A big day that may go down in history. But enough with the puffery. Not everything worked as planned. The rocket launched, cleared the tower, and went down range for a considerable distance. But not far enough to make a separation and boost back burn. It was exploded as a safety measure. High fives all around for what some may consider a failure.
Failure is how you define it. The main goal was to keep the thing from blowing up before it cleared the tower. After that, it was all a bonus. There is some news of launch pad damage. So that is being evaluated. It may be quite a bit of damage. We'll see.
If the pad damage caused a flame out of some of the engines, then this could have been a major disaster. Fortunately, that didn't happen. If the FAA really wanted to be dicks, they could have demanded more testing and some other safety measures. To tell you the truth, I'm not so sure that SpaceX should get everything they want all the time. This doesn't mean that the FAA is a bunch of nice guys, nor pushovers. They could still be dicks. Shoot, they may have been rooting for a failure. Our government seems to operate that way these days.
Back when there was a static fire, there were some engines out. This happened again, but in the air. Not enough engines were lost that could have kept it on the ground, nor could it have fallen to the ground. There was enough thrust to get it off the pad. A lucky break. There should have been more testing to find out why there was a flame out on the static fire. Only one preceded this test. I figured that they would do another, and then evaluate it until they got all 33 firing as they are supposed to. Any anomaly should be traced out until a fix can be made.
Basically, SpaceX got away with it this time. In the future, they may not be as lucky.
I'm trying not to be too critical. It is a good day. But there were some problems.
Stage separation failure at 2 minutes plus into flight.
More details later.
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