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Blue Origin Thread (merged)


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1 hour ago, Kryten said:

Currently, yes. Most other providers have a simulated launch with tanking but without firing (a so-called wet dress rehearsal, WDR).

It's faster. This thing was supposed to be going up in two days, not much time for rolling the stage back and doing extra integration work.

Yes, point of an static fire test is to make sure that the engnes works correctly. Rocket is not supposed to explode, 
Yes that sounded stupid, that I try to say is that fails while still on pad is rare, very rare, they tend to take off before exploding. 
 

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1 hour ago, Kryten said:

Should be noted that NASA had misgivings over whether or not SpaceX had really found the root cause in that case. I suppose we'll know in a few months.

Which would make SpaceX look even worse if it turns out that they put the blame on the provider of the strut when it was something else, maybe internally designed.

Edited by Nibb31
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1 hour ago, CptRichardson said:

First one wasn't their fault, and this one is too suspicious to pin on them yet. Otherwise, the second stage has been entirely reliable.

Everything is their fault, it's their rocket. That's what testing is for. The "suspicious" comment is frankly absurd.

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11 minutes ago, WildLynx said:

Ok, what is the difference then between two parts, one labeled "certified for space rockets" and other "found on the side of the road", except the price tag?

The difference is in the "certification".

One part is off the shelf and designed to resist a certain load. The other is designed to resist the same load, but has a paper trail that goes all the way back to the source materials, test results in various environments and temperatures, calibration of the test equipment, certification of the tooling, manufacturing procedures, personnel qualifications, etc...  

Yeah, it's mostly just paperwork, and you might strike lucky with the cheaper part for some applications, but there are very good reasons to use aerospace-grade components on multi-million dollar aerospace projects.

Edited by Nibb31
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1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

Regarding the first failure, material and supplier selection is their fault. Cutting corners by going for the cheaper supplier who sells non-aerospace grade parts has a cost.

They were aerospace grade. The supplier guaranteed that their struts would hold up fine to three times the load that the faulty strut buckled under - which is still more than twice the maximum stress expected during a Falcon 9's ascent.

Despite the guarantee, the strut in question (and at least two others that were found after the fact) did not reach the rated quality. The supplier delivered junk, and they were sacked for it. The one thing you can fault SpaceX for is that they didn't stress-test every single strut delivered to them despite the supplier guarantee.

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11 minutes ago, WildLynx said:

Exactly. :P

For @tater

The part was tested in certified lab manned by certified 5-star karbal engineerst more expensive then buying few certified ones and installing them right away. Well ... it works most of the time.

We are going way over here, why would it be a strut, you consider a mechanical problem. Its most likely a plumbing or electrical.

You guys seem to forget that while they can standardize the Falcon launcher, the cannot standard the connection with the payload, consequently on site you are always going to have welders, fasteners and plumbers finishing off the work. I remember an occasion once in our group where a contractor was installing a new copper hot water line and was pressure testing the line, only he forgot to close the bleed at valve at the bottom of the system, which just to happen to be over the work area. 2 inch copper with re-pressurized city water, that ole gal was in for a bit of a surprise when she had a full rain storm of warm water in the middle of a room on the 2nd of 9 floors. 

  If it was not the hydrazine tank that ignited first, then i could simply someone who forgot to secure or close a fitting. Prolly sitting in a corner red-faced going whoops.

 

Edited by PB666
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11 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

They were aerospace grade. The supplier guaranteed that their struts would hold up fine to three times the load that the faulty strut buckled under - which is still more than twice the maximum stress expected during a Falcon 9's ascent.

Despite the guarantee, the strut in question (and at least two others that were found after the fact) did not reach the rated quality. The supplier delivered junk, and they were sacked for it. The one thing you can fault SpaceX for is that they didn't stress-test every single strut delivered to them despite the supplier guarantee.

Supplier  are selected by their customers based on audits and tests. So obviously, something was wrong with SpaceX's certification process that allowed this to happen.

This is what SpaceX does: They go to one of the big aerospace suppliers, those who provide stuff for Boeing, Airbus, etc... and they ask for a quote. They usually decide that it's too expensive, so they go to Joe's Strut Factory, who happens to be cheaper, and they pay them to bring themselves up to aerospace-grade standards, and certify them. So yeah, maybe they have the paper trail, but in this case, they were still providing junk that didn't meet the standards, which means that their certification was bogus.

Edited by Nibb31
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No one is saying they need to test every single part they buy themselves, but they are none the less responsible for their design choices, and procedures (possibly including certifying parts themselves at some point). In this case a strut failure is incredibly unlikely under 1 g. The proposed fault mechanism in the last loss was said to be counterintuitive because the forces were actually up on the parts due to buoyancy in the tank. As I recall, they are not 100% on the cause of the previous loss, either, it's their best guess.

A burst COPV would be more likely... and COPVs are harder to test for faults than metal---but they are much lower mass. There are numerous other possible problems. Sadly, this will take a while I think. Hopefully they have data that narrows it further. 

Edited by tater
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1 minute ago, WildLynx said:

And what happens, when someone discovers that? Nothing can be secret for too long... Are you sure they do it?

And ain't bringing someone to higher standards are awfully expensive, if you just need a few struts?

Of course it is, which could be a good reason to cut corners. 

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17 minutes ago, insert_name said:

So you are accusing SpaceX's suppliers on what basis exactly?

