Smoke seen for miles as SpaceX Crew Dragon suffers anomaly at Cape Canaveral
floridatoday.com
floridatoday.com
1. The orange smoke [1] is the color of Nitrogen Tetroxide, which is the hypergolic fuel that Crew Dragon uses. The normal reaction in the Draco engines in the Crew Dragon is Nitrogen Tetroxide (N2O4) and methyl hydrazine (CH3(NH)NH2) [2]
2. The prior grey smoke might mean the engines were already firing for the test, which would rule out something like a tank loading error or something else with the ground crew.
3. Boeing had a hypergolics + Launch Escape System anomaly and it pushed their program schedule back 6 months. [3]
4. Eric Berger (Reporter for Ars Technica) indicating it may have been a serious incident. [4]
/r/spacex thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bfhm2c/on_april_20_...
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4oMNJmXsAAv_7B.jpg:orig
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(rocket_engine_family)
[3] https://spacenews.com/boeings-starliner-launch-abort-engine-...
[4] https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1119730184544976897
> Boeing had intended to complete the test of its abort system last summer but has yet to reschedule the flight 10 months later, apparently due to complications from this accident.
So it's probably more than 6 months
Netherlands to London in 5 and a half minutes
Still have no idea what they were thinking with that one. Apparently it's an anagram of "matchers". Ooooookay.
I'm not saying this is spin, but it sounds like how you'd spin something like this. Basically, the tests worked until they didn't. And that one therefore became the final test.
Another reminder is why you run tests. They don't scare away failure by existing, they are there to catch failure, doing their jobs exactly as intended.
It will probably result in a delay of any human spaceflight by SpaceX until the source of the source of the problem is removed. (not the particular issue that caused the anomaly but the systematic issue which didn't find it before it happened on the pad)
That depends on whether this was supposed to be the final test. If it's a post-hoc "final", then that's an obfuscation done out of shame. If it was always supposed to be the final test, then the statement is fine.
Your QA (or dev, or whatever) group has a number of test cases to verify. They verify the ones that they can, and record failures against the ones that they couldn't not. Sometimes in hardware testing, a failed test results in destruction of the hardware and/or peripheral damage to the test environment.
BTDT.
But it also sounds like kind of a bad thing that it's the last test: 'holy cow - that was close - thank god we had the last test in there.'
Without knowing the specifics of what they were testing every time that might be irrelevant, but if it was multiple test fires of the same engine and only the last one caught the problem, that's scary.
An anomaly is where things aren't going according to their expected behavior. Anomalies can have differing levels of severity, depending on the impact of the anomaly on the mission plans.
You can have anomalies at any time, that's different to a "defect" or a "failure". Failure implies anomalies so severe that the mission can not complete.
So it's not a euphemism, it's a distinct term of the art in engineering of this sort.
It’s very similar to a cloud provider saying “increased error rates” meaning total outage or 0.001% of users experiencing off-nominal behavior.
Is there nomenclature that’s better?
I prefer "rapid unplanned disassembly".
What video are you referring to?
This looks like a very fast disassembly indeed. I hope they find the cause soon.
The purpose of communication is to inform the audience, and rather than clarify what happened, this statement obscures the truth to the public.
The test capsule exploded. It means both SpaceX and Boeing have had test failures in the launch abort system for their respective human launch capsules. It will set back the timeline for the US to regain the ability to launch humans into space without paying for seats on the Soyuz.
Instead of discussing the event and its implications, the longest thread is now dedicated to excessive pedantry and incorrecting each other over textbook definitions of the word "anomaly".
Explosion has a technical meaning too, and many things that look like an explosion aren't. AMOS-6 for instance was not an explosion, even though it really looked like one to a bystander.
This isn't excessive pedantry, it's jargon meant for an audience that will understand it and not take more away from a statement than they intend to say. Better to use the word that means "something bad happened" rather than a word which means something specific only to have to follow that up with "sorry, we were wrong, it wasn't that, it was..."
If it's something like a pressure issue, it could be similar to what happened to AMOS-6, where there was buckled liner in a COPV [1] tank that caused a liquid oxygen buildup [2]
Someone on reddit captured the frames before and after, it looks like it's originating from just near one of the Super Dracos [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_overwrapped_pressure...
