Elon Musk Asks Twitter For Help In Finding Cause of SpaceX Explosion (gizmodo.com) 266
On September 1, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and destroyed the AMOS-6 satellite that belonged to Facebook, which was going to be used to beam internet to developing parts of the world. Since the cause for the explosion has yet to be solved, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is asking for help via Twitter. Slashdot reader Thelasko writes: Elon Musk stated on Twitter last night, "Still working on the Falcon fireball investigation. Turning out to be the most difficult and complex failure we have ever had in 14 years." He went on to say, "Important to note that this happened during a routine filling operation. Engines were not on and there was no apparent heat source." Other Tweets mention a "bang" sound before the fire, and that SpaceX "have not ruled out" the possibility that something struck the rocket.
Cause is (Score:5, Funny)
Samsung note 7 ?
Might want to watch this (Score:3, Interesting)
At least one possible explanation [youtube.com].
Re: Might want to watch this (Score:2)
Excellent video. Wish I had mod points.
Re:Might want to watch this (Score:5, Insightful)
And the explanation was that Elon Musk is a show off and "these problems" had been solved long before he was born? What the hell...
Thunderf00t is just another Musk hater with no real explanation as to why the explosion happened. Even a dumb moron can easily say that "hey, something went wrong with the fuel pumping" that is OBVIOUS. Musk is really pissing a lot of people of by just taking part in space exploration through his own company. Clearly that is something that hurts the feelings of a lot people. I guess it was their dream also. So they handle him just like they handled Gates, Zuckerberg and all the rest who got somewhere and did something.
Re:Might want to watch this (Score:4, Informative)
If you had watched the video, you would have seen that his explanation for what happened is that the liquid oxygen most likely froze the kerosene causing a rupture in the holding tanks in the second stage, allowing the fuels to mix; but yeah, no real explanation.
Re:Might want to watch this (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually liquid oxygen is perfectly capable of both igniting itself and turning pretty much everything around it into fuel.
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If the LOX froze the kerosene, then that "something" could be almost anything short of "exploded just for the sheer hell of it". That's a very touchy and sensitive combination.
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Re:Might want to watch this (Score:5, Insightful)
So they handle him just like they handled Gates, Zuckerberg and all the rest who got somewhere and did something.
Mentioning Musk in the same breath as Gates or Fuckerberg is bullshit. Elon Musk actually does things that make life better for other people. Gates' career was based on shitting on the industry, and the US DOJ literally found that they had held the state of the art of computing back with their anticompetitive practices, and the Gates foundation is a tax dodge ala the Rockefeller foundation which 1) can never achieve its stated goals and 2) which exists primarily to push strong international IP law for the benefit of Big Pharma, in which Gates is personally massively invested (as is the foundation.) Facebook is a spying and censorship platform.
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How is he making life better for anyone? He doesn't work in medicine, he doesn't work in providing technology to people in need, he doesn't improve technology. Bill Gates have done more for common people in all of those areas and more, even when accounting for the immoral/illegal actions of Microsoft. Just because you have a hard-on for space sci-fi and a hatred for M$ facts doesn't change...
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How is he making life better for anyone?
He's moving us towards space, if we don't go there then our species will die out eventually. He's helping move rich people towards using less resources while driving. He's helping move us towards having residential power storage, which is a necessity for a robust grid.
He doesn't work in medicine, he doesn't work in providing technology to people in need, he doesn't improve technology. Bill Gates have done more for common people in all of those areas and more,
It's well-documented that Bill Gates is actually retarding progress in all of these areas.
even when accounting for the immoral/illegal actions of Microsoft.
Nonsense.
Just because you have a hard-on for space sci-fi
If you're not into science or space, perhaps slashdot is not for you
and a hatred for M$
Well-earned.
facts doesn't change...
Your dick-riding doesn't change them either.
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When technology is invented, the whole planet generally benefits.
This was core to Julian Simon's observations -- the more freedom a society has, the more invention they generate.
Dictatorships and corruption both drag this down.
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Gates' career was based on shitting on the industry
Actually it was based on selling a useful product that lots of people wanted. He had a vision and executed. I'm talking about the original BASIC he developed for personal computers. Now it's true he was a corporate cutthroat and attained monopoly position, but you're full of it if you think he did nothing of value.
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Umm, Gates didn't develop BASIC, that was John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. In 1964. When Gates was only 9 years old. Gates and Allen just produced one clone among many.
