My old buddy Dan Durda sent me a note about an article on space.com about the recent failure of the Falcon 1 rocket from Space X. The failure was finally determined to be from an aluminum nut that was holding a pipe fitting in place. Corrosion on the part allowed fuel to leak, starting a fire which doomed the rocket.
The article’s title? "Falcon 1 Failure Traced to a Busted Nut".
As Dan pointed out, launch crews obviously work very hard.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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July 21st, 2006 at 2:35 pm
I think we tend to assume that catastrophic rocket failures primarily date from the experimental times of Robert Goddard through the enemies of WWII launching V2s, but taking into history American and Russian launches from the 1950s up to now, and the explosions as well as successes, it seems that rocketry is still a tricky business.
July 21st, 2006 at 4:17 pm
“Falcon 1 Failure Traced to a Busted Nut”??
I really wish journalists would Google the clauses and phrases they want to use in article headlines (”busted nut” ~ “bust a nut”…).
I could easily submit this to Collegehumor.com to put up as a daily hotlink for “hilarious headline,” for the n-thousandth time.
July 21st, 2006 at 4:19 pm
I forgot to add…
As if rockets, screws, nuts, and pipes weren’t phallic enough.
July 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
That’s what you get for skimping and getting aluminum nuts instead of good reliable stainless steel.
July 21st, 2006 at 6:44 pm
BB, they claim that the stainless steel nuts are much cheaper than the aluminum ones. And they will be changing over to all stainless steel on their next attempt.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:16 pm
The aluminum nuts were probably used for mass savings. Since they were anodized, but corroded anyway, a handling issue was probably involved as well.
July 21st, 2006 at 9:57 pm
I wonder what the weight penalty will be for switching to steel? It might be quite a bit.
July 21st, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Ah, they probably forgot why they chose aluminium first place and when the next rocket blows up they suddenly remember some obscure little detail.
Sorry about the spelling of aluminium, but I think it looks better in Europese
July 22nd, 2006 at 6:05 am
I don’t know what the weight penalty will be, it’s really a function of how many types of aluminum nuts they were using, and how many they’re really replacing. FWIW, I did a quick web search on “B nut” and found this site:
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/smc/bnuts18.htm
So if this were an Air Force LV, they wouldn’t be allowed to use B-nuts. Maybe this lesson was learned before, by someone else?
July 22nd, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Did you notice today’s topic by Phil in BA are both about ‘Nut cases’?
Ivan.
July 22nd, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Oh, and Irishman, (I guess you will read this sooner or later), I’m still developing that nut/bolt thread idea. Maybe I can be of help to the Falcon Rocket people. Or not.
Ivan.