NASA Expresses “Full Confidence” in SpaceX as Investigation into Explosion Continues
Completing an end-to-end uncrewed flight test, Demo-1, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon departed the International Space Station at 2:32 a.m. EST Friday, March 8, 2019, and splashed down at 8:45 a.m. in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 nautical miles off the Florida coast. (Credits: NASA Television)
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
We got a smidgen of additional information today about the “anomaly” (explosion) that destroyed a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft during a test at Cape Canaveral on Saturday.
Patricia Sanders, chairwoman of the NASA Aviation and Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), told the group during its regularly scheduled meeting that the incident occurred during an operation to test the spacecraft’s Draco maneuvering thrusters and larger SuperDraco emergency escape motors.
“The event occurred during a static fire test conducted prior to the in-flight abort test,” Sanders said. “The firing was intended to demonstrate integrated systems SuperDraco performance in two times vehicle level vibro-acoustic-like for abort environments.
“Firing of 12 service section Dracos were successfully performed. Firing of eight SuperDracos resulted in an anomaly,” she added.
SpaceX is leading the investigation into the accident with the active participation of NASA, Sanders added.
Meanwhile, NASA issued a statement of support for Elon Musk’s rocket company on Wednesday.
“SpaceX and NASA are just beginning the mishap investigation process. We don’t yet know what impact this will have to our target schedules. We have full confidence in SpaceX. Additional information will be released as it is available,” the agency said.
The Crew Dragon capsule was the same one that flew a flight test without a crew to the International Space Station in March. It was being prepared for an in-flight abort test that would have evaluated the SuperDraco escape motors.
The abort test is one of the last major milestones before a crewed flight to the space station later this year. SpaceX had hoped to conduct the abort test in June and the crewed mission in July. However, that schedule is up in the air.
It’s not clear how far along SpaceX is on additional Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly those missions.
61 responses to “NASA Expresses “Full Confidence” in SpaceX as Investigation into Explosion Continues”
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SpaceX is continuing work on Crew Dragon, except for the propulsion systems.
yes all is well MARS 2024 or is it 26 or what is it now? LOL Dear Moon
The Starship is not using the old Hypergolic RCS that has been standard in NASA spacecraft since the Mercury days. It is suppose to use a much safer and simpler cold gas system that makes turnaround easier and faster. One of the advantages of not having to build to NASA specs.
sure its suppose to be…lol spaceX “we have had 3 blowups in 4 years but we are fine”
And Boeing has had two “disassembly events” in orbit in the last month, but its hard to get images on those to scare folks with. But if those pieces hit anything in GEO it could get far more expensive than the SpaceX events were.
Yes, 2 of the 3 were on F9, given the extremely low insurance rates to fly on F9, the fact it is still fetching NASA and USAF/NRO mission contracts and successfully flying FH side cores (underly increased vibe load) there is no basis to your argument about not doing fine.
As for the third RUD, it was a test. A test of a post flight LES propulsion system in 2x vibration and acoustic load. When will Boeing be testing their LES propulsion system post flight? Oh wait, never because they dispose of it on orbit.
As usual the old space crowd would rather not test and risk the wrath of $h1theads. No post flight propulsion testing, no in-flight abort testing: “If we model it or throw it away, then we can’t test it” is the motto of old space, and it’s sick.
Mars 2038, and just for an orbital mission, according to NASA.
lol all fantasy
Fortunately, D2 is not on the critical path for any of that.
in an economic sense it probably is…watch Musk money dry up if he cannot make this work
According to you, Musk’s money dried up a long time ago.
As to making D2 work, it will shortly join the long list of other things SpaceX has made work in the face of occasional bumps along the way.
it has been getting harder for him to get…with Tesla not making money and this latest bang…its going to get still harder
Tesla is a separate enterprise and publicly traded. Even if Tesla was making money hand over fist, it wouldn’t be legal for Musk to dip into its coffers to fund a SpaceX project.
As to SpaceX, it isn’t trying to raise any money for D2. Making short work of D2’s current difficulties will be good for fund-raising anyway.
the one horse pony in all Musk world is Musk…if people start losing confidence in his judgment then the entire game starts fading
Excellent to hear the problem is isolated to the Super Dracos.
Given that the explosion is said to have occurred eight seconds before the SuperDracos were to have fired, it seems the problem is likeliest to be traced to some component or subsystem upstream of the abort engines themselves. But we shall see.
Just how isolated the SuperDraco subsystem is from the rest of the subsystems aboard the D2 is something we may learn more about in coming days.
How do you know it was before?
I read the ARS technica report…they wont fly again this year. if they fly the crew dragon next year I would be surprised…
So much for those that were advocating grounding the cargo Dragon because of the accident with the Dragon2.
