Repairing the damage from Thursday’s unmanned test flight is expected to take months. Read more at straitstimes.com.
TEXAS – Flying chunks of concrete, twisted metal sheets, craters blasted deep into the ground: The thunderous power of– the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built – inflicted serious damage on its Texas launch site.
Luckily for Mr Musk, the 120m rocket successfully lifted off, climbing for about four minutes until it tumbled and exploded, well over the Gulf of Mexico. “The main damage to the launch pad is underneath, where the flames impinge on the ground,” he told AFP, adding that repairing the crater “will take several months”.
But it “wasn’t ready in time,” and engineers “wrongly” calculated that the pad could still withstand the test. That could be solved by pumping water through channels in the steel, “so long as they have a high enough flow rate,” said Professor Metzger of the University of Central Florida. The rocket’s two stages also did not separate as planned, forcing SpaceX to trigger a self-destruct mechanism.
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