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This Morning’s Pad Incident

42 Comments

It seems to be news, so most of you probably heard that there was an explosion on the pad at LC-40 this morning, leading up to a static test fire for the upcoming launch of the AMOS satellite.

What we know so far: No one was injured, but the bird (a $200M payload) was lost. It’s a setback for Spacecom, which was about to be purchased by China pending a successful deployment. It happened prior to ignition, and SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,” so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rocket itself. But it will be a setback in SpaceX’s aggressive fall schedule until they determine the cause and how to prevent it in the future, and repair the pad.

It’s worth noting that they won’t be launching crew from that pad, but from 39B. But Phil McAlister and Kathy Lueders will want to know if the abort system would have saved crew had they been on top of the rocket. The immediate interesting question to me is whether or not they had any warning. The rocket itself has failure onset detection systems to trigger an abort, but it’s unclear if the pad itself does, and how much warning they would have had to pull the D-ring on the Dracos. Phil and Kathy had also better brace for a very stupid Congressional hearing, and we can all expect to hear a lot of illogical nonsense about how SpaceX should forget about Mars, and how this proves that reusable rockets don’t work.

[Update a couple minutes later]

One point as follow up to that last graf: SpaceX had been requesting to fuel with crew aboard, and NASA had been considering it. That’s probably out the window now.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

There were nine more flights scheduled this year. That was always unlikely, but it’s certainly not going to happen now.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, this is timely. The OIG has released a status report on commercial crew certification.

[Update a couple minutes later]

How this will affect Spacecom. Shares are down with the news. I’d call it a buying opportunity.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Also worth noting that it’s been a bad couple days for launch. Long March had a failure yesterday, and the Chinese have been mum about it (as usual).

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust already has a story about the potential ripple effects for SpaceX, SES, and the rest of the affected industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here‘s Loren Grush’s story.

[Update a couple minutes later]

And from Miri Kramer.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Joe Pappalardo probably has the best take at this point.

[Update a while later]

Well, this is bad news.

[Update a while later]

Aaaaaand here’s the video. I’ve heard that people felt it in Orlando. It may have been the largest explosion at the Cape in history.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is great news, if true.

42 thoughts on “This Morning’s Pad Incident”

  1. You make a good point Rand, but I’m equally critical of those rushing to Space X’s defense before the facts are known. The politics swing both ways.

    1. Social media would be pretty useless if people weren’t allowed to rush to judgment before the facts were known.

  2. This seriously sucks. I heard something of a hydrazine explosion, so that sounds as if it may have been the payload, not the Falcon that initiated the event. That doesn’t discount that some sort of systemic fault allowed the event to occur, and that would need to be addressed. But it would be nice to know that the SpaceX hardware is not the faulty link in the chain of events.

    1. I doubt it’s the payload. You can see the fairing falling to the ground a few seconds after the explosion, and it looks in one piece. And the explosion appears to originate from the second stage’s fueling hookup. Guess we’ll know more in a few days.

      1. Agreed. After seeing the footage, it does appear to be in the SpaceX upper stage, even right at the filling location it seems to me.

  3. Rand> SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,”

    Not quite. They said that “there was an anomaly on the pad” which some people (including Eric Berger) thought excluded the rocket itself, but the consensus is that this is a misinterpretation and at this point SpaceX’s statement does not exclude a fault with the rocket itself while “on the pad”.

    SpaceX’s statement in full:

    SpaceX can confirm that in preparation for today’s static fire, there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload. Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries.

      1. Agreed. Unfortunately many people are interpreting “anomaly on the pad” as “anomaly with the pad” and excluding the rocket, based solely on SpaceX’s initial statement.

  4. I thought static tests happened without the payload? Oh well.
    It’s going to delay a couple of launches.
    I think Falcon 9 Heavy is supposed to launch from a different pad (LC-39A) also in the Cape?

    At least it didn’t happen with IDA-2 launch. I could care less about Facebook’s satellite…

    They can still do launches from Vandenberg and LC-39A. So maybe those launches will get pushed up sooner assuming the problem isn’t in the rocket.