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Musk is really pissing a lot of people of by just taking part in space exploration through his own company. Clearly that is something that hurts the feelings of a lot people. I guess it was their dream also.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.......
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The Internet's favorite explanation [youtube.com]
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that video is a total waste of time
I found it interesting and informative. Sounds like you want to bash it because he threw some cold water on Musk fanboys.
with some fairly simple and very rambly explanations of how rockets were made 60 years ago
Do you think the basic principles have been thrown out the window? He also showed diagrams from the Falcon 9, the rocket under question, and pinpointed what the failure most likely was. He also brought up the point that SpaceX was cooling their liquid oxygen even colder than normal to get efficiencies, placing extra demands on the structure where the failure likely occurred.
At the end he starts having a go at SpaceX because they are operating differently from how the military and NASA do
Including the
Review the logs (Score:5, Funny)
Did they have the autopilot turned on?
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I doubt it - the engineers seem to be the only ones who understand that autopilots exist to do the dull deadhead work and leave the pilot's attention free for hazard analysis and mitigation. Apparently even some professional pilots can't keep that straight.
Conspiracy theory time! (Score:2)
It may have been caused by an object hitting the rocket? Well, then the internet shall commence groundless speculation as to who may have launched the object.
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My money would be on a .50 cal Anti Material Rifle. It was an Israeli satellite. A quarter-billion dollars would be a juicy target for the Palestinians.
The fire originated around the upper stage oxidizer tank, which would be the logical choice of target to shoot at. Leaking fuel isn't necessarily dangerous. Leaking oxidizer will make everything in the area kindling for the tiniest of sparks.
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The Space Nutters do make a valid point, though. The Rock is coming. It might be next year, it might be in ten million years. But it is coming. Mankind must leave this planet eventually, or go extinct. The question is not if we should be investing in space exploration technology. The question is if we should invest now, or wait until a better time.
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On that timescale, there are other alternatives. 1. With the heat death of the universe, mankind goes extinct anyway. 2. Mankind evolves into something else, so mankind ceases to exist (well, I guess that's "extinct", but it's hardly catastrophic.)
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Sounds like Static (Score:2)
Breaking SpaceX News (Score:2, Funny)
John Galt Consults the Collective
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Don't let the Interwebs fix it, they'll create 10,000 conspiracies and rename it "Launchy McBlastface".
FB is the culprit (Score:3)
It must have been the new FaceBook 'news' algorithm that caught fire because it has too many wacky conspiracy theories.
Internal weld gave out... Thermal stress,, (Score:4, Interesting)
Inside LOX tank their are anti slosh baffles made out aluminum which are welded to the inside of the tank. During fueling those welds will be under thermal stress, if one of the welds gave out it would expose Al metal to the LOX then BOOM. The tank material itself reacted with the Pure O2.
It's the nature of the beast when dealing with LOX tanks. 1st)It would be wise to let the tank sit with a pressurized with a couple of psi of O2 for several weeks building up a thicker ceramic AlO2 layer. 2nd) implement a staged cool down procedure before filling tank with cryonic oxygen to reduce stress on welds..
Cavitation-induced Ignition (Score:3)
You don't need a bullet, or a ray gun, or even a rock to ignite cryo fuels under the right circumstances.
The shockwave from the failure of a pipe or weld could be enough to ignite the fuel.
Re:Any twit could do it (Score:5, Interesting)
Proof:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I am with thunderfoot on this.
Elon musk thinks the magical free market and free enterprise can do things better.. This is reality, Nasa solved these issues back in the 1950's and early 60's. But no the ebil government can't do anything right..
Re:Any twit could do it (Score:4, Interesting)
That's quite a strawman. Nobody thinks government "can't do anything right." The government has obviously done many things right. But can free enterprise do some things better? And better yet, can they do those things on their own dime? We'll see.
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I think GP is one of those who think that the government is the only one that can do things right. If so, he might want to read the Rogers Commission Report.
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Free market typically pushes for cheaper first, then good enough and finally fast enough and no further. This makes perfect sense, I think.
NASA does not have an unlimited budget. They have been pushing for cheap, good, fast missions for years, and been very successful lately with New Horizon for instance. They have been saying that manned missions cost too much. Last I heard Elon Musk is the one wanting to go to Mars.
This is not to say that pork barrel projects [cnsnews.com] don't exist at NASA, but note that Congress ha
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Why is everyone in denial about the object that obviously flies over the rocket from frame right to left at exactly the same time as the explosion. Even Musk states that they don't know what happened and that someone heard something hit the rocket. It could even have been a drone, or a deliberate act of sabotage, but *someone* has to look at the video in more detail and determine whether it's a real thing, or just a bug!!!!!
