China pollutes ocean with bloody big rocket China's latest Long March-5 Y2 the launch has gone awry for reasons not yet made public. The launch took place from a spaceport in Hainan province. The rocket was carrying an experimental satellite, and the 57-metre long booster left the launch site without incident. Youtube Video Shortly afterwards, Xinhua tersely Tweeted …
It depends on what was one hour after launch, the report or the abort. If the latter then you'd expect it to be comfortably in orbit. The former could have been an abort within minutes of launch, and the Chinese government only grudgingly admitting to the mistake somewhat later.
The livestream definitely showed something really high up and in orbit and people being cool about it.
So definitely no abort before at least LEO.
It is sad that China is still so easily butthurt about something as unsurprising as problematic hi-tech. Until they get rid of that particular asian social particularity, the path to success will be littered with lots of failures and dead corpses.
>>"Until they get rid of that particular asian social particularity
Particular Asian Particularity? I'm Western and if a couple of billion dollars and years of work of mine exploded, I'd be pretty "particular" about things, too.
The "Particular Asian Particularity" is nothing to do with being upset when things go wrong, but rather a complete submission to authority, leading to a structural inability to question the status quo or learn properly from mistakes.
It's been going a long time, and caused a lot of problems. This is a good read, for example, of how a perfectly good 747 was flown into the ground due to the first officer's inability to correct the actions of the pilot. Despite it being literally his job to monitor and correct the pilot, his cultural inability to do so directly caused the crash. The AAIB report, if you have time, is extremely interesting.
Sometimes the whole village goes down the drain (warning: the audiotrack seems to suggest satan is holding a dark mass at launch time)
Now the NorKs probably have the more brutal approach
The same thing happening in NK would the whole engineer's family sent in concentration camp.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/north-korea/galleries/what-you-didn-t-know-about-north-korea/there-s-a-three-generations-of-punishment-rule/
It's just a little disingenous (to both sides) to make a comparison between two rockets - one of which has launched twice with one success and one failure, and one which has made 94 launches with 2 failures and 2 partial failures.
Not exactly apples and oranges or statistically significant results....
Apparently they have developed the Long March series, from types 5 on up, to use LOX/RP-1 (Kerosene) for the boosters and LOX/H2 for both the first and second stages.
These propellants are so much cleaner than what they have been using until very recently, that is, hypergolics for all stages (nasty, polluting chemicals). The new propellants, being mostly cryogenic (except for the RP-1) are harder to handle. But pretty much everybody else, India included, uses the relatively non-polluting propellants almost exclusively these days. Maybe we'll soon be seeing the end of hypergolics for rocket stages.
But if the spacecraft hit the ocean with any of its thruster fuel intact, yeah, that would have been polluting.
Serious question...
To what extent do the large rockets deplete ozone? I suppose H2/LOX is better than RP-1/LOX and both I suppose are better than the metal (aluminum?) perchlorates from solid rocket boosters, but is there any significant impact or are the flights too few to matter?
I know no NOx is produced in the engines proper but are the exhaust plumes sufficiently hot to generate NOx?
Thx!
BC
NOx was in the exhaust streams of hypergolic fueled rockets, and this was an ozone depleter. So moving from hypergolics stopped that problem. Today there is still concern about Cl present in solid rocket exhaust as it attacks ozone and the effect (ozone hole) lasts an hour or so. Could become a global issue if rocket launches increase in the future.
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