Vulcan Centaur avoids FAA scrutiny after losing solid rocket booster nozzle An unusual event occurred during United Launch Alliance's (ULA) second launch of the Vulcan Centaur at the end of last week. One of the twin Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) lost its nozzle, but the vehicle still made it into space as planned. Officially, this launch of the Vulcan Centaur – the second of two tests required to …
Other than Trump worshipping, Musk buttlicking, and whining about articles or comments you see as negative to your heroes? Why don't you go back to Gab or Trump social to your comfortable little echo chamber where everyone will tell you what you want to hear, and you won't be bothered by reality.
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I fairly certain that having a solid rocket booster nozzle land in somebody's back yard (actually more likely on somebody's boat/ship) should be considered a public safety hazard and require a FAA investigation. At least as much of a requirement as say having your second stage booster miss it's landing zone.
Though it does look like they may have held on to the SRBs a bit longer than normal to allow them to drop into the designated splash zone due to underperformance caused by the missing nozzle meaning they were a bit short. Hard to say for sure though, as they do hold them for a bit after burnout on a nominal flight - but the flight clock did show a sequence of planned events occurred late.
I can understand this to some extent.
The rocket itself seems to have performed as expected and can fly without any SRBs. I would expect the SRBs to be "grounded" until the failure has been understood and mitigated.
Scott Manley pointed out in his breakdown of the launch that they were lucky the fragments didn't impact the first stage.
ULA is downplaying this HARD, but to me it very strongly looked like the rocket came to within a hairs breadth of losing control when the nozzle failed. It was clearly flying sideways for a little bit and it definitely took a bit for the thrust vectoring system to get back control. That the target orbit was achieved was dumb luck with the timing of the failure imho.
Geez, folks can't see the big picture:
No way the nozzle would have blown any other direction, it's at the source of thrust: down! You're joking if " it blown sideways" or even "up", physics says no, it goes down.
There's a huge diff between manned and unmanned. The last f9 was manned, Vulcan was not. Unmanned: all FAA cares about is hitting the bullseye. Manned: huge can of worms.
Vulcan still hit the bullseye...100%
This was a test flight to certification, not ops. Payload still got to orbit fine.
Musk choose to go political, hence alls fair, it's open season on him.
Scott Manley pointed out an interesting question and that's whether the SRB nozzle was getting heated by the exhaust from the BE-4 engines. I've never done any studying, but I have noticed that some fuels radiate more heat outward. There's a difference between a rocket burning IPA, Methane and H2O2. I've never been close enough to one running H2 to tell. If the nozzle of the SRB is gaining extra heat from the main engines, they'll need to slip some sort of shielding in there. It shouldn't be hard to do a test at scale with the BE-3 on a test stand and an engineering sample of the SRB nozzle.
Now that I have an infrared camera, I'm looking at everything with it. It's awesome for working on electronics without putting blisters on fingers testing hotness the old fashioned way and less money in chill spray.
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