Afaik there is no Helium COPV on Crew Dragon.
Edit: after checking because of Someones comment, it turned out that cigarettes do not explode when drenched with LOX, they just burn brightly not unlike a flare.
Doesn’t seem to be true. At the least, that’s isn’t guaranteed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t48QWjtoVfw
>Anomaly: The unexpected performance of intended function.
Good or bad, major or minor, an anomaly is when reality does not meet engineering design and expectation. It just happens that in spaceflight the most active time is the most dangerous time and most anomalies result in fireballs when your engine is lit as there is not much room at all for error.
Old memory from the 80's an engineer mentioned that he went down to the lab and found an unhappy test tech. Guy was testing a new pressure sensor and it wasn't able to make 10,000 full cycles without blowing the diaphragm. Turned out the test setup was shock loading the pressure sensor. He was surprised it was almost passing. The solution was a rate limiting valve in the test setup. There was nothing wrong with the pressure sensor.
There is a great write up from one of the guys that developed the thrusters for the Apollo program. They had problem where you could get layers of frozen oxidizer and fuel in the inside of the nozzle. Which would then go explode and shatter the nozzle. The solution was to operate the thrusters so that didn't happen.
https://www.rferl.org/a/soyuz-rocket-anomaly-to-delay-u-s-sa...
10 years ago the folks putting your reaction wheels together botched it, and now they're acting slightly weird? anomaly.
you charged your batteries too hard for years because you thought "max" was a great setting for your battery chargers, and now they're failing? anomaly.
Strangely enough, yes: the satellite guys use 'anomaly' to describe the (angular) position of a body in its orbit. I've never heard where the term originated in that context.
Incidentally, according to what I was just reading, epicycles in principle can be used to approximate any curve if you pick them appropriately. Choosing them is related to fourier analysis which of course hadn't been developed yet. When you hear about it in grade school, it's presented as this dumb thing that doesn't make sense, but it was really not a terrible solution.
The deadpan delivery really does it.
Check out NASA Core Flight System if you're curious, it's an in-house framework and abstracted OS layer meant to support hard real-time flight systems.
"As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/jeff-bezos-annual-shareholde...
(Here is the computing equivalent of what SpaceX is doing: creating a PDP-11 with modern technology, that’s maybe 75% as fast, but at a fifth to a tenth of the cost.)
A more accurate summary is SpaceX is retreading well-worm ground that was trod before many of us reading this article were born, bringing modern materials and manufacturing capabilities to bear improving the same basic designs. That’s cool. But that’s not pushing the boundaries of space flight technology.
Let's not go futher, just concentrating at the incident in question. The anomalous test happened on a location named "Landing Zone 1". That's not a thing any other rocket company has. Why? Because they don't land their rockets.
It happened with a space capsule fished out of the brine. No other company reuses their space capsules in such a way.
The detonation very likely will be found to have something to do with the SuperDraco system. Which they originally designed there to enable propulsive landing on dry land. The russians have their kick engines, sure, but that's not really same as hover landing, isn't it? Why did they plan that? For rapid reusability.
So yes, if you ignore all the things they did for reusability, then they indeed are not pushing the limits of spaceflight technology.
Parachute landing a crew pod into the ocean is something we first did the year my dad was born.
> Which they originally designed there to enable propulsive landing on dry land.
We landed an entire orbiter like an airliner three years before I was born.
You're getting confused between the tiny pod that people sit in - which basically does nothing, and the actual rocket, with all the flames and gasses and actually make the pod go somewhere.
Nobody has ever landed and reused the rocket before SpaceX
> landed an entire orbiter like an airliner three years before I was born
Yes, a thing with wings landed using lift from the wings. It did not use rockets for propulsive landing like SpaceX have designed.
I do not believe you do not know that reusing the Space Shuttle Orbiter after landing required disassembling it, which made launching satellites on the reusable STS cost much more than using expendable rockets of the time as opposed to reusing the Falcon 9 booster which does not require disassembly and is cheaper than using a newly built Falcon 9 booster, which itself is cheaper than the competitor's Atlas V, which uses engines built in Russia and has lowered prices significantly in response to Falcon 9 became certified to fly government payloads.
