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Elon Musk Asks Twitter For Help In Finding Cause of SpaceX Explosion (gizmodo.com)
On September 1, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and destroyed the AMOS-6 satellite that belonged to Facebook, which was going to be used to beam internet to developing parts of the world. Since the cause for the explosion has yet to be solved, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is asking for help via Twitter. Slashdot reader Thelasko writes: Elon Musk stated on Twitter last night, "Still working on the Falcon fireball investigation. Turning out to be the most difficult and complex failure we have ever had in 14 years." He went on to say, "Important to note that this happened during a routine filling operation. Engines were not on and there was no apparent heat source." Other Tweets mention a "bang" sound before the fire, and that SpaceX "have not ruled out" the possibility that something struck the rocket.
It's not like it's rocket science!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
some object hit the rocket. bam
So, Musk wants Twitter's help in investigating the loss of a Facebook spacecraft? Somehow I doubt that Jack Dorsey will be super-happy to indirectly aid his competitors, although I admit that the man's successful launch history looks impressive.
Looks like something ignited the propellant inside the rocket. Judging by all the birds flying around it, I would start there.
>> that SpaceX "have not ruled out" the possibility that something struck the rocket.
It was the hand of God.
Samsung note 7 ?
Perhaps someone forgot a step in preparing for fueling?
Or it might have been started by a problem with the payload, battery short or similar.
At least one possible explanation.
Why not. Facebook satellite, free internetz? or something to dent spacex's storming reputation
If Twitter will save us, then we are definitely DOOMED
Facebook's karma blew it up.
What should I put in the other 100 or so characters left in the tweet?
Did they have the autopilot turned on?
I stole this Sig
This should work about as well as Microsoft's AI test on Twitter earlier this year...
What caused the SpaceX rocket to explode?
In order of popularity:
1. #CrookedHillaryTriedToKillAgain
2. #dRumpf2016
3. #SJWsRuinEverything
4. #BoatyMcBoatface
5. #GrumpyCat
6. #RamseyBolton
7. #NSADroneStrike
8. #AngelaMerkel
9. #KimKardashian
10. #TellMuskToTellTheTruth
#DeleteChrome
Bang sound + impact + expoding fuel = someone shot at it. If thats what you mean then just say it.
Musk made too many enemies. And his attempt to sabotage this week's asteroid mission through court (by blocking import of rd180) was perceived as an act of war.
If Twitter will save us, then we are definitely DOOMED
Hey, how hard can it be to find the problem - it's not like it's rocket scie... Oh, wait.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
for the American reddit.com and slashdot.org brigades to accuse Russia for this, or blame it on Chinese hackers.
World is so greedy now, that the amount of greeditons in our environment increased exponentially and, as many know, greeditons are highly explosive.
high-resolution, high-fps cameras pointed at the rocket during these stages, to get a clearer understanding of any accidents? It can't possibly be a cost to them.
OverlordQ ( #264228 ) already pointed out the error in the linked post:
It belonged to Spacecom and since it exploded before launch isn't covered by insurance, so they're out $200 million.
I thought the editors deserved a little slack but...
This is turning into a news site with little to no facts.
Seriously, can we guys team up and build AI to replace Slashdot editors?
It's been my experience that, more often or not, it's caused by some massive ignition and expansion of a combustible object. Maybe Elon should be looking at that possibility :-) Of course, there's always the possibility that these half-wits don't know whet the heck they're doing.
It may have been caused by an object hitting the rocket? Well, then the internet shall commence groundless speculation as to who may have launched the object.
Someone misread it as a ka-bang payload.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
but your free advertisement sure worked, good job
Looks like an o-ring failure around stage 2. There is very little to go on, but it does seem there was a rupture in the middle of stage 2, it may indicate that the fuel tank ruptured, or some seals failed, leading to a swift build up of pressure and heat.
A solution may be to detect pressure anomalies swiftly and cut the flow.
In all, it will probably come down to either mechanical failure either through manufacturing errors, or an unidentified temp gradient.
Musk maybe should refocus on why things aren't going as planned in a consistent way. Maybe with the privatization of space launches some things are skipped to save money? Maybe a reality is that even today space launches are nothing certain and stuff still goes wrong. The payload to me had nothing to do with this failure.
