Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/01/spacex-rocket-explodes-on-laun.html
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Facebook satellite destroyed
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Space is hard. Best wishes to SpaceX as they deal with this difficult turn of events. I’ll be fascinated to hear their conclusions about the circumstances that led to this loss on the pad of this ill-fated mission.
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I deeply dislike Facebook.
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poor satellite. this adds insult to injury.
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Aw come on guys. You had ONE job! It isn’t like it’s rocket sci— oohhh, never mind…
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It was not owned by facebook; Facebook was only one of the companies leasing bandwidth from the satellite, which belonged to Spacecom.
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What a shame.
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Jeez, this is no big deal, at the menu you just click the button to reload from the Vehicle Assembly Building and then…
What’s that now? An Actual rocket? Oooooo…
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Curious how the insurance payout works for stuff like this.
Any chance this guy was wandering around Kennedy before the test?
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Well, like I done told everyone, you can’t go reusing rockets like that. If God had meant us to fly rockets up to heaven he would have given us aerodynamic engineering, liquid oxygen, the abilities to control complex systems autonomously, and a dove to put atop it.
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Fucking doves, how do they work?
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Magnets!
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Contact the authorities, you could be Sagan lives.
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“Catastrophic abort.” I like that.
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It really IS rocket science. At some level, this illustrates how misbegotten the idea of combining your cargo lifter and passenger spacecraft as was done with the space shuttle. A 1% failure rate is probably fine for a cargo ship. Frankly, if you can lower the cost to by 90% if you accept a 5% failure rate that would probably be okay. But 1% is an unacceptably high failure rate for a manned craft. And the cost to go from 99% reliable to 99.95% reliable is, as the Trumpster would say, hyuge…
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Obviously a major malfunction.
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I prefer the term they use for failed barge landings: “Rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
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“This vehicle is run on kerosene and liquid oxygen… bring those two together and you light them, it’s a fairly combustible mix”, reports Jonathan Amos.
Fairly combustible?
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