain attitude?
Anything Musk can do (Score:3)
China can do... ;)
How many times did Musk's rockets fail before they landed successfully?
Re: (Score:2)
SpaceX has a geographical advantage, being able to launch out to the Atlantic, against the spin of the Earth, with nothing to worry about for thousands of kilometres.
China has the supply chains and a knack for getting costs down rapidly though. Geopolitics will play a role in keeping some stuff launched domestically, but competition is good and commercial satellites won't really care where their payload takes off from.
Launch with the spin of the earth not against (Score:2)
The earth spins west to east(which is why the sun rises in the east). When spacex launch from Florida over the Atlantic they are launching to the east which is the same direction the earth spins in, this provides an energy advantage to rockets aiming for orbit(even better if done at the equator where the spin of the earth is fastest). By comparison launching against the spin requires more energy, first to counteract the spin and then to reach the same speed that a rocket launching with the spin gets from th
Okay... I'm on board. Well... I'm engaged. (Score:2)
I agree fully with them as to the success. They got a 90% on their term paper. It's the same reaction I had when the return by SpaceX blew up on the pad. God damn, but didn't they succeed massively.
They got to the moon by being willing to do it even though the risk was enormous The appetite for that is gone, though, or at least so it seems. Now the price is extravagant because people think that just because a mitigation is theoretically possible, it must be done. The alternative to spending hundreds of bill
Rocket people have different standards to the rest (Score:2)
It all sounds like it went so well; it's "a partial failure during the final moments of landing," it's an "anomaly" causing "higher-than-expected landing altitude."
Then "You can watch the landing attempt *and explosion* here."
Re: (Score:3)
The video is great, they have a drone circling the rocket and it looks like something from a movie.
As for it being a failure, it seems like it would have worked perfectly if it hadn't paused a couple of metres off the ground. Perhaps the altitude sensor wasn't working properly. While there was a fireball it didn't "explode" really, that was just the engines getting crushed and some fuel igniting before the pumps cut off. It stayed upright and mostly intact.
So overall that is pretty successful test flight. S
Re: (Score:2)
> The video is great, they have a drone circling the rocket and it looks like something from a movie.
What it looks like is CGI. The motion is too perfect. Also, the videos are in 240p and 360p. There are not enough pixels there to determine whether they are real, which strongly suggests that they are not.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone go to the trouble of creating a fake video of their rocket crashing?
Come on, common sense time. What possible reason would they have for faking a failure? This is sinophobic paranoia.
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> What possible reason would they have for faking a failure?
That's what SpaceX did on the way to success. It makes it look plausible.
What's your explanation for the reason that they only released shit-quality videos?
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They used cheap cameras to do the monitoring. If they were only interested in large observables, cheap cameras are all they needed.
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That's a stupid explanation and Slashdot is dumber for having that comment on it.
4k cameras are practically free now, especially where they are made. $30 drones have 4k cameras. There is literally no reason why you would not use a far higher resolution camera.
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At the end of the video, it goes into slow-motion and you can see sharply defined pieces flying off in all directions. I don't want to jump on a conspiracy bandwagon, but I don't think you'd get that footage from cheap cameras. So we're back to good cameras and releasing low res video for some unknown reason, or faked video. It does look very CGI, but 360 camera footage can often look like CGI (not that I know it's 360 video, but it looks like it could be, so maybe it is that or something similar).
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You think SpaceX faked videos of their failures?
I assume you have some evidence for this extraordinary claim.
Re: Rocket people have different standards to the (Score:2)
Are you being willfully obtuse, or just a goddamned idiot? Because that's the dumbest read possible of what I wrote.
Re: Rocket people have different standards to the (Score:2)
No, that's pretty much the ONLY way to read what you wrote. Put down the shovel.
Re: Rocket people have different standards to the (Score:2)
Maybe they didn't launch at all because they are committing some sort of fraud. Maybe they didn't even build the rocket but misappropriated its funding. Forget it, Jake... it's China.
When the rocket crash-lands, you'd expect its skin to distort or ripple. That was when I called BS. It goes completely inert.
Re: (Score:2)
CGI or AI-generated video was my first gut-thought when watching this video too.
I'm no rocket explosion expert but even the debris coming out looks like something from a mid-tier video game. Also, what happened to the horizontal stabilization for the camera? Or the sizable explosion that sent debris flying past the camera ... didn't even shake it slightly?
As to the person questioning why they'd fake a failed-landing video - they probably don't have this rocket flying, much less landing. Faking a bad land
Re: (Score:2)
And a faked olympics opening ceremony. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/sp... [theguardian.com]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2008/aug/11/olympics2008.china
Re: (Score:2)
> Perhaps the altitude sensor wasn't working properly.
You know, it's funny, but that didn't even occur to me. My first thought was "software error".
Re: (Score:2)
Sensor would be my guess. It was too withstand and work in an extreme environment, with a lot of blowback as the booster nears the pad.
Re: (Score:2)
When dealing with things that cost over $100,000,000, you had better believe that anything that might cause even minor damage is going to be seen differently than other things. In space, can the damage be fixed at all? That's a very important question, because while here on Earth we could fix some things with a screwdriver and just swap a part, in space, it's a LOT more complicated than that where they don't have replacement parts for every little thing.
This is a reason why the idea of an orbiting platf
Re: (Score:2)
The first few attempts by SpaceX didn't work out all that well, and I have the feeling that this is complex enough that even if they'd stolen a SpaceX rocket and relocated it and the ground control station to match... this could still be the outcome of a first attempt.