YouTube analyst Scott Manley put up a pretty interesting YouTube short on the explosion that happened to Booster 18 early Friday morning. The short is extracted from a 31 minute video that covers the New Glenn launch and this Booster 18 RUD.
Scott shows some pretty impressive photos in that short video, but leaves us with a pretty familiar conclusion. It looks like a COPV (Composite Overlaid Pressure Vessel) was either the root cause or else a major contributor to the incident, much like last June's accident that destroyed Booster 36 and the test stand.
In the video, Scott shows this photo from Jordan Guidry at What About It? The area on the right where the worst damage is would have been where the COPVs were mounted. As the transcribed text in the upper middle says, "No covers and no pressure vessels are visible." Did the pressure vessels disassemble themselves?
If you look near the bottom of the downcomer tube, essentially in the middle of blown out area, you'll see a hole and can see that metal from the tube is pushed and bent into the tube. Scott posits that a COPV exploded and debris shot through the downcomer, causing the RUD.
What About It also has a video on this incident.
At this point, if it really is a recurrent problem with COPVs, it's either the tanks they're buying or SpaceX's own procedures for handling them. Either way, the sooner they get back to testing SuperHeavy boosters and flying Starships, the better.
SiG, wrt your very last sentence.
ReplyDeleteWhen McDonald, Grumman, Hughes, Lockheed, North American, et al move forward in their designs, they have a sponsor; fedgov.
To SpX, fedgov is a customer. It seems to me that if SpX wants to explore materials and designs, they do it on their own dime. In this way, SpX is more like Scaled Composites.
They have their tried and true base model to launch for contracts, but they keep pushing to expand the envelope. To what purpose? Maybe simply to see what is possible, i. e. good ol R&D.
Too, what with every new launch a new world record, they have the means, market share, etc to push ahead and against the competition. That is to say, hardly no competition therefore so far ahead that they also have the time to try new things.
If, say 2026 has 200 launches, 30 or so could be static testing of new model boosters or whatever SpX has in mind.
(Those numbers are fictional for now. But may be probable by this time next year.)
That's pretty much what I'm thinking. Saying I want them to get back to flying Starships isn't for NASA and the always-late Artemis program. Yeah, at worst, they lose the contract to Blue Origin. OTOH, they're launching 90% of the world's payloads. I just want to see them land on Mars. I'm over 70 and my chances of being around another 30 years to see that aren't great. I'd love to see it, if I could. There's nobody else on Earth that has a tenth of the chance they do to be first.
DeleteCustomer vs. sponsors? Look at how SpX developed their booster landing abilities. They flew payloads to the desired orbit, and then - when all the other launch companies throw the used booster into the Atlantic - they "played with the garbage" until they could get it to land and be reusable. With cheaper, reused rockets, they started putting up the Starlink constellation and I bet the costs to use their own "garbage" were far cheaper than what paying customer would pay.
Starship is an amazing concept. NASA wants to pay for something like 500 pounds more than the crew to the moon. Starship can bring tons (no, I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head). Because Elon's vision is to put tons on Mars.
Somewhere along my career, I learned a saying that seems to apply over and over to SpaceX: when you do things that nobody has ever done before, you learn things that nobody has ever learned. They seem to embody that.
This isn't a commercial for SpaceX. It's a freebie. AFAIK, I couldn't even buy SpaceX stock and I (obviously) don't even make a penny off the blog.
SpaceX says between 100 and 150 tons to the Moon, depending on number of crew, which is up to 40. So NASA wants 4...
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