Re:Any twit could do it (Score:5, Informative)
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This video is asking many of the right questions.
Re:Any twit could do it (Score:5, Informative)
It would have been nice if the summary had mentioned what specifically he asked for, rather than including everything but what he asked for. They make it sound like he asked Twitter to solve the problem. What he actually asked twitter for was any photos or videos of the event that anyone may have:
The connection with the "bang" is precisely what he wrote immediately after the first tweet:
If they have more videos, they can triangulate the location of the sound and determine whether it came from the rocket or elsewhere.
Musk did Not just go on Twitter and say "Well, we're baffled - go on, Twitter, figure out why it exploded for us!" like the summary makes it sound.
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He should have. This is what rockets do, more often than we want them to.
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Far too gauche and brute force.
The AI would likely just infiltrate Facebook's newsfeed algorithm, and subtly manipulate a variety of people and groups to act in unrelated ways at certain places and certain times. The ultimate purpose isn't to have them do anything specific, but in actually, to make the movement and weight distribution infinitesimally alter the spin and balance of the Earth so that the precise location of the Falcon 9 intersected with the path of a meteorite - a meteorite that was picked up
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What about Gary 7?
Re:Any twit could do it (Score:4, Informative)
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It was a FaceBook satellite. FaceBook has a policy of deliberately knocking their own servers off line to test the resilience of the network. At some point someone must have misunderstood what the idea was. Maybe an AI was programmed to randomly take down parts of the network and it somehow figured out how to blow up the rocket.
If the first AI evolves at Facebook and all that it knows about humanity is from reading Facebook posts then $deity help us all.
Re: Any twit could do it (Score:2)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Fat chance (Score:5, Informative)
Again, AMOS-6 was not in any way owned by Facebook. They had simply signed a contract to lease a significant portion of the Ka-Band payload pointed at sub-saharan Africa. But don't let facts get in the way of your hate.
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The first one who claims that the other person "hates" wins!
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You're a hater!
Re: Fat chance (Score:2)
Re: Fat chance (Score:2)
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"Facebook spacecraft" is fucking humour.
But keep showing your petulant ignorance.
This is what happens when you outsource stuff (Score:5, Funny)
Someone misread it as a ka-bang payload.
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If Twitter will save us, then we are definitely DOOMED
Hey, how hard can it be to find the problem - it's not like it's rocket scie... Oh, wait.
Arm chair scientist. (Score:3)
Opening it up to Twitter is a great idea. It allows all the arm chair scientists to express all their ideas based on nearly no facts to feel like they are useful. While people are doing the real work can just ignore the feed and not get indicated with calls and emails expressing their awesome theory.
Re:Arm chair scientist. (Score:5, Informative)
Will anyone read the actual tweets? This summary is one of the worst I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. Musk asked Twitter for pictures and videos, not to "find the cause of the explosion". They're trying to figure out whether a particular sound came from the rocket or elsewhere. The summary makes it sound like - as you put it - they're inviting arm char scientists to solve the issue for them.
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The 'arm char' scientists may have been a tad too close to the explosion...
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"The summary makes it sound like - as you put it - they're inviting arm char scientists to solve the issue for them."
Musk haters are intentionally spinning the story this way.
Re:Arm chair scientist. (Score:2)
Right, they already have enough armchair scientists working on that, for pay.
Re:Twitter's proposed explanations (Score:4, Funny)
Nah. Twitter will be too busy censoring possible theories claiming they're harassing the explosion.
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Cost of a bunch of CCTV on the launchpad, on the towers, etc.? A few thousand dollars, surely?
Cost of not knowing why you're $200m out of pocket? Surely a high potential of another $200m.
Re: Why do they not have (Score:3)
Extreme high speed cameras can usually only operate for brief periods due to buffers and heat and regular CCTV is probably too slow to get useful data. If it was shot by a bullet the act of penetrating the tank probably produces enough sparks to cause an instant explosion.
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What?
Who needs high-speed here? If you had a camera on the gantry, you could instantly eliminate entire classes of problem. Like all those NASA launches from the 60's (when cameras were MUCH more expensive!) where you see the rocket go past the camera mounted on the gantries.
Then maybe the conspiracy theory bullshit artists (fucking 9/11 article on here too!) would see the leak round the back, or whatever, instead of footage filmed from SO FAR AWAY THAT THE SOUND IS MANY SECONDS BEHIND as their best data.
