No editing, you can see the plant in the foreground moving with the audible booms. The loudest audible boom is a while later than the big explosion on the left tower.
The parachutes were cut before the capsule splashed down. I don't think astronauts would have survived. Of course testing is done to find problems, but this one is so severe that they need to check their design procedures.
The Ariane 5 did launch at the wrong azimuth. That is why they lost telemetry (because the tracking stations were pointed in the wrong direction) and why the inclination of the orbit is wrong. See this picture from a map a few minutes into the flight, the x denoting the actual position of the...
Well, I am not sure. If the satellites would have been in the correct orbit, I'd think the statement by Arianespace would have mentioned that, so I am assuming the sats are not in the correct orbit. The question then is by how much the intended orbit was missed and if the sats can compensate.
Maybe not all is lost: "The SES 14 and Al Yah 3 satellites are in orbit after tonight's launch, sources tell Spaceflight Now."
They speculate that SES 14 could reach its intended orbit with the benefit of its electric thruster.
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I got an error on Windows 7 x64. I looked in the Event Viewer and found this:
Application: SlideRule.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException
at...
Bit strange to announce a live event and then be at least 15 minutes late. :hmm:
Dragon behind curtain:
https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/472197849585688576/photo/1
The "crack" is explained under the photo in the link C3PO provided: "Visible are the diagonal channels that held parachute lines during flight, under a layer of thermal protection material."
Edit: Ninja'd by n112vu :)
http://g.co/maps/9nbfj
Looks like the plane used the area with the yellow chevrons. In other videos of the same place, the jet blast seems a lot less severe.
From what I read, this thing is meant to do suborbital hops.
We can't say what the problem was, as these guys are pretty secretive. It will most likely not be an obvious problem, as they are rumored to have a pretty decent team.
If we assume that the plane has a vertical speed of 55 m/s and that the plane will stop in 2 meters of water (just a wild guess) and that the deceleration is constant (assumption), it will stop in 2/(55/2) = 73 ms.
The deceleration will then be 55/0.073 = 753 m/s^2 and the vertical impact would...