Super Strypi Rocket Fails on Launch

The US Air Force has confirmed that its “Super Strypi” sounding, or research, rocket has broken up on launch as its booster gained excessive rotation, destroying the vehicle a minute after lift-off. ORS-4 aimed to reduce the cost of transporting small satellites to low-Earth orbit.

The Super Strypi is an unguided rocket that is launched from a tilted rail, according to Aerojet Rocketdyne, which makes the launch vehicle.

The rocket launched around 5:45pm HST (2:45pm AEDT) yesterday. “Additional information will be released as it becomes available”.

Hawaii’s much-delayed first space launch ended in failure Tuesday, the Air Force says.

Videos of Tuesday’s sunset liftoff of the U.S. Air Force’s Super Strypi launcher show the low-priced fin-guided rocket streaking into the skies over Hawaii and arcing downrange toward the south with 13 satellites before apparently losing control and breaking up. It was created in coordination with Sandia National Laboratories, the Pacific Missile Range Facility, UH’s Space Flight Laboratory, and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The University of Hawaii’s HiakaSat was developed by 150 students.

“What happened today, this is a tremendous success for the University of Hawaii, Mr. Meisenzahl said”. Even before this launch failure, the ORS-4 mission was fraught with delays; the launch had originally been set for October 2013, but was pushed back to November 2014 and then to January 2015, according to Space News, before finally settling on the November 3rd date. But the Pentagon is interested in a method to quickly replenish satellites, particularly as competition from other countries gains strength. The satellite was a hyperspectral imager used for Earth observations. “You are going to be able to tell things like weather, ocean temperatures; you are going to be able to discriminate things like lava flows on volcanoes and things and that’s what we’re really interested in – the environmental effects of different things going on in the planet”, Luke Flynn, University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory director, said in an interview with the Garden Island.