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SpaceX Says Helium Loading Issue May Have Caused Falcon 9 Explosion (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nearly two months after a September 1 accident on the launch pad, SpaceX says it is nearing the conclusion of its investigation. Although the company has yet to identify the "exact root cause" of the accident that occurred during a static fire test just prior to a planned launch of a communications satellite, the investigation has reached an "advanced state." Shortly after the fiery incident, the company focused on a breach in the cryogenic helium system of the rocket's upper stage liquid oxygen tank. "Attention has continued to narrow to one of the three composite over-wrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) inside the LOX tank," the company stated in an update released Friday afternoon. "Through extensive testing in Texas, SpaceX has shown that it can re-create a COPV failure entirely through helium loading conditions. These conditions are mainly affected by the temperature and pressure of the helium being loaded." SpaceX intends to continue work to identify the precise cause of the accident and to improve its method of loading helium onto the rocket to prevent a repeat failure. The company also plans to resume testing Falcon 9 rocket stages at its facility in McGregor, Texas, soon. By taking this step in early November, SpaceX maintains that it is on track to resume flight operations of its Falcon 9 rocket before the end of 2016.
Yes old Donald and his evil cabal of Nazi Communists sabotaged the vessel. They did this in the belief that the big boom would destroy some black lives and increase CO2.
When you elect me to office, I will prevent this thing from happening in the future
-Hillary Clinton for President
So it wasn't blown up by a shoulder launched missile after all?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You could at least apologize to NASA then since you all but claimed it was them a few months ago.
It was helium unloading. Or fags.
SpaceX will destroy itself just fine, no need for tall men on the grassy knoll. Musk can't manage shit.
What happened to the ULA sniper shooting out the oxygen tank?
I guess they mean structural failure causing a cascade of other problems.
I think that SpaceX has already demonstrated it can launch payloads with >75% reliability. That is good enough for putting cheap, standardized satellites into space, or supplies to the ISS. That could generate at least $300 million/year in revenue. SpaceX could downsize to that small.
Didn't the Hindenburg teach us anything?
It's good that they are able to track things down to a reproducable root cause.
There might be room for improvement if the root cause is something that the rest of the industry figured out decades ago.
The deeper root cause question is should/could they have forseen this failure mode if they had used lessons already learned from prefious industry failures.
If the answer is yes, then the corrective action should be to figure out a creative way to add the necessary information path while still staying nimble.
Oxygen Saturated - nearly anything becomes highly combustible. Some things like asphalt and charcoal become impact sensitive explosives.
David Barry Humerous piece in lighting BBQ
PortlandFireTraining Video
I wounder how the particular composite overwrap used behaves when saturated with liquid oxygen.