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]

The only good news to come out of this. https://t.co/mpnoJwuBZm

— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) September 1, 2016

[Update a few minutes later]

Joe Pappalardo probably has the best take at this point.

[Update a while later]

Well, this is bad news.

Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2016

[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.

It sounds like that there was

But I’m surprised they fuel the payload on the pad. I thought that storables were filled during integration.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, not such good news. Jon Goff reminded me that they use hydrazine for ACS in the upper stage. Though I’d still think they’d fuel that during horizontal integration, not on the pad.

[Late-morning update]

Here’s the full OIG report on Commercial Crew that just happened to come out today. I’ll probably do a separate blog post on it. I would note that the primary reason that it continues to slip, and that NASA has no apparently problem taking six months to do a two-week review, is that space, and American access to it, isn’t important.

[Update at noon]

Here’s Joel Achenbach’s take.

[Late-afternoon update]

@jsmuir_ @SafeNotAnOption @PaulDalyROI @spacecom @stevenyoungsfn @wingod pic.twitter.com/TLDHgQN9Ge

— Astro Mouse (@AstroMiceRule) September 1, 2016