SpaceX Crew Dragon suffers anomaly
 

I just saw this this morning:

https://www.floridatoday.com/story/...ral/3531086002/

I really wish they wouldn't use that vague BS language.

There was an accident. Something blew up.

I think the deliberately unclear "code" language is cute.

I was taught at the fire academy decades ago that red/brown smoke is probably methyl-ethyl-bad-$hi+ and I should use the RLH factor (run like he!!). We were referring to tanker crashes/spills, but I think it would apply here.

Red smoke = N2H4. RLH is a good idea.

This appears to be much worse. Looks like they have lost the spacecraft.


https://youtu.be/l9DVRIdA4GQ

N2H4 is always fun stuff.
Blended with glow fuel you can get about 50% more power out of a glow engine for ONE RUN.
After that the engine is SCRAP.

In using info from my post on TRF in the SpaceX Falcon-9 Historic Landing thread:
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threa...12#post-1879013

….you could have also included the link to the thread on NASA SpaceFlight Forum that was posts above it:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/i...p?topic=48003.0

And yes, it was destroyed. A crew would have been killed instantly. About the best that SpaceX can hope for is that this was a screw-up in test procedures, or otherwise unique to this test.

Second best something related to the fact that this was the DM-1 Dragon-2 (which launched during NARCON and docked with ISS, and landed safely in the Pacific 6 weeks ago), where possibly saltwater caused some unanticipated issue or even some kind of internal re-entry heating damage that went unnoticed somehow (I would expect they’d have stripped the outer panels off to inspect it though). NASA won’t ever re-use a Dragon-2 for a crew, but SpaceX is planning to re-use them for ISS resupply.

If it’s a Quality Control problem, bad. An inherent design problem, could be devastating (the COPV tanks are at well over 1000 PSI). Would go from a delay of months, to potentially a delay of years to come up with a new hardware approach that NASA would sign off on to allow crews onboard.