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Extreme high speed cameras can usually only operate for brief periods due to buffers and heat and regular CCTV is probably too slow to get useful data. If it was shot by a bullet the act of penetrating the tank probably produces enough sparks to cause an instant explosion.
You don't need extreme highspeed cameras though. I have a camera that you could put together a sufficient package for under $20k that shoots 300fps at 1080p for a full hour. 300fps would give you 3ms.
I'm sure that Spacex right now would LOVE to have 3ms video precision from 3 angles. In fact I know SpaceX owns these cameras. They were probably all rigged up though on the drone ship and nobody started them for just a static fire.
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Cost of not knowing why you're $200m out of pocket?
If you're 200 million out of pocket the cost is known: it's your failure to insure yourself adequately. SpaceX should only be out the deductible, the higher future premiums (which they can pass on to their customers), and the real pain is from the loss of momentum and halt in operations while they get to the bottom of this. But everyone insures their rockets.
Re: Why do they not have (Score:2)
maybe they have them, but any additional data point still helps?
Re:watch the video (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like one of the upgrades they should have for launch and prep is high-speed cameras pointed at the thing.
The first flash of light looked a lot more like an electrical discharge than it did any sort of combustion.
Hard to tell with what was published on Youtube though.
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Re:Cause (Score:4, Informative)
It's trickier than that. They were loading LOX. There was no RP1 in the upper stage yet. So why did the LOX explode?
I've read a fair bit on LOX handling, and while it's tamer than, say, HTP, there are some risks in handling it. The biggest one is contamination - which has taken down craft in the past. Most notably, the X-1A and X-1D were taken down by a contamination from a chemical used in the manufacture of their gaskets. Most organics are incompatible with LOX and become contact sensitive, including - wait for it - tending to be set off by pressure changes.
Another issue is the tank itself. LOX is compatible with most aluminum alloys, hence aluminum is frequently used for LOX tankage. However, there are some caveats. One, it must be well cleaned in a proscribed manner, due to the aforementioned contamination issues. Furthermore, it must have an intact oxide layer. If the oxide layer is damaged (bending, stretching, shearing, overaggressive cleaning) or never formed, it must be exposed to atmospheric air and allowed to reform; it begins reforming immediately but takes about three days to reach maximum thickness (slowing with time). Bare aluminum is still not hypergolic, but it is impact sensitive with LOX. It can also be set off by the same phenomenon that damages the tank - for example, heavy warping, which can create localized hot spots.
Contamination is generally considered more of a concern, however (particularly since SpaceX uses aluminum-lithium, which is more resistant to impact/pressure-induced explosion with LOX than non-lithium alloys). That said, regardless of what causes the initial burn, if temperatures are high enough, the aluminum will burn, and it burns very aggressively. Indeed, it was the addition of aluminum powder that revolutionized solid rocket propellants (powdered to make it easier to ignite and burn completely, as well as to blend), giving them a major simultaneous improvement in ISP, thrust, propellant density, and burn quality. Aluminum has such a high affinity for oxygen that it also burns in CO2 and water, stripping the oxygen from them. The general way firefighters put out large aluminum fires is.... they don't.
All of that said, these sort of problems are rare. Which makes one wonder about the unusual factor in SpaceX's case: densified/superchilled propellants. SpaceX is the only major launcher to use them, and the behavior of superchilled LOX isn't anywhere near as well studied as that of LOX at its boiling point. It changes what may liquify or freeze in contact with it, it changes the flexibility or fracture properties of physical components on contact with it, it has a higher viscosity, etc. Things that freeze into it could melt/boil as the LOX warms up as well. So it obviously draws the question, is this problem a result of the use of superchilled LOX, some unanticipated effect in the production / storage / delivery system that led to problems within the tank, or an unexpected reaction within the tank itself?
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Re:Cause rockets are the way (Score:2)
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Who said anything about the universe? Chemical rockets will never get us out of this solar system, and become extremely impractical even in the outer system. Ion drives promise a huge leap forward relatively soon (still only in-system), but it may be a very long time before they can deliver anything near the raw power needed for that first step into orbit.
Expanding into the universe is a very long-term goal probably not even worth thinking seriously about for many centuries.
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Well, communication satellites are nice and need constant maintenance/replacement. And solar power arrays probably triple or more in average power/m^2 in orbit, where it's always high noon and there's no atmospheric attenuation - especially attractive for nations like Japan that have nowhere near the land area to meet their power needs. Though there is still some work to do in terms of long-distance power transmission.
