The new—and likely final—version of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket may fly today
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Probably has to do with the static loads on the structure. Constant thrust doesn't transmit as much through the new bolted octoweb.
And damned you computer aborts.
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I always wondered for consumer facing products that threw an error like this - was there ever really a difference between abort or fail?
Here's to hoping they can restart the countdown today or have a smooth launch tomorrow. (Given the cold fuel load process, I wonder what the cost of an abort like this is)
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Saturns needed them for the camera tracking. It's as good an excuse as any.
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Watching at work (no volume). They reset the timer to 15:00. Is it really a scrub, or is it 15 minutes then we have to scrub (fuel is warm)
edit: Thanks for the replies, last of the problem people have left, I now have volume.
edit: Thanks for the replies, last of the problem people have left, I now have volume.
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This is much better for consumer. Abort now instead explode the merchandise in the air
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Still deciding (they are trying to get the abort failure reason now)
... and still reviewing the data ...
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They just said they'd get back to us. So we havent officially heard yet. Theres a still a launch window open and they're working on diagnosing the problem
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Computers threw an abort, they're still reviewing the data to determine the cause
Not yet a scrub for today
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For consumers of SpaceX's launch services, this is better. For consumers of their televised potential for things blowing up, not as much.
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And there goes my evening entertainment for today ...
Do they have to top up again, now that it is waiting on the pad?
Do they have to top up again, now that it is waiting on the pad?
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normally butters
Ars Praefectus
They have to restart the count by 6:07 eastern or else they must scrub for the day.
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This gives us some idea of how long SpaceX feels that they can wait after fueling that their propellants are "dense enough" to launch vis a vis loading crew after the fact.
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Although this is a party pooper, I genuinely would love to know more about the "Behind The Scenes: The Technical of Propellant Loading & Unloading".
What happens to the propellants during an abort? How much is vented, how much is reused, how much does it cost to preserve propellant for the next launch, how bad are the thermal stresses of repeated thermal expansions of a couple of aborts? I'd love the Behind The Scenes.
Boring stuff to a few, but -- but this is outside of the sphere of stuff that Kerbal Space Program teaches me.
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It takes so long to review the logs? Must be massive amount of debugging data in it. It's rocket science after all.
It's probably safer to go tomorrow.
It's probably safer to go tomorrow.
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I guess it has to be something small. Had it wasn`t their software would have barked what the problem is on itself without the need of manual log review (by humans)
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Elon's been tweeting up a bunch of information today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/c ... k_v_first/ (source links at reddit page, ars makes copying them over too hard)
For anyone who doesn't want to read the whole list, the biggest one is that they're planning to progressively upgrade a heat shield on stage 2 until it's reusable. The unknown is how severe the payload penalty will be.
Full list inside the spoilers because it's long.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/c ... k_v_first/ (source links at reddit page, ars makes copying them over too hard)
For anyone who doesn't want to read the whole list, the biggest one is that they're planning to progressively upgrade a heat shield on stage 2 until it's reusable. The unknown is how severe the payload penalty will be.
Full list inside the spoilers because it's long.
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At least with an instantaneous launch window there isn't all this hanging around waiting if there's an abort. 
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I'm sure it did. It might have been something like: the pressure on the helium tank is too high!
However, why it's reading the tank as too high is an issue. Did too much helium get loaded? Is there a problem with the sensor? Do the electrical system do something funky that' resulting in a bad He reading?
I'm sure it's not a single sensor. But whatever the flag is could have several paths through the tree to work toward it.
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I'm guessing it's pretty easy to find the proximate cause -- the final event which triggered the computers to say "wait a second!" -- but figuring out what led up to that takes longer.
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I think they said as much on stream. T-1 Minute takes a lot longer to sift through since they just have an abort and then they have to check a bazillion logs to see which systems caused the abort and why...
Could be an interesting article in itself how telemetry and abort mechanisms work and with what kind of hardware they are processed (can't really imagine what amount of data a rocket produces a second)
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On the other hand, if you start with maximum chamber pressure in each case, I assume keeping the thrust constant means you burn longer. Isn't the goal in rockets to burn as much fuel as quickly as possible, to reduce mass as quickly as possible?
By the way, didn't they previously also reduce thrust around the time of max-Q?
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Yeah, and the fact that it didn't get thrown until control had switched to the Falcon 9. They might have found the bit that triggered the hold, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know what threw that bit. And à big part of it will be why the Falcon 9 computer caught something the other didn't.
Having said that, a false positive is much better than a false negative.
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What kind of situations causing an abort would make it ok to go? I can't imagine anyone wanting to go ahead with a launch without knowing why it aborted.
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Depends on the product but generally speaking Abort would do just that, stopping everything and doing nothing else. Fail on the other hand would try to do gracefully recovery back to a usable state.
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