Shouldn't be anything flowing around the second stage. And any o rings on the exterior of the Falcon 9 wouldn't be used to pressurize anything.
Need to say more?
Musk, face facts. You do not know what you are doing.
Maybe someone hit the fueling connection with some kind of laser?
I am sure that he will get nothing but clear, insightful suggestions from Twitter.
Opening it up to Twitter is a great idea. It allows all the arm chair scientists to express all their ideas based on nearly no facts to feel like they are useful. While people are doing the real work can just ignore the feed and not get indicated with calls and emails expressing their awesome theory.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But they all show Donald Trump the insult comic presidential candidate.
Who stole the remote?!?!?!
You won't hire Canadians at your subsidized playpen, but you expect the world to help you find out why your firecracker blew up?
Fuck off, go play Captain Space on your own dime.
Obviously a shark with a laser
What "o-ring" are you talking about?
Ezekiel 23:20
SpaceX didn't realize rocket science means needing enough people to do rocket science. Seriously, crowd-sourcing an accident? On Twitter? Well, according to my simulations with Kerbal Space Program, you need to...
His boyfriend's ass, no doubt.
Where there are big things, there is always a source of static electricity build-up which needs to be managed carefully. I would bet on static being the ignition source, the bang being a small puddle of fuel igniting somewhere, and the rest being history.
After reading TFA, they are collecting information to help figure what happened.
It would have been nice if the /. summary included the meat of the request.
" Please email any recordings of the event to report@spacex.com."
Now that wasn't that hard was it?
Come on folks. /. is to find the interesting stuff (which this was)
The purpose of
and make it easy to see what the stuff is (which is the complaint ^H^H^H opportunity for improvement here).
This saves time, which will draw folks to the site.
Providing a forum for useful comments flows from the above flows from the above.
Not the other way around.
Am I the only one that has concerns about this???
John Galt Consults the Collective
You are welcome on my lawn.
So why didn't this happen earlier? There have been dozens, if not over a hundred of these fueling operations by now. It's not reasonable to assume that the necessary equipment design precautions weren't taken.
Ezekiel 23:20
I think everyone at SpaceX does. Everything seems to be done at breakneck speed without much thought at this company.
Yes. Like every other new complex technology it takes time to find all the problems and fix them. Early cars had a tendancy to catch fire and break down. Steam engines would explode. Airplanes would crash. Will rockets ever be as safe as airplanes probably not on a per launch bases but on a miles traveled perdeath they will be safer than cars are today.
It must have been the new FaceBook 'news' algorithm that caught fire because it has too many wacky conspiracy theories.
But none of those technologies suddenly scaled to match the size of the Universe. Airplanes still take 6 hours to cross the Atlantic, same as in 1969, and as a matter of fact, we don't even have a way to cross it in 3 hours, which we had 30 years ago.
Sometimes things just don't work and never will.
Sorry.
Rockets are "new complex technology"? We have been firing rockets on missions like this for 60 years now.
You will never convince the space nutters. They always say "well at one point someone said that people couldn't fly in airplanes" so it MUST be possible to fly to andromeda. No one is going to tell them different!
What are you basing that on?
No, it's true. It's not rocket science. It's rocket engineering.
That's The Trouble with Tribbles.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Ever since the Challenger explosion, the inclusion of O-rings in rockets has been mandatory to give an excuse for failure.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Twitter blames it all on GamerGate.
There are rumors that other people posted suggestions, like 'a faulty o-ring' or 'lightning strike', and criticized the GamerGate claim, but no such posts can be seen on Twitter anymore.
So...here we have the Cadillac of space vehicles, popping at or around the second stage connection point for an undetermined reason. We know how it exploded, the fuel and oxidizer mixed...we need to know why. The best best, based on the track record of the Falcon 9 1.0 and this new 1.1 F9R model, is to look at the differences: "The re-usable version of Falcon 9 is known as F9R which itself does not represent a fully different launcher and is more of an add-on to the v1.1 version in the form of the Nitrogen Cold Gas Attitude Control System, the four deployable landing legs and four grid fins used for three-axis control during atmospheric flight, especially during non-propulsive flight phases." -Spaceflight101's article on the Falcon 9 (both version 1.0 and 1.1 The article also stated that their was a brand spanking new stage one design being used. A new design that failed? Who'd a thunk. Now, I don't have the resources or access to investigate in detail. But I bet, dollars to donuts, the failure lies in a stress failure on the side of the rocket with the initial explosion, caused by a specific difference in the designs mentioned. I know its vague, but I'm not going to postulate a more accurate guess based on the limited data available, the actual team can do that, they have the burned up wreck and design on hand to actually examine, and the materials expertise to look at it. I will say that from an informed, but less educated perspective that's the most logical place to look for the details of the failure.