Your link also rightly lambastes the idea of space colonization offering "growing room"
Re:Cause (Score:5, Informative)
It's trickier than that. They were loading LOX. There was no RP1 in the upper stage yet. So why did the LOX explode?
Do you have a source for that? Typically the RP-1 is loaded first as even though it's chilled, it's far more thermally stable than the super-chilled LOX. The LOX is loaded into the tanks just before launch so that it doesn't have time to warm up before the rocket is ignited.
From the US Launch Report video, it's also pretty clear that the RP-1 was already in both stages when the anomaly occurred. In a deflagration like that, it burns with big movie-style orange flames, and that's exactly what we saw from both the upper stage, and the lower stage as the rocket came apart.
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Hmm, I replied to this, but I can no longer find my reply. That statement was based on a propellant loading timeline posted at NASA Spaceflight; if the timeline was incorrect then that would indeed change the picture, and suggest for example a common bulkhead failure (although that would raise the question of why). Alternatively combustables on the outside (a leak, for example) could ignite with liquified air / LOX coming off of the outside of the LOX tank (unlike boiling point LOX, superchilled LOX can l
Re:Cause (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look at the published video on YouTube of the explosion and go frame by frame, there are two events. The first is a bright flash that lasts a few frames and appears much larger than it actually is because it is both saturating the camera and illuminating the condensation clouds. You can see the illumination effect clearly in the first frame the flash appears as there are distinct shadows in the clouds. It's unclear to me whether this triggering event is electrical or chemical in nature, but I'm not an expert. Three observations can be made, however: (1) it is bright enough to cause lens flare in the camera which allows pinpointing its source despite the saturation (look for the X, carefully find its center -- you can do that very accurately -- and then back up a handful of frames; see that triangle thingy with a thin tail? That's what failed.) Then, (2) the initial flash is small and is followed almost immediately by a medium sized flash, and in turn that releases the fireball. Then, (3) the condensation clouds aren't moved by the explosion for about 12 frames until the fireball really starts to form, suggesting that the earlier flashes marked the release of lots of energy that may have been primarily radiation (light) rather than heat because they didn't expand the air enough for me to think of them as explosions. The video is 60 FPS, and the initial flash forms within one frame, so that's only 17 ms. The consdensation clouds don't start moving for 200 ms from the main explosion.
So we have one event that's exceedingly hot that triggers a second that's also exceedingly hot, that releases enough LOX to start the fireball. I'm thinking static discharge from the LOX filling.
One thing I don't understand, though, is that if you watch the fireball in slow motion, as the lower front heads toward the ground, there are seemingly waves passing through it. What are those? Additional shock fronts from tertiary explosions?
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Damn you, Micheal Bay!
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Nope, it's a disinformative post.
The RP-1 was already loaded. RP-1 can happily sit there forever at ambient temperature (it's just high-grade kerosene), it won't boil off like liquid oxygen. The LOX is loaded last because of that boil-off concern.
The firefall of burning kerosene is plainly visible in the video. OP is an idiot.
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More dis-information. The kerosene for the Full Thrust version is chilled to -7 degrees centigrade , boosting its density by 2.5 - 4.0 percent. [spaceflight101.com]
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But you must agree that a high velocity round from a sniper rifle would probably have the same effect as we saw on the video. Also, shooting at the upper stage makes it more likely to go bang as the fuel and lox are physically closer together and a shooter would have a better line of sight to the top of the rocket.
One of these [youtube.com] bad boys, a PTRD-41 [wikipedia.org] can shoot up to 1km, but of course a real sniper rifle [wikipedia.org] can shoot up to 2km ranges and still be lethal. No idea how that translates into piercing the thin lightweig
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You could, perhaps, get close enough on a boat. Making such a shot from a moving boat would be a huge challenge and I'm willing to bet the Coast Guard would be on your ass for being there. On land, you're going to have to get the rifle past security and still have an almost impossible shot. Short of ninjaing your way into the launch complex itself.
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So there's a 2-3km exclusion zone around the launch site? And that perimeter is effectively patrolled?
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I stand corrected entirely. I scoped out launch complex 40 at the Cape and you are correct, the shot would have to be made from the ocean.
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Really? Now you've got me curious - from the looks of it in Google Maps the surrounding area is mostly heavily overgrown swampland. Even if the roads were cut off it seems like a sufficiently dedicated saboteur could be dropped off in the river and hike/swim practically to the edge of the complex.
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Ok, sub-sonic :)