Wow, they lost it…
An awesome sales pitch to the end of the live stream 
Gosh darn it, I just closed it because it froze on my end. 
Gotta go back and rewatch.
A video for those that were not watching live.
Got back from camping in the mountains today and this is the saddest thing I could have seen 
. From what I have read so far there was an o2 pressurization anomaly in the second stage. I have heard that both the air force made the call to terminate the rocket, and that the rocket underwent RUD(Rapid unplanned disassembly for the uninformed) on it’s own.
So far we are still unsure what caused the issue, although multiple theories have been proposed and we can speculate if we’re inclined.
Regardless, It sucks for not only the scientists whose research and experiments were on board, but also for the astronauts on the ISS. At this point in time, there isn’t a reliable way to resupply them. Orbital ATK blew up last year and won’t relaunch for awhile. Russia’s Soyuz/progress rockets are having issues and the last one failed, and now SpaceX.
Additionally, the international docking adaptor was on board, which was to be the adaptor the Dragon 2 and boeing’s CST100 capsule would dock to. One of the theories I hinted at earlier is that the adaptor was the heaviest payload that’s been in the trunk, and that it was improperly attached. When detached it fell into the LOX tanks which caused the pressurization issues. However that is obviously wild speculation. It could have been anything, but whatever it is, it’s black swan event(as far as rocket failures go). The cause of the failures isn’t any of the expected causes(as noted by musk on twitter) and it’s a very interesting case.
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Let’s see: Antares, Progress, now Falcon 9…
Ok seriously, who’s the clown that cursed the ISS?
As much as I admire SpaceX and applaude them for forcing the industry to evolve, I’ll still stay a fan of the European program first - see the ATV: no accident! (What do you mean, only 5? I don’t see your point) And I’m sure the aforementioned clown only cursed the ISS now because they knew their paltry curse would fail on the mighty European civilian space technology!
Joke aside, I fear that some politicians use it to try and cut down SpaceX’s funding for the “well-proven ULA”…
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I was hoping to see them nail the third autonomous landing attempt 
However this has to be expected when you slam something through the atmosphere as fast as it can go. I did notice what looked like the Dragon capsule get thrown off / ejected from the payload, so I hope they can recover something useful from it.
From what I’ve heard the capsule continued sending telemetry but they didn’t have a way to fire the parachutes remotely, at least under these circumstances.
On the bright side one could speculate that, having had this happen, a manual override is likely to be part of future manned launches, if it wasn’t already, and that with one of those any hypothetical crew on this launch likely would’ve made it down unharmed.
Indeed. The fact that something was going wrong was evident several seconds before RUD. Plenty of time to eject the pod.
In addition, I expect they’ll want the 1st stage to be able to survive and land itself after jettisoning the upper stages if something goes wrong with them as in this case. That obviously poses a significant challenge as the failing upper stages need to get out of the way of the 1st stage.
Well, this is no good.
“Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds.”
Elon Musk
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Hey guys! The conference call with musk is going on as I type this. The most impotant parts are:
They continued to talk with dragon until they lost LoS with it past the horizon, and in the future dragon will contain code to automatically deploy its chutes to save itself.
The anomaly seems to have happened within .893 seconds, and believed to be caused by a strut breaking as they passed 3.2g’s of acceleration. The strut was holding a helium tank used to pressurize the second stage. Helium was released causing an overpressure event which started the whole shebang.
The strut failed at 2,000 lbs of force when it’s rated for 10,000. They will test all struts individually from now on, and switch to something with even higher performance.
Thats the gist, more details can be found at www.reddit.com/r/spacex or on various twitters or the nasaspaceflight forums.
F9 expected to return to flight in “few months” so not huge of a problem to fix.
September is the earliest date for flight.
Struts are from a supplier and not made inhouse.
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust
“Musk: able to replicate by taking 1000s of these struts and testing; a few failed well below rated level.”
I feel like this quote was aimed at ksp players in particular
Jeff Foust @jeff_foust · 8s8 seconds ago
Musk: don’t think we need to add more struts, just test them individually.
Gotta get to work! That’s all I got for now.
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Well, I know I was (one of) the one(s) tweeting Musk that exact thing. So yeah, probably
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Imagine being the guys who created the struts…
Literally the reason I don’t trust most welders/manufactures of formed metal parts. Even if it wasn’t formed my previous statement of not trusting welders still stands.
Quality testing is usually done at the 95-99% mark, sad truth is that for this project it needed to be 100% for each part, regardless of time lost for testing, the simple fact of “It can go boom” is good enough reason let alone the fact that they’re spending tons on it.
SpaceX’s official update can be found on their website
But the interesting part is
but at this time, we expect to return to flight this fall and fly all the customers we intended to fly in 2015 by end of year.
In other words: Strut guys, you’re fired. We’ll handle this.
Edit: Scott Manley to the rescue!
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Any news on the next launch?
Elon musk discussing the failure, and answering a number of decent questions about what they know happened… the same can’t be said for most of the other questions however.
No news on when the next launch will be though. As far as I’ve seen. It will probably be a couple months.
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I read somewhere around September at the earliest.
I’m also putting in multiple applications for internships for this fall/spring in Hawthorne and Vandenberg…wish me luck!
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SpaceX just pushed this on social media, the unveiling of Dragon 2.0’s crew interior.
Videos and pictures here.
Teaser video for those just passing by.
It really is the kind of interior I could see one enjoying a space whisky in…
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