First orbital rocket launched from Europe crashes after takeoff
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/30/first-orbital-rocket-launched-europe-crashes-launch-spectrumOpen linkView original on jlai.lu155
Comments24https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/30/first-orbital-rocket-launched-europe-crashes-launch-spectrumOpen linkView original on jlai.lu
I mean, technically, Russia is in Europe.
Also, as the guys at NASA said back in the day, it takes a thousand failures to create one working rocket. Don't look at something halfway done and call it a failure.
edit = apparently I need to learn to read a map.
Don't they do most of their launches from Baikonur in Kazakhstan?
Yeah, but they do have Plesetsk in the European part of Russia. Only used for unmanned launches.
I'll edit my comment
Is it? I thought technically it was in Asia?
Russia is like Turkey partial in europe. Whereas in Turkey its only part of Istanbul, Russia is up to the ural mountains.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains
RU is in Europe, and SSIA in Asia.
Any pretty much everything east of Ural mountains was colonised by Russian slavs. The native indigenous peoples often do not consider themselves russian.
The actual Russian part is the European part, though.
So what about Kazakhstan?
It has a small part in Europe, west of the Ural river. The vast majority of it is in Asia, and I would largely consider it an Asian country.
Thanks
Schrödinger's Country.
Sometimes it's in Europe and sometimes it's in Asia.
Not very orbital, then, is it. Jokes aside, rocketry is hard and I hope they gained the data to make it work next time.
Yeah it’s pretty much a requirement for a new space company to crash their first rocket. At least that’s my default expectation. Space is crazy hard.
Did they forgot about the abort mission function?
That rocket went ballistic into the ground.
Also, years of years of rockets (and missiles) development, and it's still so difficult.
You make it sound like if it was rocket sci... huuuu... never mind.
Video
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1906293118888001536/pu/vid/avc1/1916x1080/KdPEAvb7KKMZ88UY.mp4?tag=14
How dare they zoom back out but not show it falling to the ground.
I can always imagine the tight feeling in the engineers chests as they watch it start to go sideways.1
Where did they launch from?
From here :
.
.
It did pitch.
It crashed? Go read the telemetry and see what went wrong. Try again.
Article said they said 30 seconds would be a success. Not clear how long it stayed up? Clock froze at +18 seconds.