Last week's failed test of the SpaceX Dragon 2 capsule has been conspicuous for the absence of any comments from SpaceX or NASA about what went wrong. Until recently, all that was known was that, from several miles away, smoke was seen drifting from the launch pad.
It now appears that the failure was pretty catastrophic. The Dragon capsule's ejection rockets were to be tested. They're designed to pull the capsule clear of its launch rocket in the event of a malfunction, before the capsule parachutes to a safe landing with its occupants. This video, allegedly taken from one of the launch pad cameras, and seemingly copied by a smartphone filming a display screen, is said to show what happened. (Profanity alert - the onlookers use some fairly descriptive terms to show their dismay.)
Yeah . . . if I were an astronaut, I wouldn't be real comfortable at the thought of riding inside that capsule, with that escape system! Some redesign appears necessary.
Peter
Maybe they need to go back to the Apollo system with the tower and the rockets on top, with explosive bolts to separate it from the rest of the rocket
ReplyDeleteSo far SpaceX has been very, very lucky to have avoided major problems; I suspect this will soon change, and then they will stop being the unstoppable force soaring ever upward.
ReplyDeleteIt hasn't been in the news much, probably due to their 'golden child' status, however their is accumulating evidence of them taking shortcuts and poor quality control checks or inspection... some time, probably soon, this will come back to bite them.
The counter fact is that these SuperDraco rocket engines have been made since 2012 and have been tested over a hundred times. They've done abort tests, lifting a capsule from the ground before.
ReplyDeleteThat's not an excuse - nobody in their right mind would want to be in that capsule - it just means that maybe the answer isn't as obvious as one might think. Maybe it doesn't mean throw out the design and start over, maybe it means find out who did something stupid and come up with a way to prevent that.
That's a real catastrophic failure.
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with Sig. Humans continue to be fallible and 'miss' things on checklists...
ReplyDeleteOne failure with a rocket engine in testing isn't terribly meaningful. It happens more than engineers would like, but it is how they perfect these things. The problem is identifying the cause when all you've got left is pieces of twisted, burnt scrap.
ReplyDeleteAgreed Larry.
ReplyDeleteCertainly is easier when it happens during a ground-test while tethered to a sensor suite and with a small army of engineers on-hand. Combing through the wreckage becomes a real fun time when you have to fish it out of the ocean first, let alone if large parts never make it to Earth. That's kinda why we shouldn't laugh at getting test results from tests, even if those results are explosive. Let's also not forget that this was a test of something that had already been fished out of said ocean.
If, on the day of the Challenger disaster, NASA had come to me and offered a ride in one of the other shuttles, in say, just two weeks time, I would have jumped at the chance.
ReplyDeleteYes, it would have been a gamble, but their track record up to that time had been pretty good, so I would have taken that gamble just for the chance to go into space.
I still would.