Inside LOX tank their are anti slosh baffles made out aluminum which are welded to the inside of the tank. During fueling those welds will be under thermal stress, if one of the welds gave out it would expose Al metal to the LOX then BOOM. The tank material itself reacted with the Pure O2.
It's the nature of the beast when dealing with LOX tanks. 1st)It would be wise to let the tank sit with a pressurized with a couple of psi of O2 for several weeks building up a thicker ceramic AlO2 layer. 2nd) implement a staged cool down procedure before filling tank with cryonic oxygen to reduce stress on welds..
Think about it. Elon Musk's rocket is one big phallus. Hillary hates phalluses. I know she hates guns too. But I do not put it past her to take a pot shot at this phallus at it's most vulnerable moment. It really does go along with the whole democratic agenda:
1) We are destroying an entrepreneur.
2) We are protecting the environment from all this harmful rocket exhaust.
3) We are keeping space unmolested by Elon's phallus
4) We are taking out an Israeli satellite.
Let's not forget Elon Musk is male who has swum in a sea of white privilege since the day he was born. I know it might seem a little far fetched, but I would not put it past Hillary Clinton to personally destroy this rocket.
"As long as there is poverty, injustice, or environmental degradation anywhere on the planet, we should not think about sending our problems into space. "
-Hillary Clinton
Your beloved government-run NASA pushed Thiokol to fly Challenger in conditions that were outside of the the tested design limits.
The free market does push for better, faster and cheaper. NASA, left to its own devices, has no motivation to lower the cost of space flight - frankly they have every incentive to be bigger and slower. NASA strategically located offices and subcontractors in various congressional districts, not for cost efficiency, but to encourage congress to keep the cash flowing.
Competition and free markets made the USA the biggest and most dynamic economy the world has ever seen. China's recent successes are due almost completely to opening of their markets - even their communist party was able to figure that out.
Tinfoil hat?
It was an Israeli operator SpaceCom satellite for Facebook. I would love to see the specs on that satellite to see if it was not multi-purpose?
It looks like an unmanned drone flying at supersonic speeds directly into the rocket. Doesn't need to be a missile, but needs to be small enough to not be picked up by radar. I have not seen any of the radar data released, so that would be something I would look into if I was Musk. A small drone with a small explosive payload going kamikaze?
Since it was at Cape Canaveral, Florida it would not be a stretch to think something in international waters would have difficulty launching an unmanned drone....
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
Rokkit sciense iz hard.
The cause of the explosion is very simple: IRRESPONSIBILITY
They kept lying about success and about the fact that every single launch has had mayor issues ... including fuel pressure problems on every flight.
The aerospace industry is not a place where you can lie and hide problems ... because the irresponsibility will ALWAYS end-up in tragedy.
Rectal extraction, most likely.
Ezekiel 23:20
He based it on his hyperloop technology.
You would definitely notice a hypersonic vehicle at sea level. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
Ok, sub-sonic :)
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
When I picture you, I imagine that you were probably a "space nutter" yourself in your youth? Probably mildly autistic or schizophrenic? Completely obsessed and lost in fantasy. Then, one day, you started taking medication or someone explained the rocket equation to you, or both, and your fantasy world came crumbling down. So, you started to bitterly frame all of those sci-fi authors and movie makers, and even the real rocket scientists and astronauts and researchers in your mind as liars, personally out to get you. And now you attack others with the fanaticism of a convert with your fixed idea that space travel and exploration aren't possible, continually frustrated by the fact that the real world says they actually are. Maybe a better analogy would be an alcoholic who's sobered up. You know the one. They were the crazy, out of control, drinker who wrecked their own life due to total obsession with being drunk all the time, and now they're temporarily sober and continually sermonizing to their friends who have a few drinks once a week on a Friday night.
