
September 1 Anomaly Updates - obi1kenobi
http://www.spacex.com/news/2016/09/01/anomaly-updates
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onetwotree
That's awfully euphemistic language for a huge fireball.

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DVassallo
Actually I thought this might be showing a glimpse of how SpaceX communicates
internally. Saying "a huge fireball" is probably like saying "the website was
down", but those responsible of keeping the website up would probably use more
precise/euphemistic terms to describe why and how it broke. Ex: Elevated
backend latencies caused the browser to time out waiting for a response. Yes,
it's a softer description than "the site was down", but it's also more
precise.

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haddr
Do I understand it correctly? "This was part of a standard pre-launch static
fire to demonstrate the health of the vehicle prior to an eventual launch.".
So they set some fire before the launch? Why?

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gliptic
"Static fire" = holding down the rocket and firing the engines for some time.
It's a rehearsal of the whole launch procedure short of actually releasing the
rocket.

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revelation
Why do they still do that? I was under the impression that the rocket was held
down for a second or so with the engines firing during the real launch, also.

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gizmo686
It is. However the point of holding the rocket for a moment during the actual
launch is to give the engines time to fire.

The point of a static fire is to test the launch systems. The hope is that
problems can be noticed before the actual launch, where they are more likely
to cause catastrophic failure (and where we they might not be noticed in time
to abort).

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suyash
Why don't they call it a catastrophe - hundereds of millions of dollars burned
in this incident on Sep 1.

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ryanlol
These things aren't catastrophes, they're inevitable and very much expected.
Honestly, even "anomaly" might be a bit strong.

