But it was out of the environment, thankfully.

Mike C.

Here's where the sand and concrete came from:

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/164 ... 30785?s=20

No sand storm Isla Blanca Beach Park.

The flame trail was wrong (asymmetrical and orange/yellow) from the beginning. It grew in length, the shortened, grew … It also disappeared briefly at times (from my vantage point). Just plain weird.

There shouldn't be a visible flame trail at all when everything is working correctly. Being MethylOx it will have a pale blue flame that would be hard to see in the daytime, so "disappearing" might just have been a rare flicker of "normal".

The visible trail is because they began shedding engines from liftoff onward. Three were out by the time they cleared the launch tower, and three more were lost before MECO. What you could see was likely the engine-rich exhaust trail from the damaged engines.

Reviewing the footage, the blast threw huge chunks of launch pad material as high as the chopstick arms, that's over 300 feet in the air. My guess is that it was FOD that took out the first three engines, and probably damaged the others that failed. There also appeared to be damage to one of the hydraulic packs on the side of the booster, which was seen burning.

In spite of all of that, it made it to stage separation, which failed to occur for some reason. Great data to build on while they finish the newly excavated flame trench and put in the diverter and deluge system.

Love this picture:

It's what the N1 would have looked like if it had 21st century flight controls.

This stabilized view is one of the best

https://twitter.com/nextspaceflight/sta ... 4755470338

Really impressive it held together through so many gyrations. Wonder if they destroyed it, or it just eventually came apart?

When the rocket started to tumble, the SpaceX announcer seem to think this was the planned flip of the booster to start it's return but that didn't make sense since the second stage was still attached. What was he thinking?

SpaceX has nearly perfected the reusable booster concept, now if they could just design a reusable launce platform.

He did say something like Beginning a "flip for stage separation". That might have been all in the fog of war.

they lost hydraulics most likely, couldn't gimbal, couldn't unlatch stages, etc

They may be rethinking their redundancy in their hydraulic designs after this, if there's a commonality

I was wondering the same thing. But the announcer seemed to be saying that it was planned to flip before separation.

And I can't understand why they would do that, as they would have to flip and then flip again. Unless they wanted to separate without shutting down the first stage engines.

I was wondering the same thing. But the announcer seemed to be saying that it was planned to flip before separation.

And I can't understand why they would do that, as they would have to flip and then flip again. Unless they wanted to separate without shutting down the first stage engines.

It was doomed from engine light.  When the engines lit off it blew a large crater.  

It hit the concrete and blew it up 325' in the air.

The concrete hit the bottom area around the engines and took out the hydraulics.  The hydraulics that is used to pull the locking pins at the top so that the rocket can deploy from the booster.  

Double post