Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this was expected or not. This video immediately comes to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMbUeO4iGhY (Why SpaceX Cares about Concrete)

This probably explains why some of the engines didn't make it off the pad. That is some incredible damage.

Depends on what you mean by "expected." It was absolutely not supposed to happen, although a lot of people in the industry have been shouting "we have flame trenches for a reason!"

They didn't want it to happen, but they definitely knew it was a strong possibility.

I have done work for NASA on this problem through SBIRs. The risks have been known for a long time, and to my team the extent of the damage was not surprising. NASA/SpaceX just don't have the computational tools to assess these types of risks at this time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com