Three weeks after the SpaceX rocket Falcon 9 blew up just minutes after launch, the company believes it’s finally found the culprit — a 2-foot steel strut.
The Weakest Link
Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said on Monday that initial investigation has lead the company to believe that a 2-foot long steel strut is what inevitably brought down their latest unmanned rocket, the Falcon 9. This strut, measuring in at only an inch wide, had one job — to hold down a high-pressure helium bottle in the liquid oxygen tank. Engineers believe that the strut snapped, which launched the bottle to the top of the oxygen tank. The result of which can be seen here.
The faulty strut is manufactured to support 10,000 pounds of force, which is well above the 3,500 pounds of force that the struts handle during an actual launch. “The strut failed five times below its normal strength, which is crazy,” said Musk.
In the news conference, Musk iterated that these were only preliminary results and that nothing was exactly definitive yet. During the conference Musk also stated that the strut wasn’t manufactured by SpaceX and that they had tested “some enormous number” only to discover that some could only support 2,000 pounds of force. Musk declined to provide the name of the supplier.
Misplaced Confidence Could Also be the Blame
The Falcon 9’s original mission was to resupply the ISS, but also staying intact so that SpaceX could retrieve the rocket in order to reuse it. For commercial spaceflight companies, this is a way to decrease the cost of future missions. Unfortunately, this is the third time in the last eight months that the rocket has experienced a failed launch.
“To some degree the company became a little bit complacent in the course of 20 successes in a row,” said Musk. “This is certainly an important lesson and something we will take with us into the future.”
According to Musk, many of the company’s employees believed Musk was being “paranoid” by his stringent attitude towards potential flaws. A behavior that has proven to be well justified.
Looking Forward to the Future
All of SpaceX’s main systems and rocket engines are made in-house, and Marco Caceres, director of space studies for Teal Group, believes that this is an important achievement.
“There is not a fundamental flaw in the design of the rocket itself. A strut is a specific part… Going forward, they will be much more careful about testing everything that goes on the vehicle,” said Caceres.
SpaceX is currently still trying to retrieve Dragon, the cargo spacecraft attached to the Falcon 9, and currently has no plans to cease its mission, though the launch schedule will need to be revised.