I'm not. SpaceX did. 

http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-update

The result of SpaceX's root cause analysis after the CRS-7 failure was that one of the struts that support the COPV (the composite helium tanks) failed under G load, which caused the COPV to go lose and puncture the LOX tank. SpaceX put the blame on the manufacturer of the struts as the investigation revealed that some of them did not meet the requirements. NASA wasn't too impressed with the investigation report provided by SpaceX and because of the lack of evidence, some doubts remain that the root cause was actually found.

If evidence points to today's incident being linked to the COPVs themselves (the explosion seems to originate in the same general area), then SpaceX might have some explaining to do regarding the CRS-7 report...  But this is all just speculation, and I'll stop commenting on the causes of today's accident here. We simply don't have enough evidence.

Edited by Nibb31
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29 is my favorite number.

This was F9-029.

*Sigh*

Why...

I REALLY hope this won't have a humongous delay on other launches. The Heavy has already been delayed enough... and Crew Dragon.

Oof. This'll ruin my day.

At the very least I was at school so I didn't have to know for eight hours...

Worst case scenario: No more SpaceX Launches for 6 months.

Most likely scenario: Everything is delayed, but not to extremes.

Optimistic scenario: The pad isn't too badly damaged, and it wasn't a problem with the rocket, but with the fueling procedure.

Too-good-to-be-true scenario: This is all one big April Fool's joke.

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29 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

29 is my favorite number.

This was F9-029.

*Sigh*

Why...

I REALLY hope this won't have a humongous delay on other launches. The Heavy has already been delayed enough... and Crew Dragon.

Oof. This'll ruin my day.

At the very least I was at school so I didn't have to know for eight hours...

Worst case scenario: No more SpaceX Launches for 6 months.

Most likely scenario: Everything is delayed, but not to extremes.

Optimistic scenario: The pad isn't too badly damaged, and it wasn't a problem with the rocket, but with the fueling procedure.

Too-good-to-be-true scenario: This is all one big April Fool's joke.

The pad is toast. a minute or two after the first stage explosion, you could see the ground tanks go. The strongback tower is scrap too. Rebuilding the pad will take at least 6 months to a year.

LC-39A is supposed to be "nearly ready" for F9 and FH, so they will probably accelerate that while they repair LC-40. You are still looking at several months of delay, a growing backlog, FH being postponed, the 2018 Mars mission being pushed to 2020 and the MCT reveal being pushed back until after F9 has a successful flight or two.

This is definitely a bad day for SpaceX.

Edited by Nibb31
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Just now, Nibb31 said:

This is definitely a bad day for SpaceX.

Yes. The one thing that broke today, about 30 seconds ago as I am writing this, is in the reddit I saw these words:

"Don't expect another launch in 2016."

Being the "Rocket Nerd" of my family/school, this is a bit of a big blow to me.

On a more positive note, Shortly after I read that I found this coub:

Dragon would be safe, I guess.

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1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

I'm not. SpaceX did. 

http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-update

The result of SpaceX's root cause analysis after the CRS-7 failure was that one of the struts that support the COPV (the composite helium tanks) failed under G load, which caused the COPV to go lose and puncture the LOX tank. SpaceX put the blame on the manufacturer of the struts as the investigation revealed that some of them did not meet the requirements. NASA wasn't too impressed with the investigation report provided by SpaceX and because of the lack of evidence, some doubts remain that the root cause was actually found.

If evidence points to today's incident being linked to the COPVs themselves (the explosion seems to originate in the same general area), then SpaceX might have some explaining to do regarding the CRS-7 report...  But this is all just speculation, and I'll stop commenting on the causes of today's accident here. We simply don't have enough evidence.

Oh whoops thought you were talking about today's failure, not CRS 7.

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1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

The pad is toast. a minute or two after the first stage explosion, you could see the ground tanks go. The strongback tower is scrap too. Rebuilding the pad will take at least 6 months to a year.

Doubtful

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5 hours ago, tater said:

Everything is their fault, it's their rocket. That's what testing is for. The "suspicious" comment is frankly absurd.

They were given defective parts that were supposedly cert'd for launch while following industry-standard practices. They didn't know that their supplier was doing a excrements job on their testing and passing on defective parts. Yes, it was absolutely the supplier's fault in that case.  In this case, it's suspicious because of the bell-end of bell-end abnormality of this failure, and it's still not even clear if this is internal to their rocket or pad-side failure on the fueling equipment.

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1 minute ago, tater said:

It's not "suspicious" at all.

It's not at all unlikely that the stated cause of the previous failure was in fact wrong, it could certainly be the COPV failing.

No, it's probably not the COPV failing, but instead a static discharge around the fueling port, given some of the footage reconstruction work of people trying to figure out the initial flashpoint. Which, once more, given that the last US static-fire test failure was in 1958, is still suspicious as hell.

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You guys are making alot of hype about conspiracies and the like. There a whole bunch of different launchpad disasters that can occur at least one of them has a probability of happening every 60 years.

Seriously SpaceX got like 6 flights up in a row, they were do for a faux-pas, nothing exciting there.

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9 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Seriously SpaceX got like 6 flights up in a row, they were do for a faux-pas, nothing exciting there.

That's not the kind of attitude that breeds success. That's the kind of attitude that breeds a failure every six launches.

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