Source: SpaceX: Mars ship prototype explodes after first intact landing | Science | The Guardian It landed great and then exploded. Bob Wilson
Yes it exploaded ...... unlike NASA fire in the capsule where 3 burn to death on the ground, or columbia, or challenger. Yea so much tragedy to ROTFLAMO if that's the kind of thing that floats some people's boats. Just glad no one was hurt while testing. .
I believe it was uncrewed, and this was part of the testing program, where the objective is to learn stuff from what the rocket does, and what it did was ... that. I'm sure the team would have been elated if it had gone without a hitch, but I don't think anybody was too downcast about the test run that they got.
They seem to be receiving tons of data about many systems before something causes rapid disassembly of the test articles. Far more useful test data gets received and recorded now than from the fireballs of sixty years ago.
My sweet CFO asked me yesterday if I had heard of Elon’s rocket exploding. I asked her if it was the booster trying to land on the drone ship, whence she said that a rocket exploded on the pad - she really wasn’t sure since she’s not into the space thing....so she didn’t have the deets. After a quick internet search I laughed and told her that....no....it was not the rocket due to lift off out of FLORIDA, but rather the one in Texas....the Florida rocket was scheduled for tomorrow (today.) That’s pretty impressive for a private company doing ‘big-boy’ stuff......
Gee. they made progress. It didn't go perfectly so they have something to learn from. Next. Know anyone else who could do this much? Remember back to several years ago, or to this year when several "what we are going to do next years" were issued. But one company is right up front and making progress. And the others?
I think that it is amazing that they have learned to land and reuse their other family of rockets. It's just a question of time until they get it right with this one. Meanwhile these are some pretty dramatic failures. I have always been fascinated by NASA from it's inception in the 50's when I was a kid in grade school. The advancements from Project Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and then onto the Space Shuttles and ISS. I was curious about the G forces on a Saturn 5 launch. I have heard that the Saturn 5 was too heavy to lift off at the moment of ignition but since it burned tons of fuel per second, within several seconds it would gradually begin to accelerate. As the rocket burned off fuel and became lighter and with the thrust from the engines remaining constant, the G forces on the astronauts would increase (F=MA) after liftoff. I found this chart which you might find interesting. The chart shows that they cut off the center engine at about 2 minutes into the flight which would restrict the G force to under 4 G's. The launch mass is over 60 million pounds and the landing mass is about 10,000 lbs. An incredible amount of energy is required to get a human to the moon and back.
I was also fascinated as a kid during this era, but my direct memories go back only to the Gemini era, not Mercury or earlier. I'll have to dispute that. I'm remembering the F-1 engines having a thrust of 1.5 million pounds each, for a total of 7.5 million pounds. But the total launchpad weight was less than that, just under 6.5 million pounds for Apollo 11. Thrust did exceed launch weight, though not by very much. It didn't lift off at the moment of ignition because it was clamped down to the pad, to give time for the engines and thrust to stabilize, and give time for the launch computers and human controllers to decide that everything was running smoothly enough to allow it to be released for launch. I'm remembering this as about 8 to 9 seconds of burn time, but could use a refresher. If something wasn't working right, e.g. one engine not reaching its required thrust, they could still abort the launch and save the crew, vehicle, and launch pad complex from a fiery destruction. And somewhere along the line (not necessarily a moon mission, maybe a Space Shuttle?), I do remember such a launch pad abort after engine ignition. You slipped a decimal place. Make that 6 to 6.5 million pounds, varying by mission. P.S. Here is a Youtube video of Apollo 11's launch. Watch one of the hold-down clamps open at 3m:53s. Or go to a very slow motion video with commentary here, and see several of the clamps in action.
A NASA youtube that give me enough data to go back with a better understanding of @Ronald Doles graph 17 minutes into the footage of multiple (3) space shuttle launches A lot more data than I can process at first read Saturn V - Wikipedia Thinking of the movie Space Cowboys - looks like the test flight controllers got the ole "Sock it to Um" experience, during the landing. Not always a bad thing, except perhaps in the papers or on the balance sheets.