Yes, SpaceX may junk it and move on to the Starship. The reality is that NASA needs commercial crew far more than SpaceX does at this point.
Now all Boeing has to do is prove their hypergolic escape system is safe by finally do the pad abort test they have been delaying for so long.
no criticism is still valid. how did their safety group miss this and not miss “other things
“Yes, SpaceX may junk it and move on to the Starship. The reality is that
NASA needs commercial crew far more than SpaceX does at this point.
are you joking. the game is almost up with musk
He is bleeding money on Tesla…and investor confidence that he can build starship is at an all time low with this “anomaly”
If he cannot make crew dragon work…do you really think anyone is going to trust him to build whatever they are calling it now
Boeing is getting there…they have an excellent outside and inside tiger team tripping the scales.
Yes, yes, we’ve heard this all before – after CRS-7, after Amos-6 and now after the D2 explosion. Musk is toast. SpaceX is trembling on the brink of insolvency. Yada-yada-yada. Lather, rinse, repeat. You’d think after whiffing twice before, all the anti-SpaceX zealots out there would get wise not to swing at the slider, but noooooo…
This!!!! The anti-musk crowd have botched so many calls, cried so much wolf they are a laughing stock. And like the idiot media playing into Trump’s hand all the time.
Here you have upthread someone, presumed to be intelligent, making a prediction based on zero information. I can make a 100 guesses that might go the other way on the delay time. For instance, a specific modal interaction with the vibe test stand and D2 capsule once integrated with propellent loaded. Certainly such an unfortunate and hard to model coupling event, if found to be the case, would not cause the D2 to be “re-designed” or grounded for years. But hell it could go the other way too, need to wait for the RCA not be a reckless dope because…you know Musk and SpaceX….Tesla blah blah blah.
Prepare to be surprised.
yes it might go longer
They’ll figure it out.
I have zero confidence in SpaceX if a non aviation bolt was used on F9 in the the NASA CRS Dragon loss. Not that it caused the loss, but that it was used at all. I have been in aero-space and watched and I have never seen something like that. If you change from FAA standards you got to have approval from them to do so. SpaceX should be decertified if this is true. I would be truly surprised if any other aero-space did this. When I built my Bobcat ultralight from plans I had FAA books to check if what I was doing was correct. I safely flew for about 70 hours before I retired it.
My 2nd cousin built a kit ultralight. He did not read the FAA books on standards. He took off on the first flight and the engine quit. He hit the cables at the end of the runway on a public road and survived. He found that trash had stopped up the outlet of the fuel tank. FAA says to use a finger strainer. Trash can not stop up. There is 2″ of fuel outlet rather than a single hole.
PS: Lastly, the key technical finding by the
IRT with regard to this failure was that it was due to a design error: SpaceX chose to use an
industrial grade (as opposed to aerospace grade) 17-4 PH SS (precipitation-hardening stainless
steel) cast part (the “Rod End”) in a critical load path under cryogenic conditions and strenuous
flight environments. The implementation was done without adequate screening or testing of the
industrial grade part, without regard to the manufacturer’s recommendations for a 4:1 factor of
safety when using their industrial grade part in an application, and without proper modeling or
adequate load testing of the part under predicted flight conditions. This design error is directly
related to the Falcon 9 CRS-7 launch failure as a “credible” cause.
https://rocketrundown.com/n… P.7 of the report. He had a link. I never read this report. I was hoping it was not true. They say credible. I think NASA is a credible source. We just missed it. SpaceX has made the #1 mistake in aero-space. Not following the FAA standards. This is like Trump saying :Make America Again. Meaning: America is not great now, but in the past it was. The #1 thing that politicians never say is America is not great. He is the 1st President and any politician I have ever heard or read has said that.
non TSOd bolts? it is worse then I thought…
I agree. Aerospace grading is being exposed for the scams inherent to excess paperwork. Shake ups are coming. Hopefully SpaceX will have moved enough work in house to avoid the coming supply line crash.
LOL sure that is why Boeing has not blown up a capsule and SpaceX is picking up the small pieces the difference between software and aerospace companies
Both companies had serious problems in late-stage testing of abort engines for their crew capsules. Boeing got lucky and avoided a fire/explosion. SpaceX didn’t.
there wasnt any luck about it. Boeing ran into things that they did not understand and were not predicted…they formed tiger teams and are now figuring it out. thats what aerospace companies do
As far as I can tell, that’s pretty much what Spacex is doing too. So your point is a bit obscure.
You’re right again. Boeing will wait until they can blame it on pilot error.
if that is the problem I sure it will be. it was the problem in the max
what does AIRSPEED DISAGREE AND AOA DISAGREE mean to you?
in addition it turns out that MCAS has stopped at least 6 full stalls…including one by SWA 🙂
What does type grounded world wide by dozens of countries mean to you?
the only government group that had any technical data was FAA…and the data about MCAS was not known at the time to most of the other countries
So you mean it is grounded for no reason?
the data did not support grounding it…the PR was unsustainable.
it was in both cases pilot error in dealing with a malfunction.