I am mentioning the fact that RD-180 is built in Russia only because the US company got the plans to build them from the Russians but decided that doing that is too expensive while built-in-Russia engines are available, so basically the US did not have the capability to manufacture state-of-the-art engines until SpaceX Raptor, Blue Origin BE-4. If newly built RS-25 happen, I'll count those as state of the art, but so far they're only using old already-flown-on-shuttle engines with extremely expensive computer upgrades.
But that's stuff they've already accomplished. You're ignoring what they have in development. The Raptor engine is among the most advanced engines ever made, pushing combustion/metallurgy technology literally to the limits, certainly not well-worn ground. Not to mention Starship/Super Heavy, which is pushing reusability further.
They might not accomplish everything they set out to do, but that's why it's "pushing" rather than "pushed".
It's about twice the thrust-to-weight ratio of an F-1, which was designed in 1969. With all the advances in materials science since 1969 (composites, etc.), that tells you a lot about the glacial pace of advancement in the field. It's also not clear to me why that even matters--a Saturn V has about 90,000 pounds of engines; a Falcon 9 Heavy has about 27,000 pounds. Both need millions of pounds of fuel. (As to your comment about "pushing" versus "pushed"--that interpretation of OP's comment doesn't match the fact that he's talking about a setback involving SpaceX's current generation of vehicles.)
Given the same chemical reaction, improving the engine efficiency state-of-art by 50% in 50 years is astounding. With Raptor they are actually getting close to the theoretical limits.
What other expectations do you have for advancements? New chemicals are hard to get by. Nuclear is beyond contemplation. You can't invent new physics. What do you expect?
Through aerospace innovation? Perhaps not as much as you would like. But they do it through materials, manufacturing, automation, computers and operations innovations, which are just as important.
If I build an electric car with the same rubber technology as cars have used for a century, this would not mean I hadn't pushed the limits of technology.
> Rocketdyne’s engine produced about 7-8 times as much thrust (which is why SpaceX needs 27 engines on three boosters for a Falcon 9 Heavy, versus 5 for a Saturn V.)
"Thrust per engine" is a bad metric since, for larger payloads, it can be better to add more engines than make them bigger, and that metric immediately disqualifies that strategy. (For instance, more full independent engines means more redundancy. Which strategy is better is going to depend on the details.) We wouldn't say that 18-wheelers are worse technology than 4-wheeled earth movers because the latter have more weight per wheel. Ultimately, the thing we care about is most mass to highest orbit at lowest risk. But if you want to concentrate on raw engine performance, you probably should look at metrics like ISP (which SpaceX is indeed not pushing the limits).
> A more accurate summary is SpaceX is retreading well-worm ground that was trod before many of us reading this article were born, bringing modern materials and manufacturing capabilities to bear improving the same basic designs. That’s cool. But that’s not pushing the boundaries of space flight technology.
Surely re-useable first stages is the biggest advance by far in spaceflight technology in decades?
It sounds like by "space flight technology" you just mean engines, but chemical rockets are within about a factor of 2 of the maximum efficiency allowed by the laws of physics. So within that paradigm, you're just not going to get revolutionary (multiple-orders-of-magnitude) improvements in the things we care about (mass to orbit) by improving engines as opposed to things like re-usability. So I think by your definition, the only thing that would be really be an improvement would be nuclear rockets, or something else even more extreme.
That's a misleading comparison, because we're not talking about some ancillary aspect of the design (like rubber tires). This is more like designing a car with the same basic engine technology as a 1969 Impala, except you're using an aluminium engine block and modern crumple zones.
> "Thrust per engine" is a bad metric since, for larger payloads, it can be better to add more engines than make them bigger.
More engines can also mean more chances for failure. (You can make the design resistant to engine-out conditions, but some engine-out conditions are less recoverable than others.) Regardless, the Falcon 9 Heavy also has substantially lower maximum thrust than the Saturn V.
