The failure of the rocket launch may have been a simple human error – BGR

• A preliminary investigation into the failure of a Vega rocket launched on Monday suggests that human error was the cause.
• The rocket’s upper stage likely suffered from mismatched leads, which caused it to veer in the opposite direction to that intended.
• The failure of the rocket destroyed both satellites that were on board.

---

On Monday night, a Vega rocket launched by France’s Arianespace failed shortly after take-off. The rocket was destroyed, along with its payload of two orbiters – the SEOSAT-Ingenio and Taranis satellites – and was the second time a Vega launch has ended in disaster in the last three launch attempts.

Now, an initial investigation into what went wrong suggests that the failure was the result of very unfortunate human error. How Space flight now Reports, the engineers who reviewed the launch and subsequent failure data concluded that it is as if a pair of cables are reversed and not being attached to the right places in the rocket’s upper stage led to the total loss of the spacecraft and its useful load.

According to the report, which cites Arianespace chief engineering office Roland Lagier, the cables that were connected to the thrust vector control actuators on the rocket’s upper stage were reversed. This is an error that would have happened during assembly and apparently was not caught during inspections of the work done after the fact.

The reversed cables produced signals intended to produce a change of direction that actually did the exact opposite. These adjustments caused the engineers to lose control of the rocket and it fell, which is a death sentence for anything heading into space. The rocket flew for about eight minutes before this problem manifested itself and the spacecraft was eventually destroyed.

This is a shame for Arianespace, but it’s even worse for clients whose satellites were destroyed due to mismatched cables. The SEOSAT-Ingenio was sent into space for Spain and was designed to scan Earth and transmit important observations, while the Taranis satellite from France was built to detect and study “mysterious electrical discharges from thunderstorms,” ​​according to Space flight now.

The good news – if there is anything to be found in this unfortunate story – is that Arianespace believes the rocket failure is in no way related to the failure of its other Vega rocket last year. Calling the failure of Monday’s launch a “quality and production problem”, CEO Stéphane Israël said the company “is examining all processes to better understand why this integration error has not been corrected”. Adding “We will be 100% transparent”.

The investigation, of course, is not fully completed at this point, but based on what engineers have discovered so far, it appears that the cause of the rocket’s failure has been well established. We’ll have to wait and see if anything else turns up, but for now this looks like an unfortunate accident.