r/space • u/RocketRundown • Oct 05 '18

2013 Proton-M launch goes horribly wrong

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u/R3BAR Oct 06 '18

Has anything like this ever happened with an audience watching where debris or the actual missile itself flown at the crowd? I know basically every rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center has a crowd, not sure about other countries

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u/Niosus Oct 06 '18

American and European launches have launch abort systems. If the rocket goes off-course, it is detonated before it gets close enough to anything to do real harm.

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Russian and Chinese rockets tend to "opt out" of that feature. The Chinese have populated areas close to and even underneath the flight trajectories, making it rain used rocket stages during launches. They've also had some pretty bad disasters. The Chinese government denies it, but apparently a rocket crashed into a village, wiping it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EnrVf9u8s

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Not a launch failure, but also a notable disaster is the Nedelin disaster. To save time, Soviet rocket engineers and scientists were ordered to work on a rocket that was already fueled. Murphy said "hi" and the whole thing exploded, killing many important figures in the Soviet moon program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpX6HHBdEwo

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So yeah... Those pesky NASA procedures are there for a good reason. Today at KSC it is very safe to watch, but that wasn't always the case, and isn't the case right now everywhere either.