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Canaveral Crew Dragon Post-Explosion Issues for SpaceX

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SpaceX is changing the Falcon 9 booster recovery from Cape Canaveral to a droneship landing. The Cape Canaveral landing zone needs to be preserved for the post-explosion investigation work. There are pieces of the Crew Dragon around the landing site.

SOURCES – SciGuySpace Twitter

29 thoughts on “Canaveral Crew Dragon Post-Explosion Issues for SpaceX”

  1. Place the docking hatch on the bottom of a capsule, not the nose. The spacecraft points its belly to a target, and thus the heat shield is not in the way of space debris. The hypergolic tank is toward the center, ringed by passengers–far from the wall of the capsule. Thus, only inert hatch mechanisms are near the heat shield, as opposed to tankage, plumbling, etc.

    You have the hypergolics feed upward–to an escape tower that has no solids–or is a hybrid.

    Thus you have a liquid fueled tractor system. No chance of salt water intrusion–because it is up and out of the way.

    A diving bell has its lower hatch off–and the water stays out of that “capsule” even with a big hole in the bottom–or should I say–because of it. Pull it out of the water by a hook on the tower, and guys come out of the bottom inside a ship.

    That’s new isn’t it?

    Discuss.

  2. Durp! You must not have been looking closely.

    BUT, all of this is OFF TOPIC. Take the argument offline.

  3. And, BTW. Ad hominem attacks are the hallmark of a person with no good arguments. I would guess that those planes were full of nobody, that is they were remote controlled. Finding an intact passport of a purported terrorist just goes to show, it was all for show.
    Really? The fires were hot enough to weaken 4 inch thick steel beams, but the passport survived?
    Yes, the earth is a sphere, I’ve seen evidence of it’s curvature, but the big E could still be kicking.

  4. Actually, I mean all three towers, but 7 is the most obviously impossible as “explained by the media”.

  5. There have been much hotter fires, but no collapse like these. Structural members two floors away would have remained strong. If the building had fallen, it would have been in big pieces.

  6. If that had happened, failure because of members weakened by localized fires, the towers would have buckled, and fallen in a few large pieces. No building of structural steel has ever failed in the way the towers did, except by controlled demolition, except on 9-11-2001, and it happened 3 times on the same block in downtown Manhattan! Now that is unbelievable!!! BTW, structural steel is not heat treated for hardness. The desired state is to be as non brittle(tough) as possible, so that when overloaded
    it undergoes plastic deformation, and transfers load to other structural members. When tested to failure, structural steel stretches to more than twice it’s original length before breaking.
    I was watching my television when the first building went down. I immediately thought no…it can’t be. It looks exactly like a controlled demolition. No….they(the State) wouldn’t! But-but those buildings just can’t do that. It’s impossible for them to fall that way. Structural steel just does not fail that way! This has got to be the American Reichstag, happening on my TV, in front of me, in real time. Sometimes you just hate being correct. I didn’t sleep well for months.

  7. How, other than controlled demolition would you explain a statically indeterminate structure built of well connected, non-brittle members collapsing into a pile of severed, relatively small pieces, rather than toppling over more, or less in one piece? Magic, perhaps an embrittlement spell? Those towers collapsing into relatively small pieces, was like a car crashing into a tree, and the tree collapsing into a pile of toothpicks.
    I suspect the rationalization for rigging the buildings was that if the buildings were gravely damaged in an attack, as they almost were in the first attack with a truck full of explosives, they could be demolished more or less in their own footprints, rather than fall, and take out a quarter mile swath of the Manhattan financial district. At some point, the decision was made to destroy the buildings to create a casus belli for the Iraq, and Afghan wars.
    As for who is responsible, consider the ancient legal principle cui bono(who benefits) in light of Randolph Bourne’s observation that “War is the health of the state”.

  8. And those 20 saudis who suicided must have been bots too, CIA bots, possibly chem trail influence or supernatural phenomena that the CIA knows how to weaponize!

  10. last pick for brains? Do you actually believe that demolition explosives were placed in all the buildings that collapsed and someone was just waiting around, ready to set them off on the off-chance that Islamic terrorists would fly aircraft into the two biggest ones? Also, the earth is a sphere, and Elvis is dead.

  12. anyone uttering such lunacy can only be a shill or a bot. you know more than literally 100s of engineers and architects who 100% agree with William? 9-11 was a scam that lead to what the criminal neocons wanted, war in the middle east, clear as daylight.

  13. NASA doesn’t seem to have a problem with Boeing CST100/Starliner coming down on land.

    But where Dragon 2 was to use propulsive deceleration from terminal velocity to zero (with parachutes only for emergency), and Soyuz/Shenzhou/New Shepard normally descend on ‘chutes with additional rocket braking only at the last second, Boeing chose passive airbags in that terminal role, instead.

    A Dragon (or any other capsule) parachuting to land with no terminal deceleration, would be rather rough.

    But they all (well, maybe not New Shepard, I don’t know. But it should never be in a position where that could happen) can float if they have to, and Soyuz once had to, landing on a frozen lake.

  14. “So if the explosion was a result of prior exposure to sea water, the only thing to rethink is letting NASA influence their design decisions.”

