![]() ![]() Had humans been injured or killed, it would have undoubtedly complicated the already complex road ahead for SpaceX. Fortunately, no one was harmed during Saturday's accident, which speaks well of SpaceX's safety practices during such dynamic tests. The last time we saw this dramatic of a ground-based spacecraft failure was during the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, which cost three human lives. I would argue that, since this vehicle will eventually carry humans and is funded largely by NASA, transparency is essential to ensuring public confidence in the vehicle and company's processes. ![]() Advertisementĭuring past accidents, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has been fairly forthcoming about the cause of the failures, and we hope for similar transparency with this accident. ![]() The worst-case scenario is that there is some undiscovered but fundamental design problem in SuperDraco thrusters. The best case scenario, in terms of causing delays for SpaceX, would be that someone mishandled the ground systems equipment. One source indicated that the company has a lot of data about the failure-this was a ground-based test, so the vehicle was heavily instrumented-so theoretically finding the root cause of the accident should be more straightforward than had a problem occurred during a real flight. According to the leaked video, the anomaly occurred within the final 10 seconds of the countdown, and it is not entirely clear whether the SuperDraco engines had begun to fire. Either way, this is a significant materiel loss for the company. It is not clear whether it will fabricate a boilerplate vehicle with a SuperDraco system of eight thrusters, or re-purpose one of the Dragons it has built for crewed flights to the space station. Now that SpaceX has lost this capsule, it must find a substitute for this launch abort test. During this test, the Dragon would have launched from Florida on a Falcon 9 booster and then fired its powerful SuperDraco engines to show that the Dragon could pull itself safely away from the rocket in case of a problem with the booster before or during flight.įurther Reading SpaceX completes a historic mission, crew flight possible later in 2019 The spacecraft was being prepared for a launch abort test this summer. The Crew Dragon capsule in question is the same one that successfully flew a demonstration mission to the International Space Station in March. After a dramatic weekend, what follows is a summary of what we know, what we don't know, and where SpaceX goes from here. According to one source, the orange plumes were the result of between one and two tons of nitrogen tetroxide-the oxidizer used by Dragon's SuperDraco engines-burning at the location. Further Reading SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft had an anomaly during tests SaturdayĪfter the accident, large dramatic clouds of orange smoke billowed above "Landing Zone 1," where SpaceX conducted Saturday's engine tests. ![]()
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