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SpaceX Rocket Engine Explodes During Test (space.com)
According to The Washington Post, a SpaceX rocket engine exploded Sunday (Nov. 5) at the company's test facility in McGregor, Texas. The explosion reportedly occurred during a "qualification test" of a Merlin engine, the type that powers SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Space.com reports: SpaceX has suspended engine testing while it investigates what caused the incident, which didn't injure anyone, the Post added. In a statement provided to the Post, SpaceX representatives said they didn't expect the explosion to affect the company's launch schedule. That schedule has been pretty packed this year. SpaceX has already launched 16 missions, all of them successful, in 2017 -- twice as many as its previous high in a calendar year. And all but three of these missions also involved landings of the Falcon 9 first stage, for eventual refurbishment and reuse.
We should also remember that SpaceX had an engine fail destructively on the CRS-1 mission. The design of the rocket contains such a failure in one engine without damaging the others. The rocket had an engine-out capability that can cope with one or more failures. It compensated and completed the mission, achieving all expected parameters on the remaining 8 first-stage engines.
Bruce Perens.
Ok, then, can we get ULA on a level playing field with cutting corners?
You are being silly. This was R&D, not a production launch.
Right now ULA is required to do the full engineering work up for every launch, v.s. spaceX not
1. This was not a "launch"
2. It should be up to the market.
ULA provides expensive reliability. SpaceX provides discount access to orbit. If you are launching a 5 billion dollar GSO comsat, you will go with ULA. If you want to dump a van load of cubesats designed by high school science clubs into LEO, you go with SpaceX.
SpaceX will get more reliable much faster than ULA will get cheaper. In ten years, ULA will be out of business.