[AR] Re: Falcon 9 flight today

  • From: David McMillan <skyefire@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 12:16:47 -0400
SEESAT mailing list had a lot of chatter on this, without any real concensus. Apparently an object with a large "halo" was spotted, which now most observers agree to have been a fuel dump by the second stage. But the number of object tracks does seem to exceed any reasonable count of what *should* be there by a factor of roughly 2. According to some commenters, SpaceX was attempting to demonstrate an on-orbit relight of the second stage, after payload separation, and there was some sort of "anomaly." 

On 10/1/2013 11:42 AM, Rand Simberg wrote:
SpaceX is denying it, claiming that initial tracking data is always a little flaky. And what could cause an explosion? It has no hypergolics on it, AFAIK. 

On 10/01/2013 07:41 AM, Henry Spencer wrote:

Another little fly in the ointment: <http://www.zarya.info/blog/?p=1595>
reports indications that the Falcon 9 second stage may have exploded in
orbit, although after payload separation.  Which is not as bad as having
it happen with payloads still on board, but certainly isn't good news.

Henry Spencer
henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
(regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)

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