this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
27 points (93.5% liked)

Spaceflight

617 readers
24 users here now

Your one-stop shop for spaceflight news and discussion.

All serious posts related to spaceflight are welcome! JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, Roscosmos, ULA, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, Blue Origin, etc. (Arca and Pythom, if you must).

Other related space communities:

Related meme community:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Here's the requisite Manley analysis of the GEM 63XL SRB anomaly on today's Vulcan certification flight.

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 5 points 1 month ago

Ah, so that was the sound I heard outside today. Didn’t know it was an anomaly. Impressive control.

[–] burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I wonder how much "engine out" capacity they would have on a normal flight. This is a pretty big architectural difference vs Falcon and Starship.

Given that Vulcan has only two BE-4s, I don't expect they would have much capability for engine-out unless it occurred very shortly before scheduled MECO. As for SRB-out capability, that feels like it would depend on the required orbit, SRB configuration, and the exact nature of the failure. They've now demonstrated a certain level of SRB-out capability for the VC2S configuration, but I think a certain amount of luck was involved, in that the rest of the rocket seemingly sustained minimal damage. For the 4- and 6-SRB variants, I think the chances of cascading failures would be higher.