[AR] Re: SpaceX
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 00:28:04 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Jonathan Goff wrote:
Apparently there was at least one Thor failure in 1957 (digging through
Wikipedia here) that happened during fueling.
There was one other borderline case: the 1978 Titan II missile accident,
which involved a massive N2O4 leak in an operational Titan silo during
fueling, due to sloppy practices and a not-very-fault-tolerant system.
It's borderline because it *didn't* result in an explosion; however, it
did kill two guys and injure several others, damage the missile beyond
repair, and damage the silo enough for several years of downtime (ending
in a "stop work" order because repairs were overtaken by the decision to
retire the Titan II force).
But yes, this is a class of accident that is pretty much obsolete, and
it's going to be much better for SpaceX if the cause turns out to be a
novel vehicle problem rather than a handling error.
Henry
Other related posts:
