A defective brace inside the upper-stage of the Falcon 9 rocket was most probably the root cause for the explosion that happened last month, according to CEO Elon Musk.
The company announced the results of the initial investigations on Monday, stating that the supportive brace or strut that is responsible for holding the bottle of helium used to pressurize the liquid oxygen tank of the upper stage engine broke around the 138 second mark into the flight.
“As a result, the helium bottle would have shot to the top of the tank at high speed. It failed five times below its nominal strength, which is pretty crazy,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said.
According to the billionaire CEO, the faulty piece of equipment was successfully flown on all previous Falcon 9 flights without any glitches what so ever. And more importantly these braces had been tested to withstand 4.536 kg of force (10,000 lbs). However it failed at the 2,000 lbs mark.
These struts are each 2 feet (60 cm) long and an inch thick and were provided to SpaceX by an outside supplier.
“We are not going to use these particular struts in the future,” Musk said, adding that the company will source it from a different supplier from now on.
“We have been able to replicate the failure by taking a huge sample, essentially thousands of these struts, and pulling them,” Musk commented. “We found a few that failed far below their certificated level. That’s what led us to think that there was one just far below its rated capability that happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The company plans to begin individually testing each strut ahead of future launches to avoid such mishaps in the future.
NASA lost more than $ 110 million in equipment which was bound for the astronauts living in the International Space Station, according to a US space agency spokesman.
SpaceX has promised to look into further issues that may have played a role in the accident, as well as any other potential problems that could have an adverse effect on future flights.
“This is the first time we’ve had a failure in seven years, so I think to some degree the company as a whole became maybe a little bit complacent,” Musk said.
Benzamin H
1 Comment
Testing the struts for this failure can’t be too tough, they tested hundreds if not thousands and found a few that failed in the 2000 pound range where it would need to fail to fit the theory they have about the failure. They did it within the span of the 3 weeks following the failure. The problem is that SpaceX is either deluding itself or trying to save face. The problem isn’t the struts it is the management that didn’t test the struts before the failure. We learned this lesson in the 1960’s. Those who fail to read and heed their history are doomed to repeat it. We had many rockets and aircraft failing due to faulty parts. They were certified by their manufacturers to meet a certain specification, but they still failed. The problem is that any product will have a certain failure rate no matter how well manufactured. The manufacturers self interest precludes any fair and impartial ability to deliver perfection. So what we did was invent Metrology, the exact science of measurement. They called it PMEL in the Air Force and they had standards for everything traceable to a central repository of the most exact standards. Today they call that repository NIST and all aerospace manufacturers buy parts and then inspect and test them. The materials purchased are tested to see that they meet the standards of the purchase order, the length, weight, and strength in this case would be most important. Only those parts that meet the standards of the purchase order are paid for, rejects are returned. Usually the equipment used by the inspectors are calibrated and repaired by the upstream metrology department and their standards are in turn tested periodically to make sure they are traceable to the NIST. That material inspection and testing step seems to be missing or badly flawed at SpaceX. The whole department might run a million bucks a year to operate with enough personnel to test every part purchased by SpaceX. It might seem a waste of time and money to go through that testing, but you could run it for a lot of years for the cost they are facing from this one rocket failure. Other businesses might not need to have such a materials testing department with exacting standards. But Aerospace industries do. Its not the same as a car company where you can issue a recall. Its not the same as a solar panel company where you can simply issue an RMA and refund or replace a defective batch of solar panels. This is rocket science and managing a rocket science business is different than anything else and much more precise, demanding, nit-picking and terribly boring than anything else imaginable. Mr. Musk and his management team failed to learn this lesson from the history books so they have had to relearn it from the school of hard knocks. That’s an expensive school by the way. So no this is not a case of faulty parts causing a rocket failure, it is a case of faulty management going through the learning curve unnecessarily. This episode could have easily been avoided and should have never happened. Ego may be to blame. But until Elon Musk and the management team at SpaceX stand up and take the blame and explain what they are doing to correct the management ethos they are going to run into a number of failures. Face it, own the failure and fix it and move on. That is what needs to happen at SpaceX. Its not faulty parts or complacent staff, its faulty leadership Mr. Musk.