Experts Ponder Cause of N.Korean Rocket Failure

Chosun Ilbo ^ | 04/16/12

[AmericanInTokyo]

My take? They are self-handcuffed victims of their very own odd, eery, obsessive preoccuption with Great Socialist anniversaries of this, that and the other. Endemic in Ccommunist socieies, and particular in the most dictatorial of them. It is one of the only ways to keep the starving, enslaved and otherwise deprived "People" preoccupied on Bread and Circuses so they dont get pissed off and turn on the National Palace of the Maximum Leader.

I guess they rushed it, to keep from losing face, the foreign press there made additional pressure. My guess? Next time, they will invite no foreign press observers.

[Lx]

Those turbo pumps are tricky. I read an account of the failures of the Shuttle Main Engines, SSMEs. A lot were due to turbo pump problems but what really stood out was that a run away turbo pump could reach 400,000 RPMs in one second leading to self destruction before it reached that number.

The engineers were complaining that the monitoring they were doing couldn't react fast enough due to slow computers to stop the overrun in time to save the engine and turbopump.

I think this is the writeup:
SSME history in several parts

From part III:
If only the normal operating torque were applied to the HPOTP without the fluid load applied (gas in the pump or in cavitation) it could accelerate from a dead stop to a destructive overspeed condition in less than a tenth of a second. The acceleration rate under this condition is almost 400,000 rpm per second.

[jersey117]

Dear Leader touts missile launch as a smashing success.

In a sense it was in that they launched it in obama's face after his failed negotiations.

[T-Bird45]

I believe I have found the culprit:

[Da Coyote]

Their rockets fail because their rocket scientists know as much about rockets as the Obamaloon knows about the constitution.

[alancarp]

I was curious about whether the rocket had even reached a high enough altitude for us to take it out in that manner. Though I tend to agree: not convinced at all that this administration would have opted to do that in any case.

[TheOldLady]

Click his tootsies!

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[no-s]

Those turbo pumps are tricky.

And probably unnecessary at the technology level they're trying to achieve. They could easily produce pressure fed or gas pumped designs which might not achieve the pinnacle of mass ratio, but would have the decided quality of being more reliable. Even under duress of bad management decisions. I noticed the nuke programs (eg the Paki one too) had similar rigidity of design selection. Maybe the management culture doesn't reward innovation. Perhaps they might be more successful with an upper management change...?

Heheh...

[jda]

It’s quite simple: Inferior, Chinese-made tinker toys.

[jpsb]

The US has had an experimental ....

"Funding for the program was cut in 2010 and the program was canceled in December 2011. It made its final flight on February 14, 2012 to Davis–Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona to be prepared and kept in storage at the "Boneyard" by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group."

[Arkansas Toothpick]

[blueunicorn6]

Natural gas leak.

[USAF80]

We have regressed too. We went from the shuttle back to rockets. We are hitching rides into space with the Russkies. I always thought that we should have just made newer up to date versions of the shuttle because we knew that it worked.

[Cronos]

All chinese made products are poor quality....

[Night Hides Not]

The guy holding the first and second stages together let go tooooo early ?

Pretty damning indictment of the substandard quality of Dear Leader's in-flight missile mechanics.

[Lx]

Hell, they could use the one the V2 used. All it was powered by was Hydrogen Peroxide (not your normal 3%) and passed through a silver screen. It was enough to power the V2.

If they were smart, they would use the J2 style engines in the Saturn 2nd stage. They still used turbopumps but they weren’t under as much stress as the SSMEs or the 1st stage Saturn’s. They also, if they’re smart, get the extra thrust put out by the turbopump’s power section instead of wasting it like I believe we did with the Atlas rockets.

[B.O. Plenty]

Zer0 could get some street creds if he would claim responsibility for the NORK bottle rocket blowing up shortly off the launch pad.