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Progeny Mk5 Block I First Flight Fails
Original Post
A storm system off the coast has unfortunately smothered KSC in low clouds throughout the daytime launch window for the first Mk5 Block I rocket. The rocket remains healthy on the pad despite strong surface winds and the launch team will continue to monitor it overnight as we hope the following day cycle brings better weather as the storm continues to move out to sea. We’ll have an update here after the launch.
In the meantime, you can check out the flight analysis for the previous Mk5 launch at the end of last week to get a better idea of what went into planning the ascent for the Block I.
Update
The weather cleared up nicely the following day cycle and preparations for launch went off cleanly up until booster ignition at T-0, which somehow lit off the second stage booster and discarded the first stage. The rocket eventually landed 8km downrange and was destroyed on impact with the water. We will not be releasing any more information at this time while a full review is conducted over the weekend in order to determine the cause as quickly as possible so we can decide whether the next Block I launch needs to be delayed. Mission timeline.
Genesis & KerBalloon Missions
Since KerBalloon had a head-start this week thanks to a weather balloon surplus from the last launch that wasn’t used, Specialist Bill stayed at KSC to help work on this week’s Mk5 launch balloons while Specialist Bob headed out to sea to release a high-altitude balloon to gather temperature data. After a day of waiting for clearer skies and favorable winds the balloon was released and recovered successfully after a decent but not optimal ascent.
Commander Valentina took a Civvie out for a long flight down towards the southern end of the landmass where mariners reported spotting signs of aquatic creatures in a large bay. This got scientists excited as no large sea creatures had been seen near land since The Impact occurred, so Val spent well over an hour flying around the area hoping to spot something so a research airship could be tasked to move on station for long-term monitoring. Unfortunately her observations of the area did not turn up anything, although she did manage to beat both her previous records for longest continuous flight time and distance.
A second Genesis mission in support of Progenitor was carried out as well this week by Captain Jebediah in order to determine how a Civvie needed to fly past KSC in order for its wing camera to get a good shot of the launch pad for viewing rockets ascending. By eventually using a ridge line just west of KSC as a landmark Jeb was able to cruise northward while staying 2.5km west of KSC to get a good angle on the launch pad. The Civvie carries a nose camera as well but Flight Director Lanalye is not thrilled about flying an aircraft directly towards the launch zone. Heading perpendicular allows the aircraft to be as close as possible without any danger of it approaching the rocket. Still, she has allowed controllers to direct Jeb straight for the rocket if his side-long pass is looking short of the mark, as by this time there will be only seconds left until liftoff and not enough time for the aircraft to reach the pad from 2.5km away before the rocket is far and away along its flight path.
ATN Database Update
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,098 asteroids, 26 updates and 0 alerts issued.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
The record year of transits has finally come to close with Moho making a separate trip across the sun this past weekend in just over 4 hours, which was almost twice as fast as its previous transit at the start of the year. Moho has a highly elliptical orbit relative to Minmus and Eve so the first transit was further away from the sun and slower than the second. Since both transits were taken with photos every hour, you can see the speed difference in our composite image of all 5 transits. The Minmus transit at the bottom was only a little over an hour so there is a 30 minute position included for that one.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 10/19/17
I was so ready to get this done on Tuesday just as I had predicted last week buuuut – meh. IRL work stuff. Stress. Boo hoo. Anyways now I’m back to trying to push out my lead again next week. The vicious cycle continues. Still, the week was pretty good and some reddit comments actually helped bouy the spirit so that was nice. I had a nice twitter comment last month as well. it’s always nice to know people are really enjoying the content. Ok so I still haven’t been able to launch off the Block I and see what it’s capable of (other than a straight-upwards code check flight) so enough moping around and let’s get a move on here.
Mk5 Block I scrub
I let the RNG take control of the weather again so what you saw was what I got – low clouds with lots of coverage the first day cycle attempt followed by low clouds but sparse coverage for the second. So yea things could have easily ended up clouded over again but the random numbers that rotate/pan/skew the cloud texture managed to put some mostly clear skies over KSC. Again winds were taken by cloud movement, which changes depending on the x,y,z values for the cloud texture. I have justifiable wiggle room here though – even if no one would know other than me, I could make the surface winds a different direction than the winds aloft moving the clouds.
The kOS code switch from using staging events and action groups over to part actions was done so that I could be flying the Civvie past the pad while the rocket’s kOS code was running for it to launch. When it’s not the active vessel the stage and action group commands do not function, which makes sense.
I was a bit on the fence about actually flying Jeb’s mission – I mean it’s not like I actually drive the UTVs around for KerBalloon missions. However in the end I decided they needed to be flown because the distances involved would otherwise be too arbitrary to properly calculate the way I can with UTV movements across the ground. Also I did want to challenge myself to try and hit the mark for launch. Still, it adds time and effort to the launch which is why I won’t be doing it often.
The booster anomaly was not how I originally wanted things to go. I did plan for the first stage booster to fail to ignite but the whole second stage thing was actually some emergent gameplay I felt I needed to follow. I will have a full explanation of what went “wrong” in next week’s Desk Notes so I don’t spoil anything from over this weekend. Just remember the first stage booster not igniting was the only thing I planned ahead of time.
Weather photos
I like to take a lot of weather photos to show conditions rather than only describe them in a tweet, but I’m starting to wonder if these are photos I should be including in my flickr albums. I’m beginning to get the feeling they are cluttering up the albums. I may start just uploading them to imgur. I don’t know, still haven’t decided. Will take a bit more time to see.
Lunch time
I thought I was being smart scheduling the Mk5 final integration photo for lunchtime so I could do a quick setup without having to edit in workers moving around looking like they are actually doing things instead of randomly wandering. Almost worked, then I realized it was dark out and had to black out the windows 😛
Purposeful missions
When the game generates a contract for me that I accept the first thing I do is look at what type it is and where it is and try to come up with a good reason for doing it – why does this agency want temperature data from here? Why does this agency want a crew report from there? If it just looks like random nonsense (which, frankly, it is) then I will change the location and try to find interesting places to go. Either way I’ve been putting more effort into coming up with good reasons for these missions, like the trip out to survey the extinct volcano and Val looking for “whales” and the most recent mission seeking to determine if backcountry Civvie flying is feasible.
Thumbs up
I thought my latest Jeb pose was pretty good, considering it was a composite of two poses:
Pose 1 on left, Pose 2 in middle, composite pose right
The angle of the camera was also purposely positioned so that his glove would contrast well with the wheel cover otherwise the thumbs up is hard to see.
KSP v1.3.1 revisit
So I realized recently that I actually do need to install the new KSP version sooner rather than later since in order to plan my orbital program I need to have a look at all the parts I have to choose from, and I want to make sure I’m doing it in an environment in which I’ll actually be using them. This won’t be so bad since part packs generally are version agnostic, at least the ones that have been updated to KSP v1.0, and those that do come with plugins generally don’t affect the performance characteristics as viewed statically in the VAB. In case anyone is wondering, this is where I use the tech tree. I don’t unlock nodes with science, I convert science points into funds, but I do take note of how technologies are structured in the tree and proceed progressively. So looking for orbital engines I’ll be mainly comparing various offerings out of one of the earlier rocketry tech tree nodes. I’ll be honest that I haven’t had much time to plan out the orbital program – it doesn’t even have a name yet – one of the downsides to being so short on lead time. Still planning to announce it early Nov tho.
