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Okay, that was cool.

I've never seen any other live launch, though I assume NASA has done it before. Would have been more interesting to see it during the day. After a couple of seconds you were just watching a column of fire.

I saw it, was awesome. Yeah that's kind of the view you get, pretty hard to get cameras up in space to track something moving that fast.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1374 ... -explosion

At about 90 seconds into the flight one of the 9 engines on the first stage simply exploded. Any other vehicle does that and there's a big fireball in the sky.

Captain Ned wrote:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137492-spacex-launches-iss-resupply-spacecraft-despite-mid-launch-engine-explosion

At about 90 seconds into the flight one of the 9 engines on the first stage simply exploded. Any other vehicle does that and there's a big fireball in the sky.

That is pretty damn impressive!

Dang it, did i miss it? What? It exploded? WTF

Arclight wrote:

Dang it, did i miss it? What? It exploded? WTF

No, one of the nine engines on the first-stage booster exploded in-flight. Falcon 9 was designed to take this hit whereas any other booster that suffered an engine explosion likely would have scattered itself across the sky.

Listening to the video it happened right after Max-Q, the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the booster. Big fireball out of one engine and the stack keeps moving like nothing happened.

Sounds like they *really* did their homework on fault tolerance. Holy crap, it's hard to imagine designing a booster to survive a failure like that!

We drove out to the coast to watch it. Fun times by all. Almost as loud as a shuttle, but not quite as bright. Still very impressive and quite a milestone.
To Infinity and Beyond!

Wow. I didn't even notice or hear mention of the explosion when I watched it originally. That's incredible.

So... doing a little more reading on this, it's designed to be capable of reaching orbit even with two failed engines. Each engine is encased in a Kevlar blast shield to reduce the risk of a cascading failure if one engine blows.

Slow motion footage of the explosion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6zsZiVa998

You can clearly see some pretty sizable chunks flying off as the failed engine disintegrates.

just brew it! wrote:

You can clearly see some pretty sizable chunks flying off as the failed engine disintegrates.

Some are saying the engine was shut down and the bell failed due to aerodynamic pressure (corner engine and no longer with lots of pressure in the bell). Not in that shot, as the injector head is glowing white-hot right to the moment of explosion.

The current 3x3 arrangement puts lots of aero stress on the 4 corner engines. The next Falcon 9 will be the last of the 3x3 config as they're moving to a ring config for aero purposes.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

We drove out to the coast to watch it. Fun times by all. Almost as loud as a shuttle, but not quite as bright. Still very impressive and quite a milestone.
To Infinity and Beyond!

Did you film it? Made pictures? Damn it man share something with us, this is history in the making.

My wife with my son in the Ergo.

Seen in a forum comment (over at Ars): "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Engines"

That's rockin'.

Sounds like Russian engineering too... design it to work while failing.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

My wife with my son in the Ergo.

Kid's thinking "Mom you're blocking my view!"

Airmantharp wrote:

That's rockin'.

Sounds like Russian engineering too... design it to work while failing.

Sounds like NASA does the same:
"Both the Space Shuttle and Saturn 5 launch vehicle had similar “engine out” capabilities, though in their cases the solution was to shut down the faulty engine before it could explode."

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

My wife with my son in the Ergo.

That's *puts on sun glasses* rocket science baby.

Well this answers the NASA bureaucrats who questioned the ability of the private space companies to get their program paperwork in order.

trackerben wrote:

Well this answers the NASA bureaucrats who questioned the ability of the private space companies to get their program paperwork in order.

People will follow the money...