This was the first flight of the Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket. An
anomaly occurred at 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the ascent, resulting in the loss of the vehicle.
Captured from my backyard about 35 miles north of Vandenberg SFB using a Canon PowerShot G7 with 2x teleconverter lens.
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Following up on this story a bit more, it seems the flight was
terminated after the rocket began to pitch. The vehicle may have
lost an engine, starting with an engine anomaly
at about 15 seconds into the flight. From
this video, it appears the faring and payload were torn off as the rocket started to pitch.
Here's the
full video of the launch made available by NASA Space Flight.
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Firefly Aerospace released an
official statement for their first test flight. The Alpha rocket was carrying a
DREAM payload consisting of "items from schools and other institutions, including small satellites and several demonstration spacecraft."
The failure that lead to the early termination of this test flight may be rooted in the loss of one of the Firefly Alpha's four independent thrust vectoring Reaver engines. For more details, check out this insightful
launch analysis presented by Scott Manley.
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