>>The unmanned rocket was destroyed when its self-destruct system was triggered after an unexplained malfunction.
It's interesting these rockets are equipped with self-destruct systems. What scenario would warrant a rocket purposely self-destruct?
It's interesting these rockets are equipped with self-destruct systems. What scenario would warrant a rocket purposely self-destruct?
I can't seem to find any good numbers, but it seems like the F9 rocket should have somewhere around 200 tons of fuel & oxidiser (kerosene & liquid oxygen). That, in addition to the few other hundred tons of rocket landing anywhere public is probably not going to end well.
IIRC, most rockets over a certain size are required to have some form of 'range safety package'[1] which may include a self-destruct capability for exactly these reasons.
In the course of the Challenger shuttle accident, the Solid Rocket Boosters were remotely destroyed by the range safety officer[2]
When they're out of control and could hit someone.
> The more robustly constructed crew cabin also survived the breakup of the launch vehicle; while the SRBs were subsequently destroyed remotely by the Range Safety Officer, the detached cabin continued along a ballistic trajectory and was observed exiting the cloud of gases at T+75.237.
In the images, you can see the solid rocket booster (SRB) following a random path after the explosion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety#Range_safety_in_US...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl12dXYcUTo
Then imagine if it was headed for somebody's house (or a city). You'd want to blow it up in the air before it reached the ground.
My favorite part is at the end when the sound from the explosion arrives. Everything is calm, then suddenly KABOOM! Really drives home how far away the thing is (because it takes so long for the sound to arrive) and how big it is (because it's still a massive KABOOM even at that distance).
I read about it in Boris Chertok's memoirs (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/feb/HQ_12-054_Chertok_R...), which are huge and sprawling, he was there from the beginning, from the mission to get V2 stuff from Germany after WW2, through the Soviet Union's fall.
One can imagine all sorts of instances where it'd be preferable to litter the area with debris rather than missle-ing the rocket into a densely populated area.