Amazing Video: Private Japanese Sounding Rocket Crashes After Liftoff
Video Caption: Interstellar Technologies, founded by popular internet service provider Livedoor’s creator Takafumi Horie, launched the unmanned rocket, MOMO-2, from a test site in Taiki.
The outlandish, Ferrari-driving Horie — who helped drive Japan’s shift to an information-based economy in the late 1990s and the early 2000s but later spent nearly two years in jail for accounting fraud — founded Interstellar in 2013. However, privately backed efforts to explore space from Japan have so far failed to compete with the government-run Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
11 responses to “Amazing Video: Private Japanese Sounding Rocket Crashes After Liftoff”
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there is a flame in the boat-tail, maybe a valve failure or pump leak?
Percheron, the first Falcon 1 (and a hybrid propellant rocket whose name escapes me now).
It wouldn’t be the first one to fail to a frozen LOX valve, if that’s it…
by the time you are at 100% power, the valves should be open. Nah, if something went bad, it was a turbopump failure, or a connector failed, etc..
If at first you don’t succeed…quit? Try again? Go for sushi?
Hey, hardly anyone gets it right, the first time…
Here is the video without the annoying captions: https://m.youtube.com/watch…
Horie. What you doing with rockets?…. Go make me some giant robots. LOL
If a flat-earther creationist can make a pressure-fed rocket he flew on without killing himself, Japan ought to be able to do the same.
That was a steam rocket, which is considerably simpler than a LOX/alcohol pressure fed rocket. A steam rocket is a self-pressurizing uncatalyzed monopropellant, basically just a tank, valve, and nozzle. LOX/alcohol requires pressurants, igniters, stable combustion, cooling, etc, etc.
Just a bit of snark. I was hoping they’d go the Truax route. Not many pressure-fed folks out there. If Proton dies–then there goes big hypergolics, too..
Ripple Aerospace are your folks, then. They are trying a mini Sea Dragon with plans for a big one if it works.
I for one am not sad to see hypergols go, but the Long March 2/3/4 family will be around for a while anyway.