Boom
This story might not be available to all due to the NYT paywall, but apparently yesterday’s launch did more than a little bit of damage around the launch site and covered Port Isabel, TX in grime.
Some highlights:
Virtually everywhere in the city “ended up with a covering of a rather thick, granular, sand grain that just landed on everything,” Valerie Bates, a Port Isabel spokeswoman, said in an interview. Images posted to social media showed residents’ cars covered in brown debris.
A window shattered at a fitness gym, its owner, Luis Alanis, said. Mr. Alanis, who was at home at the time of the launch, said he felt “rumbling, kind of like a mini earthquake.” He estimated that the window would cost about $300 to fix.
Closer to the launch site, large pieces of debris were recorded flying through the air and smashing into an unoccupied car.
“There were bowling ball-sized pieces of concrete that came flying out of the launchpad area,”
Well done, Elon.
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Space X told Twitter, “hold my beer”
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…yeah. Nothing quite like living adjacent to the launch and having it drop ■■■■ all over you, your house, your car, your family, and this does not include the rocket debris that showered down all over the area, too.
If I lived there, I would be suing the State of Texas, the County, and whatever city (maybe is the county) for allowing this development so close to populated areas.
Cape Canaveral is significantly farther away from people and property than Boca Chica. So are the launch sites at Vandenberg, and White Sands. You blow one up at Canaveral, it rains ■■■■ down in the Atlantic. Musk just dropped a flaming mess in a Nature Conservation Preserve.
All Musk is showing us is a path for how to go from a billionaire to a Dollar Menuaire.
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Elon Musk = Wile E Coyote
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Yeah - nothing like the worlds most powerful rocket to sweep all the debris. What’s the solution? More launches and it will eventually clean it all up, right?! Jeesh, what were they expecting?
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I’m somewhat surprised that this possibility wasn’t evaluated and mitigated when the launch site was first proposed. There are people who make a living doing specifically the types of analyses that would have recommended changes. Before the first Titan IVB flight I was involved in some meetings with what they call, “Range Safety,” at both Edwards AFB and Cape Canaveral where these explosive mad scientists were talking about their models on what could happen if a fully fueled rocket blew up on the pad. They had all sorts of wild experimental data with them, including stuff where they blew shards of glass into pigs (I certainly hope they were dead first) to evaluate the potential risk to humans. Some of the craziest ■■■■ I ever had to listen to, frankly.
The noise produced by these things is also widely known and modeled. The sound levels are so high at liftoff, I seem to remember something about 190db for a Space Shuttle, that it can literally break things on the pad, and designs were modified to accommodate that risk.
I think it’s a completely fair set of questions to poke at why that apparently didn’t happen here. The SpaceX fanboy excuse of, “This is all new,” just doesn’t cut it when you know these things have been considered for over 60 years.
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But as mentioned above, in this ‘agile’ world - just do what you think is right and adjust it later … the lack of controls and thinking through the ‘what if’s’ is appalling, but that’s what you get when you are trying to figure out how to make a rocket launch site from youtube (haha, jk, I hope).
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I need to remember this phrase for future use:
Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
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It’s the latest twist on FUBAR.
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That explosion wasn’t FUBAR. It was FUBB.
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I’m not sad for Elon. Screw that guy. But I don’t like seeing our space efforts set back. I always root for success with all of these efforts because we need some of this stuff to work and when it does it opens up so many things for us. So…too bad Elon (hope the next one works better).
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I’d be interested to know if any of the rocket scientists 
can comment on this - is it accurate or just noise?
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The launch pad damage to the engines is a viable scenario. We had that issue as a concern on Titan IVB. We called it trampoline and it was basically the shock wave from when the solid boosters ignited bouncing back off the concrete with enough force to break the nozzles or vector control (steering) system. It was mitigated by lots of water at launch to dampen out the shock wave.
I’m going to have to go watch the video more closely. I have to believe the Elon overruling the engineers is quite likely. He’s done that before. It’s one of the reasons their turnover is really high and they have a bad rep in college recruiting.
Edit: I found this video of the launch pad during launch. Adds credibility to the prior claim. Elon said not destroying the launch pad was a success criterion prior to the launch. Not sure he met that objective.
Edit 2: Yeah, they wrecked the pad. Holy crap! This is simply incompetent.
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I wonder if there is any truth to the rumor Elon will be joining the CEOs of Clearlink and MillerKnoll for a forum on effective leadership styles.
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More and more I think companies are taking the strategy of “poke the employees in the eye, if they don’t holler keep doing it”. I worked for a company like that.
Just one example of what they did: Top management sent out a memo to all the older employees who were under the grandfathered pension plan that basically said “you have more money than you need for retirement so we’re aren’t going to match your 401k anymore”.
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And then later froze the pension plan so that it didn’t grow any more.
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Ditto here. We need people doing things in the private sector like he is. It’s not about personalities.
A buddy of mine pointed this out to me: if you’re going to destroy a launch pad, this is how you do it.
This is a Titan 34D failure in 1986. It helped make it so us Hercules/ATK guys could get the Titan IVB work referenced earlier.
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More about the launch pad damage. No quench system? No flame trench? WTF? Those are not unknown needs. I sense some serious technical arrogance issues at SpaceX.
It also implies that the destruct was manually activated. I’m going to bet the FAA is going to be pretty hard on them at the next cert review regarding their autonomous destruct system and criteria for manual destruct. That would be a fun show to watch.
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