Either that, or you're just some pathetic loser who tries to make himself feel superior by "nerd-baiting". Because, you know, a creepy obsession with replying over and over to every thread on space isn't nerdy at all. Seriously, do you actually believe that you're not a sad, sad, little loser?
Who said anything about the universe? Chemical rockets will never get us out of this solar system, and become extremely impractical even in the outer system. Ion drives promise a huge leap forward relatively soon (still only in-system), but it may be a very long time before they can deliver anything near the raw power needed for that first step into orbit.
Expanding into the universe is a very long-term goal probably not even worth thinking seriously about for many centuries.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's him and his management style; shoddy products come about when fitness for purpose (quality in a nut shell) is a secondary objective to cost savings, etc.
Then SpaceX cannot receive certification for U.S. Government ISS or other contractual activity involving rockets or other aerospace vehicles.
The Elon Musk Empire (ponzi scheme) has collapsed. Money from SpaceX was being funneled to Tesla and SolarCity. Now, the funnel is stopped.
Musk's private bank accounts are now on "life-support" where there is not hope of "life".
A sad exclamation mark to end a promising career and highly flawed member of the millennial generation.
"Iron Man" is just a pandering idiot.
Little-known bit of supersonic flight history which might prove enlightening:
Everybody remembers that Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 and broke the "sound barrier". What most people forget, however, is that Yeager and others like Scotty Crossfield continued to fly and that program continued to advance through several versions.... the Bell X-1A, then the X-1B, then the C and then the X-1Dwhich is where this tale gets interesting.
The Bell X-1D was being carried aloft by its carrier plane in 1951 when it suddnenly burst into flames and had to be dropped to save the bomber and its crew (and the X-1D pilot who had not yet boarded the X-1D). The X-1D fell and was destroyed scattering its remains on Muroc dry lake. Investigations of the incident uncovered a root cause that nobody expected and that seems to get regularly forgotten in the aerospace business: There was a gasket in the plumbing that was improperly manufactured using an organic material. It seems that when liquid oxygen encounters certain organic materials, spontaneous combustion occurs WITHOUT HEAT AND WITHOUT ANY IGNITION SOURCE. It's sort of like hypergolic fuels which react violently when they meet even without an ignition source or heat. LOX (and LH2, which NASA uses but Musk does not) are both dangerous dragons that must be tamed and handled with care, and they do not behave just like colder versions of their gaseous selves.
The Falcon 9 SHOULD be even more vulnerableto this because Musk is loading it with densified LOX (LOX chilled to an even lower temp to make it more dense and makemore fit within the same size tank. Nothing says the Falcon 9 cannot be safely operated with densified LOX...... it's just that ANY contamination by ANY organic material (like bits of a cotton rag?) anywhere in the LOX system could cause a spontaneous fire, and contained as it is in a rocket tank, this rapidly converts into a bomb. There's no reason to suspec a drone, or aliens, or industrial sabotage, or anything else exotic and related to foil-hats...... they just need to see if there is any sign of an organic contaminant in the remains of the LOX system, and do a VERY serious review of their procedures and processes to make sure they allow no such contaminations.
This paper has a pretty thorough analysis of igniting cryogenic fuels by the force of cavitation, that is, collapsing of bubbles that could, for example, form from the interaction of super-chilled LOx and LOx condensed from the atmosphere.
You don't need a bullet, or a ray gun, or even a rock to ignite cryo fuels under the right circumstances.
The shockwave from the failure of a pipe or weld could be enough to ignite the fuel.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Just curious.
The footage appears to show something hit the rocket at sub-bullet speeds.
See the news story about loss of amos-6 jeopardizing sale of SpaceCom to China. Israel sells tech to China and US gets very upset about it. If SpaceCom doesn't get sold to China after this it was likely a covert operation. I just hope they don't waste too much time looking for a natural cause when the cause was man-made and go back to flying. Basically just another piece of collateral damage, and nobody got hurt.
Israel has "multi-purpose" satellites, but this one was a telecom satellite on a GEO orbit. It was unlikely to be useful at anything except relaying communications.
My theory is that there was a spark caused by static discharge. There are many ways that could happen, and my vague memory indicates it has caused similar failures. Finding proof of it will be daunting.