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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

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Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#5

Post by cstross »

Wild-ass speculation in the absence of more information than a tweet and a photo of a pad fire:

SpaceX test-fire the first stage motors before each launch. If this was a test firing that went spectacularly wrong, it's embarrassing -- but there won't have been any human beings within blast range and it's better to fail in test than to fail in flight with a payload on top.

(If it was a catastrophic failure during fueling/de-fueling ops, that's another matter entirely, and far more serious -- and an explosive test failure is serious enough as it is.)

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#9

Post by rst »

cstross wrote: post #5

Wild-ass speculation in the absence of more information than a tweet and a photo of a pad fire: SpaceX test-fire the first stage motors before each launch. If this was a test firing that went spectacularly wrong, it's embarrassing -- but there won't have been any human beings within blast range and it's better to fail in test than to fail in flight with a payload on top. (If it was a catastrophic failure during fueli…

Test fire for the launch of a commercial satellite (AMOS-6), which had been scheduled for a few days hence (and now presumably delayed, along with the rest of their launch schedule, pending further investigation). It might conceivably have been during fueling/de-fueling around the test. It's not yet clear from public reports whether the payload was attached at the time of the test-fire; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.

(Note that fueling operations for Falcon 9 got a whole lot trickier when they switched to use of super-cooled fuel and oxidizer, to increase density -- if that stuff gets warmer, its volume increases to more than that of the tank, but it's still liquid, so you can't just vent it off.)

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