SpaceX Explains Cause Of Rocket Explosion

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After an exhaustive three week investigation, the folks at SpaceX finally figured out why the Falcon 9 rocket exploded in spectacular fashion during a test firing at Cape Canaveral. I'll spare you all the technical jargon and sum up the explanation with "sumthin' went wrong and it just blowed up." ;)

The Accident Investigation Team (AIT), composed of SpaceX, the FAA, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and industry experts, are currently scouring through approximately 3,000 channels of engineering data along with video, audio and imagery. The timeline of the event is extremely short – from first signs of an anomaly to loss of data is about 93 milliseconds or less than 1/10th of a second. The majority of debris from the incident has been recovered, photographed, labeled and catalogued, and is now in a hangar for inspection and use during the investigation.
 
"sumthin' went wrong and it just blowed up."

Sounds like an Elon Musk description to me.

(I like how on a "blew up on landing," he called it a "rapid unscheduled disassembly.")
 
Huh? They don't explain ANYTHING about what the defect was. they haven't figured anything out. I don't get it.

From the reddit.com/r/spacex threads, it seems that whereas the last failure occurred because a strut failed during the launch, this time a helium tank itself (aluminum+carbon fiber construction) lost containment while being filled and blew up. More information is needed to know exactly how... the tank has to deal with not only pressurization but also huge temperature differentials.
 
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this is par for the course for space x. tesla may have gotten all the good engineers. lol. if you try to use crygentic fuel there is two ways to do it. One a really complex system that converts to normal tempature gas which kills the psi in that gas, and using values that don´t freeze. My guess is they saw forty or fifty artists used cyrogentic gas at a thousand plus psi dumping into a raw barrel or turbine not an isotope... oxygen at minus 132 degrees that mixes with hydrogen contacting a stainless steel metal wall greater than twenty degrees different starts what is called sublimation from a soild or super cooled liquid to a room tempature gas... boom. hydrogen plus oxygen plus heat equals denation like in the video. a normal gas plumbing connection is not rated for cryonic gas. I had to dump the gas into a mixing chamber with floride much like canned air works dump that into super cooled parts and mix it through a series of fans before dumping into high pressure gas then it still explodes, you just have to use M48 or high speed steel to deflect the explosive out the exhaust mouth of the space craft. grin. people will still throw money at them to try and join the 25 mile high club too bad that above 750 miilebars nothing works as intended. snicker. you can increase the air pressure but it still works best at sea level. lol.
 
From the reddit.com/r/spacex threads, it seems that whereas the last failure occurred because a strut failed during the launch, this time a helium tank itself (aluminum+carbon fiber construction) lost containment while being filled and blew up. More information is needed to know exactly how... the tank has to deal with not only pressurization but also huge temperature differentials.

Yeah, the split second before BANG you can see the leak just below the arm/pipe.
 
Why is it that most of Musk's critics sound like they went to the Zoolander School for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Want to Do Other Stuff Good Too?
 
This sucks, but I think they are still entroute for normalcy.
Rocket seem to explode a lot more than one would think.
I guess people say 'its not rocket science' for a reason.
 
This is what happens when the poster doesn't read the article he refers too either.

They just now started investigating the cause for the containment failure. The article explains that they've finished cataloguing all the debris, accounted for damages to the facilities of the launch pad, and created decision trees for the possible chain of events.

And they hope that they can figure out the cause before the scheduled resuming of normal operations in November.
 
And they hope that they can figure out the cause before the scheduled resuming of normal operations in November.

I imagine that has to be protocol. No launches until you figured out the causes of the last catastrophic failure.
 
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