The PR in every country that operates them? PR with no basis in fact can ground billions of dollars worth of aircraft in dozens of countries?
Meanwhile it looks like another piece of Boeing hardware in orbit has disassembled and created a hazard for future missions. From the tracking video it looks like a real mess. I rather have small pieces on the ground than in orbit.
http://www.leonarddavid.com…
Cluttering Up Space: U.S. Rocket Stage Explodes
By Leonard David
April 23rd, 2019
“A discarded upper stage from a rocket launched nearly a decade ago
has fragmented, adding to ongoing growth of orbital debris encircling
Earth.
The large Atlas V Centaur upper stage, for an as-yet-unknown reason, broke up between March 23 – March 25.”
Boeing isnot responsible for space debris
Its their booster, and so they are responsible for not ensuring it vented properly, so legally there is a good case against them if the debris take out any satellites.
lol after 10 years it is unlikely to be improper venting…
Perhaps it was another flaw, but it’s not good when used boosters start creating debris clouds in Earth orbit.
Perhaps another mission for the Starship will be collecting Boeing’s old rocket stages/satellites and returning them to Earth before they become hazards.?
oh you are just looking for problems and not thinking all that well
the booster has been inert with vents open for 10 years…if you believe some volitales in the primary fuel and oxidizer remain well you dont know cryos…its possible the battery did something strange but more likely that it was hit by a piece of space debris
space debris is not good…imagine how much the crewed dragon would have created 🙂
Its no different than you looking for problems with SpaceX…
Nice how you left the helium system (which is well sealed and inert) off your list of candidates. Always can tell you are not playing with a full deck.
technically the Centaur is Lockheeds. ULA owns the gear, Lockheed acquired GD which had acquired Convair. The Boeing stuff in ULA came from Delta IV and the DCSS which came from McDac.
Neither of you has any idea what kind of bolts SpaceX uses. Simply because parts come with cartons of testimonial paperwork is no guarantee of anything anyway. Orbital got burned on two consecutive Taurus launches where parts of the fairing separation mechanisms were made using substandard aluminum extrusions that had been supplied with faked testing documents. Tests-to-destruction of random items received is the only reasonably sure way to be sure of what you’re getting no matter what the paperwork may say. That seems to be what SpaceX has done since the CRS-7 strut failure.
you notice I put a ? there.
” Simply because parts come with cartons of testimonial paperwork is no guarantee of anything anyway.
that is not correct if you buy the “bolts” from reputable suppliers which sale TSO parts…you can count on them being correct…
custom made parts are a bit more dicy but not really …we put a new wing spar in the T50…it had to literally be manufactored for us and the adaption to it was to do some fiberglass non structural protection for it…the wood is the strength…
we had no problem getting the correct paper work and test results for it. the airplane is better than she was the day she was born in 43.
Did you paint in its original colors as a trainer, or go with the “Song Bird” color scheme used on the civilian ones after the war?
it was used as a radar trainer in WW2…and its that today
For certain values of “reputable,” perhaps you are correct. In that case, Orbital (now NGIS) seems to have somehow managed to deal with a non-reputable supplier.
Stop listening to the guy on the street selling pencils out of a cup. All the parts kits including fasteners for the build-ups were sent to JSC for independent analysis and testing.
I put a question mark…try reading before thinking and thinking before talking
I saw the question mark. Statement stands, no reason to echo unsubstantiated hallucinations.
Buy cheap–get cheap.
“NASA expresses ‘full confidence’ in SpaceX as investigation…continues”
In the sports world, endorsements like these are known as “The proverbial ‘kiss of death’”, lol
https://rocketrundown.com/n…
I am very sad about the credible cause. He has a link to the NASA report. P.7. See below my other comment to read the finding. I have saved the report. I will put it on a USB stick to keep for a long time. Maybe several sticks. Here is a copy and paste to make it easy for you.
PS: Lastly, the key technical finding by the
IRT with regard to this failure was that it was due to a design error: SpaceX chose to use an
industrial grade (as opposed to aerospace grade) 17-4 PH SS (precipitation-hardening stainless
steel) cast part (the “Rod End”) in a critical load path under cryogenic conditions and strenuous
flight environments. The implementation was done without adequate screening or testing of the
industrial grade part, without regard to the manufacturer’s recommendations for a 4:1 factor of
safety when using their industrial grade part in an application, and without proper modeling or
adequate load testing of the part under predicted flight conditions. This design error is directly
related to the Falcon 9 CRS-7 launch failure as a “credible” cause. NASA is credible.
wow
dark times men