Korean commercial launch company Innospace had the first liftoff of their Hanbit-Nano rocket last night. It cleared the tower, but during the first stage burn it crashed and exploded.
The first stage is a hybrid motor, meaning it uses liquid oxygen like most rockets but solid paraffin wax as the fuel. Hybrids are generally terrible for a variety of reasons for which I could go on about at length. Australia also has a hybrid launcher that failed this year.
Those are screenshots from the launch webcast, launch is at 1:13 https://youtu.be/RqGZ1mS5FC0?t=4378
There's two frames of the explosion seen from the drone.
3rd party footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpsGIQ9U1Y
The launch was from Alcântara Space Center in Brazil, which has been trying to attract commercial operators. It's another equatorial launch site, about two degrees from the equator. It has had a couple dozen suborbital launches but never a successful orbital launch, and VLS-1 V03 killed 21 people in 2003.
The brightness of the plume varies dramatically, which is not surprising in a large hybrid. You're just spraying LOX down the center of a big lump of fuel, you have no control over the mixture ratio at any given instant.
Large hybrids are incredibly susceptible to combustion instability; Virgin Galactic spent years and years trying to get theirs to behave itself.
I've only ever seen one stable large hybrid and it was catalyzed peroxide. The cat pack was probably acting as an acoustic damper.
simonbp
Ben Brockert