Falcon 9 Rocket Explodes on Launch Test

DaveinCoalinga said
First one was a design flaw. It was a strut that wasn't strong enough allowing the helium tank inside to break loose, which in turn caused a massive oxygen flood and explosion. That has since been fixed. Up to this point it's the only real failure of the SpaceX program. This one's cause will be figured out and fixed also.

As far as manned flights, that's why this design has been being perfected unmanned. NASA in the beginning had issues also, but because of the money involved it was able to test things on the ground much more and have more extensive testing procedures that would bankrupt any private company. So, SpaceX is doing the unmanned cargo missions working out the flaws this way, in real time. When all is done I'd trust SpaceX as much as I'd trust any thing that involved a few thousand tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen. Which personally isn't much

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I was under the impression that the struts just weren't built properly to meet their certification load. That's a quality escape by the supplier. And if SpaceX was a stringent as LMT, they'd have tested one strut to verify the materials were good, and the processing was good vs just accepting on cert.

I couldn't find anything saying the struts were re-designed. There was speculation they could be re-designed or use a different supplier to mitigate the issue, but the exact cause was never stated. Best I ran across was something about "grain structure", which we'd normally call Microstructure. Perhaps it was faulty heat treatment, or the part has a weld and they didn't do a post weld heat treatment. If that's the case, a simple hardness test on the component would have caught it.