September 1 Anomaly Updates | Hacker News Reader

September 1 Anomaly Updates

spacex.com

56 pointsobi1kenobi17 comments

That's awfully euphemistic language for a huge fireball.

Actually I thought this might be showing a glimpse of how SpaceX communicates internally. Saying "a huge fireball" is probably like saying "the website was down", but those responsible of keeping the website up would probably use more precise/euphemistic terms to describe why and how it broke. Ex: Elevated backend latencies caused the browser to time out waiting for a response. Yes, it's a softer description than "the site was down", but it's also more precise.

Welcome to PR

Do I understand it correctly? "This was part of a standard pre-launch static fire to demonstrate the health of the vehicle prior to an eventual launch.". So they set some fire before the launch? Why?

"Static fire" = holding down the rocket and firing the engines for some time. It's a rehearsal of the whole launch procedure short of actually releasing the rocket.

Thanks! I was quite puzzled, as they had this roadmap of having manned mission in like 2 years from now. Now as I learned that they do static fire shortly before lanching, and given that in this moment the astronauts should be already there in the rocket... I can't really imagine this.

no, the static fire is a day or so before the launch. in this case, the payload was integrated, and for a manned mission the dragon 2 capsule would be mated, but no crew/astronauts present yet.

Why do they still do that? I was under the impression that the rocket was held down for a second or so with the engines firing during the real launch, also.

It is. However the point of holding the rocket for a moment during the actual launch is to give the engines time to fire.

The point of a static fire is to test the launch systems. The hope is that problems can be noticed before the actual launch, where they are more likely to cause catastrophic failure (and where we they might not be noticed in time to abort).

This "anomaly", as they're calling it, is why.

Better to have the rocket explode on the pad in a controlled test than in the air over a populated area.

Best info I can find comes from /r/spacex:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4f9fxm/do_other_lau...

I don't think anyone in that thread mentioned it, but Orbital has done static fires on the pad (sans payload).

Why don't they call it a catastrophe - hundereds of millions of dollars burned in this incident on Sep 1.

These things aren't catastrophes, they're inevitable and very much expected. Honestly, even "anomaly" might be a bit strong.

Tests are meant to be able to fail. We wouldn't hold tests if we didn't expect the subject to be able to fail. Not so much a "catastrophe", as "to be expected and previously accounted for".

"Catastrophe" is not a permissible word in Musketarianism.

Did we watch different videos? I didn't see any money burning in the one I watched...

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