12 thoughts on “An “Interesting” Day For SpaceX?”

  1. I managed to see the vid of the large cloud, but can’t see any comments or content. Any idea what happened?

    To me, it looks like that cloud *could* be from a multi-core test. Or, something could have gone kaboom.

      1. Thanks; I couldn’t see anything but his first comment
        “Test at McGregor Tx Space X Facility 4.21.2016. Spectacular and awesome come to mind.”
        and the vid.

        I use a scripblockers, a cookie blocker, and don’t have facebook, so anything on that site displays badly for me, if at all.

        I too hope no one was hurt, and I also hope it was just something new, not a RUD. If it had been a RUD, I suspect either we, or the photographer, would have seen fire.

    1. It was a video of a huge rolling cloud at the complex, as if a rocket had blown up in a violent explosion, or perhaps like what you see when a superhero with the power to summon storms decides to mess somebody up.

      My guess is that lots of fuel and oxidizer suddenly met in a way that did not produce controlled thrust.

  5. Whatever it was seems to have ended before the video starts. Likely just before, but before. There is no vigorous expansion or roiling going on in the cloud of smoke/steam in the center of the field of view, it’s just dissipating.

    As the smoke/steam clears there is what appears to be an F9 1st stage upright on the “up-in-the-air-platform” test stand to the right of the centroid of the dissipating cloud. As the cloud continues to thin there is something else of height and width roughly comparable to the F9 1st stage, but seemingly rooted at ground level rather than supported on a raised platform, seen standing at the center of where the smoke/steam was formerly coming from.

    The video is too low-res to descry exactly what this object might be. It is at least conceivable that it could be a triple-core Falcon Heavy test article seen from a highly oblique side angle.

    There seemed to be a high-pitched hissing sound early in the video too. But it’s hard to be sure as there is also a lot of obvious wind noise from the camera’s (phone’s?) exposed microphone. This hissing might have been: 1) just more wind noise, or, 2) some release of pressure from some item of ground support equipment as part of the shutdown procedure of some really large test run – that of a full-up FH triple-core test article, say.

    It would be nice if the video didn’t start after the end of whatever happened, but I understand that SpaceX doesn’t make detailed schedules of their tests available in advance. SpaceX has been said to be building a surface-level test stand for the FH that routes the exhaust sideways like an actual launch pad. This is said to be partly for versimilitude to an actual launch and partly to lower the noise level for the neighbors over what it would be if a platform-type test stand was used.

    It would also be nice to have some calibration of what Mr. Wallace means by “spectacular and awesome.” The latter word tends, infamously, to be overused, often inappropriately, by those of the Millenial persuasion. If there was a test of an FH triple core, though, even I, a jaded Boomer, would completely endorse Mr. Wallace’s choice of descriptors regardless of his demographic cohort.

  6. It certainly didn’t look like any controlled test I’ve seen at Stennis. I hope all are safe.

  7. I didn’t listen to the audio but it didn’t look like any sort of major problem to me. Major problems do not tend to leave the rocket standing upright at the end.

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