    But NASA will be their first, and for a long time, primary customer for commercial crew, so their interests carry weight.

  16. Technically it seems like we’re exactly as much on course for 2024 as we were before, since Dragon isn’t part of the Mars mission plans?

  18. NSF chat argues against that notion – NASA responsible for water landing. Details are in the Crew Dragon anomaly thread. SpaceX general subforum.

  19. I believe they let the Russians land on land because they’re going to regardless of what NASA says, and without the Russians NASA has no manned access to space.

    Which is really embarrassing, and their own fault.

    NASA is really conservative when it comes to manned space flight, because they have this (Irrational, I think.) conviction that even one more dead astronaut, and America will turn on them.

    That people don’t mind folks dying doing dangerous stuff of their own volition seems to have escaped their attention. I think they’re in a bit of denial about WHY the Challenger and Columbia accidents hurt them: Not because people died, but because the investigations demonstrated NASA was pretty callous about astronaut safety. (Ignored safety warnings for Challenger, pretty much knew there was a good chance Columbia would burn up on reentry and refused to check because it might result in their being forced to launch a rescue mission.

  20. I think the image of astronauts impacting into the ocean at 400mph in a accident is less traumatizing then them hitting pavement that fast. Its not rational, but…I think its part of that.

  21. Oh, come on. Speaking as a mechanical engineer, there wasn’t anything even the slightest bit suspicious about how those buildings came down. Impact knocks off fire proofing, beams get hot in fire, anneal, stop being strong enough to hold up building.

    Looked perfectly ordinary to anybody who understands this stuff.

  22. I’ve never understood NASA’s insistence on ocean landings. It’s inconvenient, and arguably more dangerous. The shuttle used a runway, not a canal.
    I wonder if it’s because other planned launch systems use ocean landings, and they don’t want it claimed that dry landings are an advantage. Correct me if I am wrong, but NASA has accepted dry landings by Russian craft for years. If the difference is the propulsive landing, why can’t Dragon dry land with a parachute, like Soyuz?
    Virgil Griffin had to swim for it, and by some accounts nearly drowned when his spacecraft, the Liberty Bell 7 sank upon landing in the Atlantic ocean on 7-21-1961. Imagine trying to swim in a pressure suit! I’m telling ya, ocean landings are not better than dry landings. This must be a pretense.

  23. Some SpaceX engines use hypergolic compounds to ignite the main fuels. I’m fairly sure the Merlin does. That’s the reason for the green flash sometimes seen at engine startup.

  24. Yes, mea culpa, building 7. The one that was not hit by an aircraft, that the mainstream media avoids mentioning.
    Now that it’s been 18 years, I think it’s time an actual unbiased investigation is made, and it’s results made public. It’s now clear that the FBI hid witnesses the 9-11 commission subpoenaed. Just another law enforcement agency breaking the law under orders from the top! I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know the Federal government’s story is a pack of lies.
    If the feds weren’t complicit, why the cover up?

  25. As I’ve elsewhere pointed out, the Dragon was never meant to land in water, let alone sea water. That was a result of NASA refusing to manrate a propulsive landing capsule, and SpaceX having to knuckle under because NASA would be their primary customer for the Dragon.

    So if the explosion was a result of prior exposure to sea water, the only thing to rethink is letting NASA influence their design decisions.

    At this point we don’t know the cause of the explosion, so we don’t know the lesson to learn from it.

  27. Don’t know.

    AFAIK Starship/Superheavy don’t use hypergolic fuels that explode on contact, and both methane and LOX aren’t a big environmental hazard after they are spilled.

    They can fail and undergo RUD, of course, but for different reasons.

    I think they will need to reassess the whole idea of putting the astronauts in Dragon 2 surrounded by spontaneously exploding hypergolic rockets.

  28. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, preserving the site of the destruction of an aerospace vehicle is of utmost importance in discovering exactly what happened. The management of SpaceX has very wisely made the decision to preserve the site of the dragon explosion to recover evidence. The best way to insure that a terrible event does not reoccur is to know exactly what happened, and take measures to prevent it.
    In fact, I can only think of one instance where the destruction of an aerospace vehicle(s) was not followed by preservation of the site to preserve evidence. The integrity of the site was destroyed as quickly as possible, resulting in the deaths by cancer of many of the workers that destroyed it, which could have been avoided if the dust had been allowed to settle, and proper safety measures had been taken.
    Why would this be done? The only reason I can think of, is the authorities that made the decision to destroy the scene of the crime/crash did not want the official story(lie) overturned by the actual evidence left at the site.
    The site I am writing of, the world trade center in NYC. It seems clear to me that the governments involved either had something to hide, or were ordered to act by a more powerful government that had something to hide. Just how did the three buildings come down the way they did, if they did not succumb to controlled demolition?
    I’ll tell you one thing as a mechanical engineer. Building 6 did not collapse by thermal expansion.

  29. So are we still on course for landing humans on Mars at 2024 after a straight line accelerated development by a superhero of the vehicles and keeping them there for 2 years hoping that they will put all the equipment to generate the fuel that will allow them to return to earth right?

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