> Surely re-useable first stages is the biggest advance is spaceflight technology in decades? It sounds like by "space flight technology" you just mean engines, but chemical rockets are within about a factor of 2 of the maximum efficiency allowed by the laws of physics. So within that paradigm, you're just not going to get revolutionary (multiple-orders-of-magnitude) improvements in the things we care about (mass to orbit) by improving engines as opposed to things like re-usability. So I think by your definition, the only thing that would be really be an improvement would be nuclear rockets, or something else even more extreme.
I don't even really disagree with that point. Unless there is some groundbreaking advance in rocket engines, you're not going to be "pushing the boundaries of spaceflight technology." It's just like how we don't say Intel is "pushing the boundaries of CPU technology" every time they widen the vector units on the same basic Core architecture they've been using for almost two decades. It's a mature field where revolutionary improvements aren't possible with foreseeable technology. But that doesn't mean you get to relabel incremental improvements as revolutionary.
I think within the context of chemical rockets, engines really are sorta ancillary! Not to the same extent as rubber tires (I used that extreme example just to make my point clear), but engines is just not where the large improvements in things we care about will come from.
> More engines can also mean more chances for failure.
Agreed. I wasn't arguing for either strategy since I don't know enough to have an opinion. I just wanted to point out that more engines was a plausible best strategy, depending on engineering details, and we shouldn't choose metrics that immediately disqualify it.
> Regardless, the Falcon 9 Heavy also has substantially lower maximum thrust than the Saturn V.
Agreed, Falcon 9 is not an example of an advance in total lift capacity, and total lift capacity is important. BFR/Starship may exceed Saturn V, but if so it will be a very slight edge which is not impressive after half a century. So I agree that this is not where the advances are happening. But, to pick another extreme example, the even older Spruce Goose was only recently dethroned in total wingspan, but this doesn't mean no dramatic advances in flight technology have occurred.
> But that doesn't mean you get to relabel incremental improvements as revolutionary.
abledon's original comment said "pushed the limits of spaceflight technology". I was the first person to use the vague word "revolutionary", and I immediately clarified what I meant: orders of magnitude improvement in metrics we care about. And I think the SpaceX tech, both completed and under development, really can lower mass-to-orbit prices by a factor of 100.
They're not ancillary because propulsion performance metrics really drive the things you can do with the rocket. (Same thing in airplanes.) Acknowledging that "large improvements" will not happen in that area is a concession that we've hit a pretty hard wall on what we can do with this technology.
(Also, fwiw, I don't think your comments should have been, downvoted since they have been thoughtful, and a good counterpoint to the SpaceX over-enthusiasm in these threads.)
[1] Even with computer aided design, composites, laser sintering, etc., the thrust-to-weight ratio of a Merlin engine is a factor of two better than an RP-1/LOX engine from half a century ago. That’s about the same factor improvement as we achieved in subsonic jet engine performance over that time period. Aerospace technology moves very slowly, there is no reason to be hopeful and optimistic.
(Can confirm that this Twitter account is a real person who works at KSC.)
The problem is that the Apollo 1 test was run with both a pure-oxygen environment and a positive relative pressure to the outside, but was run on the ground. That meant a ~16psi pure oxygen environment, which is a real fire propagation issue, meaning materials which were specced not to burn in the flight environment could burn during the test.
This video goes in to a bit more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvA7N_j_8os
https://www.popsci.com/why-did-nasa-still-use-pure-oxygen-af...
The effects could be redone in HD, but I think it wasn't even widescreen originally.
Just a small computer glitch or, things firing/smoking when they shouldn't, or something more drastic?
Things firing/smoking when they shouldn't? That's an anomaly too.
Pressure reading slightly out of predicted range? Also anomaly.
Everything went kaboom? That is also an anomaly, as long as that wasn't the plan.
Basically everything where expectation and reality do not meet.
Call it "malfunction discovered during testing", could you not?
Edit: Here's an example search (excluding SpaceX): https://www.google.de/search?q=anomaly+rocket+launch+-spacex
Nominal - as expected (no more than nominal deviations from expected parameters)
Anomaly - something unexpected
Not sure which I overheard.