SpaceX’s engineers concluded a material defect in an axial support strut holding a helium-filled Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel, or COPV, caused the bracket to fracture under the structural loads of launch. Within a few weeks of the launch failure, SpaceX officials publicly identified what the company’s engineers determined was the most probable cause of the accident. “In other words, the vehicle went from flying fine to conflagration in less than a second, or ‘within a blink of an eye,'” NASA officials wrote in a summary of their inquiry published Monday. Within 800 to 900 milliseconds from the first indication of a problem, the Falcon 9 began disintegrating at an altitude of nearly 150,000 feet - about 44 kilometers - over the Atlantic Ocean. The launcher’s first stage flew as planned until 2 minutes, 19 seconds, after liftoff, when a puff of vapor suddenly appeared near the top of the Falcon 9. ![]() The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral on June 28, 2015, with SpaceX’s seventh Dragon cargo mission to the space station. The NASA review board largely agreed with SpaceX on the direct cause of the launch failure - the rupture of the Falcon 9’s upper stage liquid oxygen tank triggered by a pressurized helium vessel that broke free in flight, according to a public summary of their report released Monday.īut the agency’s engineers faulted SpaceX for using a substandard steel component in a strut that was supposed to hold the helium reservoir inside the liquid oxygen tank, where propellant was chilled to near minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 184 degrees Celsius). companies, SpaceX itself was in charge of the primary investigation team. ![]() ![]() Under regulations set by the Federal Aviation Administration, the government agency which oversees commercial rocket launches by U.S. NASA’s independent review team that investigated the destruction of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon supply ship shortly after liftoff in June 2015 concluded a design error led to the loss of more than two tons of provisions and equipment heading for the International Space Station.Įngineers from NASA’s Launch Services Program, a group based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, reviewed telemetry from the doomed flight and compiled an independent report on the launch failure.
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