When you think of NASA and crashes, you think of things like this:
But, you usually don’t think about government balloon crashes being “dramatic”, unless of course it’s a balloon crash in Roswell, NM in 1947.
Watch this video from Australia’s ABC:
A huge NASA balloon loaded with a telescope painstakingly built to scan the sky at wavelengths invisible to the human eye crashed in the Australian outback Thursday, destroying the astronomy experiment and just missing nearby onlookers, according to Australian media reports.
In dramatic video released by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the giant 400-foot (121-meter) balloon is seen just beginning to lift its payload, then the telescope gondola appears to unexpectedly come loose from its carriage. The telescope crashes through a fence and overturn a nearby parked sport utility vehicle before finally stopping.
Video via Space.com/Yahoo News:
Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but as you can see in the video, it was a close call.
h/t to Steve Goddard
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DirkH April 29, 2010 at 9:32 pm
My favourite was the Genesis probe with the upside down accelerometer that failed to open its parachute.
Keith Minto April 30, 2010 at 12:05 am
My favourite was the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter that burned up due to Lockheed Martin using Imperial measurements and NASA, metric.
My favo(u)rite was the 2004 DART (Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology), an orbital vehicle that was supposed to highlight NASA’s incredible navigational precision by autonomously docking, very gently, with an orbiting communications satellite.
DART lived up to its name with an incredibly precise autonomous rendezvous at speeding-bullet velocity…
I was “ground crew” for a bunch of hot air balloon launches some years back. We had no problem with knowing which way was “down wind” and parking everything “up wind”… but then again, we were just amateurs… (well, except that some of us had pilots licenses and one was an FAA Examiner rated.)
Didn’t they think of a $100 tank of helium and some party balloons to check ‘winds aloft’? Heck, they could have probably gotten a load of free party balloons just by inviting the local clown to “observe”…
I also found their response “typical”. Visitors will be banned. Don’t need any nasty witnesses or photographic records. I’d have been much happier with a statement of “Clearly visitors need to be positioned up wind and a bit further back; we also need to review our ‘winds aloft’ measurement and guidelines for launch.” But no. Just “get the witnesses out of here!”…
To be fair, I finally saw the video on the ABC TV news, and the winds didn’t look at fault. They had a very heavy object, raised high on an inclined plane (the launcher) thus having great potential energy, then the restraints let go…
And it never occurred to them to clear everything away from the back of the ramp in case the load let go?
Good thing that was down in Australia. Here in the US that could have sparked a nasty OSHA investigation due to such a negligent attitude towards workplace safety. That was official on-the-clock work, not an amateur launch, the official safety person on site should’ve insisted the area was clear.
Gee, guess this could mean NASA’s insurance rates are going up. I wonder who pays for that?
E. M. Smith, We, hot air balloon pilots might take a wee bit of umbrage at being labelled ‘just amateurs’…:)
But yes, very bad planning having all that equipment, vehicles etc downwind of the launch tower.
Quite apart from the wind loading on the vehicle which, because it is ‘lighter than air’, it is easy to forget that there can be large masses and inertia involved.
e.g. an average hot air balloon can easily mass 3.5-4 tons or more, so once it gets moving, you do not want to try and stop it, or get in it’s way.
There have been times when it seemed that when it came to glitches NASA was proving that there was no free launch. 🙂
We watched this on our daily news where there was a video running for several minutes. The winds must have been aloft, as there is no movement in the grass at ground level. Perhaps they should have launched a small balloon to see what was up there.
“Perhaps they should have launched a small balloon to see what was up there.”
Numerous people have asked this. The question seems sincere and not just another snide remark, so I’ll answer it: They DO send up small balloons, many of them, before every launch. They are called ‘Pilot Balloons’ (often shortened to ‘Pieball’). These balloons are tracked from the ground (optically, in my day) by an instrument that calculates, records, and prints the wind direction and speed at intervals well above the top of the balloon during climbout. The printouts are preserved in case they are needed for a failure investigation.
There is also a tethered balloon attached to the launch vehicle. The length of the tether is about equivalent to the height of the balloon. This balloon is released moments before launch.
In addition to both of the above, a weather balloon is often launched the day of the mission, tracked from the ground, recovered, and the instrument package re-used.
Professional meteorologists keep a close eye on all satellite and ground observations of weather before inflation and launch. The meteorologist are very experienced and good at what they do. (Predicting something that is inherently unpredicable.)
This incident is a good lesson in why it is better to scrub a launch, even after the balloon is fully inflated, if there is any credible doubt about launch conditions, rather than launch if conditions suddenly change.