Henry,
Apparently there was at least one Thor failure in 1957 (digging through
Wikipedia here) that happened during fueling. But any way you slice it, it
looks like pre-ignition launch failures like this haven't really happened
in ~50yrs in the US. So personally, I hope for SpaceX's sake that it was
due to some quirk of the F9 vehicle, whether it was subcooling, or having
COPVs inside the LOX tank, rather than a ground handling accident. Because
to me at least, having an umbilical fail and take out a launch vehicle when
nobody else in the US has had a failure like that in over half a century,
over 1000 liquid fueled rocket launches and dozens of vehicle iterations,
looks far worse than running into some subtlety of a cutting-edge launch
vehicle...
Sorry if that's a wee bit rambly,
~Jon
On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:33 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Jonathan Goff wrote:
I think someone was saying an Atlas event in 1959 was the last US pad
explosion during fueling. Though there was also the SIVB-503 test stand
event that also let go during fueling in ~1962, but that wasn't with an
operational vehicle with a payload on top.
The S-IVB-503 explosion was in January 1967. However, it was not actually
a fueling accident -- the stage was fully fueled and ready to go. The
failure happened while the test crew was working through the startup
sequence for an acceptance-test firing.
I don't have details on the Atlas failures, alas.
Henry
