Elon Musk, CEO and owner of SpaceX, has released a statement (or whatever you call it when done in a Q&A!) in which he says:
We’re not quite ready to release details on the initial investigation yet, but we should do it very soon. We think we have a very good idea but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and then be wrong. We definitely know where the problem occurred, but ‘why?’ is the question. We think we know, but have to be sure. We think it’s very small and will require a tiny change, so tiny that if we had another rocket on the pad we could launch tomorrow.
I will let you know when I see a more final report.
What a frank and open way of talking to the media:
Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?
Musk: Do I sound optimistic?
Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.
Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.
So refreshing.
It had Gordo Cooper’s ashes on it!
And Scotty’s!
And 206 other people!
I suppose the question is whether they’ve just been unlucky, or whether there are a hundred more simple things like corroded nuts to find out about.
So how long will it take until the next attempt?
It’s a big problem that these rocket things are single use. It’s like testing extremely expensive matches.
That’s not quite true, Ian B. According to SpaceX’s website, “They are also designed such that all stages are reusable, making them the world’s first fully reusable launch vehicles.” So the plan is not to be testing “expensive matches”, although obviously in this case there was something of a failure in the execution.