Eris 1 on the Bowen Orbital Spaceport launchpad last week. Photo: Gilmour Space Technologies.
Space is hard! This was and remains common vernacular in the space community. It is believed to have originated from NASA in the 1960s when then-President John F Kennedy set that organisation the seemingly impossible but ultimately conquered goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Fast-forward 60 years, and it seems little has changed. Just ask the team from Gilmour Space Technologies.
The Australian start-up was last week poised to launch the first Australian-designed rocket designed to reach orbit, but two launchpad anomalies have seen its launch postponed to the next available window, in June.
The company was certified to launch by the Australian Space Agency (ASA) and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) after a more than 12-month process of oversight, checks and rechecks by the regulators.
During that time, Gilmour’s Eris 1 rocket had been relocated to its launch facility at the Bowen Orbital Spaceport (BOS) near Bowen in Queensland. It had been conducting numerous tests, including a dry-launch countdown last August.
So, with clearance from the regulators and the weather appearing to be cooperative, the company rolled the rocket out of its vehicle assembly building (VAB) at BOS and erected it on the launchpad to prepare for a possible launch on Thursday morning.
A minor electrical fault, which nonetheless required investigation and remediation, saw the company announce the launch would be pushed back 24 hours to Friday morning.
But on Thursday night, the rocket’s three-stage separation mechanisms and nosecone payload fairing were ‘’energised’’ by filling them with gas and connecting electrical power, at which point the fairing separated from the rocket and crashed to the ground.
Fortunately, there was no injury to ground crews, nor damage to the rest of the rocket and launchpad. But it effectively meant the rocket would need a new nose fairing, and a comprehensive investigation into the anomaly would be required.
A new fairing was hastily despatched by road from the company’s Gold Coast headquarters and arrived over the weekend, while the rocket was lowered and returned to the shelter of the VAB so the investigation could begin.
Company founder and CEO Adam Gilmour said scrubbed launches were a normal part of the commercial launch sector, particularly with a new rocket design being tested for the first time.
“We are investigating why this happened, but it looks like in some of our testing procedures we turned off the flight computer and the energy system of the second stage, and for some reason that has triggered the payload fairing to go,” he told an Innovation.com podcast on 18 May.
“So that seems to be the root cause … when we turned off the second stage, it seemed to trigger the payload fairing to go through its separation sequence and separate.”
Mr Gilmour said the investigation could take more than a week, but the fairing behaved as it should have in that its two sides separated clear of the rocket so that no damage was caused to either the vehicle or any of the launch infrastructure on the ground.
The only payload Eris 1 will be carrying on its first flight will be a jar of Vegemite and a camera.