    1. What it is going to do is push insurance rates for Falcon 9 launches up though. That’s good news for the launchers with more reliability (e.g. Atlas V, Ariane 5).

        1. Doesn’t matter. The satellite blew up while it was in SpaceX’s possession. I hope they find out the causes and fix them but in the long run this accident won’t impact SpaceX much at all.
          The satellite company is another matter though. They should have insurance on the satellite but they still won’t be able to operate the service on time.

          But like I said, the owner is Facebook. So screw them.

        2. Speaking as a lawyer and not an enthusiast, the video of the F9 going up on the pad is enough of an impetus for insurance carrier to jack up the rates. If it turns out this happened because of Space X pad practices even more so, and if it was do to super-chill O2, that could add to the tab and even make some customers insist they not use the practice for their satellites, which means Space X would have to expend more cores. Speculation at this point, but a plausible scenario.

          1. The chances of it having anything to do with superchilled LOX are vanishingly small. That’s only in the first stage, I think. I think it’s more likely a hydrazine problem in the upper stage. It should be an impetus for SpaceX to get away from hypergolics.

          2. SpaceX can’t get away from hypergolics easily. They use them to start the first stage (Green Dragon), and in the Dracos and SuperDracos (hydrazine).

          2. Godzilla’s point (can I not reply to comments once they are nested too deep?) is that SpaceX might be able to get LC39A going before repairing LC40. They were planning the inaugural launch of the Falcon Heavy there late this year, so the pad preparations must be close. I don’t now what other issues might affect the use of LC39A for commercial F9 launches.

  5. When talking about ‘fueling and crew’ I was wondering – the erectors I’ve seen don’t really seem to have any way for crew to get -up- there. Do we have a basic idea of how they plan to load?

    Is there some ‘improved’ erector, somewhere? How much does an erector cost, and where is the replacement for -that- coming from. (Because this one is toast.) They aren’t ‘Shuttle transporter expensive’ are they?

      1. I’m pretty sure this is the biggest on the pad. The second biggest rocket after Saturn V was the Saturn IB, which weighed almost exactly the same as Falcon 9. It never failed.

        The Titan IV A20 was much larger, but blew up almost a minute into flight.

  7. A couple seconds after the initial explosion something that looks like the payload fairing can be seen hitting the ground. Which suggests that a capsule on the stack might survive a similar explosion. Of course the top priority is figuring what went BOOM in the first place and making sure it doesn’t happen again.

  8. The propellant tanks at the launch site seem fine. Considering how SpaceX’s launch sites are I think repairing it would take a couple of months at most.

    Didn’t they have an issue with some valves on the second stage a couple of flights back? This is supposedly a different issue but once again its second stage issues.

    1. I’ve watched the video several times, at all speeds, and in single frame. I could almost swear that the origin of the initial “event” is between the vehicle and the tower…almost. Given the oxygen venting around the fairing boattail, it is not far-fetched to think that something as simple as a static discharge could have ignited oxygen-saturated wire insulation. Once initiated, it would spread rapidly to anything flammable – as Apollo 1 should remind us all.

  10. Well, if it had been only the Israeli AMOS that was lost, that would be too bad. But they also lost a microsat, the African National Deforestation Environmental Explorer.

    The loss of AMOS and ANDEE together is just too much for this infantile space launch industry, so it’s time to shut it down.

    1. Any type of reasonably humorous response to this would get me banned on every public forum everywhere simultaneously.

      So let me say the payload of record for this rocket and the one of notoriety was the Israeli satellite, that went down in flames. Or in other words: Flamous AMOS.

      Paul D. ball is in your court….

    2. State Department on Monday: “We found another hard drive that contained some of Hillary’s emails but unfortunately it was repurposed for a microsat that was on that Falcon 9 that blew up.”

  12. Rand,
    Responding to yours of 10:19 AM yesterday, why would they have been fueling the upper stage for a static test that (obviously) only involved the first stage engines?

    1. The static fire isn’t only to check the booster’s engines, but also to check out the ground support equipment (GSE) and countdown procedures. The static fire is run as much as possible like an actual countdown. It can’t test the upper stage engine, of course, but it does test the fittings and valves associated with tanking and detanking LOX and PR-1 for both stages.

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