SpaceX almost dies aboard a C-17 jet above Hawaii.
In 2008, before the company successfully launched a single rocket, two dozen SpaceX engineers transported its Falcon 1 rocket to an air force jet to Hawaii. From there, a vessel would transport it to the company’s launch facilities on the Marshall Islands for another launch attempt. This was the last chance of the company: if it failed, SpaceX would be done.
But when the jet crashed before landing, the SpaceXers heard “a loud, horrible, bang”, according to a new book by Eric Berger, a journalist and senior space editor at Ars Technica. The rocket exploded due to pressure imbalance. So Zach Dunn, one of SpaceX’s latest engineers, crawled into his belly. His quick fix saved the company – and possibly his own life.
Berger’s book “Liftoff” describes this moment and other wild events from SpaceX’s early years – including the construction of a loading dock on a remote island, a mutiny staged by engineers trapped on that island without food, and the scramble to send a commercial rocket into orbit.
SpaceX finally reached the orbit using the rocket that almost crumpled in the air.
SpaceX engineers were in mid-flight emergency
According to September’s book, there was almost no money left for SpaceX. The company has failed in all its efforts to send a rocket into orbit, and so it does not win any contracts. Musk no longer had cash to pump to SpaceX and Tesla, both of which were bouncing around when the recession hit. SpaceX has had enough resources for just one more launch effort, the book reads.
Musk gave his engineers six weeks for the final effort, Berger wrote. When they were ready to transport the Falcon 1 rocket from California to the Marshall Islands, the engineers boarded the C-17 jet at Los Angeles International Airport. The first few hours of the flight to Hawaii, they crossed smoothly over the Pacific Ocean and sank back into the seats around the rocket. According to the book, someone broke out a guitar.
But with the descent, loud banging and pinging through the cargo area when dives appeared next to the body of the rocket. The engineers realized that the fuel tank with liquid oxygen did not let out enough air to keep up with the pressure changes as the jet came down.
The tank basically ‘breathed through a straw haul’, Berger wrote.
As the pressure in the jet’s boot increased relative to the pressure in the rocket’s fuel tank, the Falcon 1 began to crumble.
“The first thought I had was that this thing was going to implode and bounce back,” Anne Chinnery, who was running SpaceX launch operations at the time, told Berger. “And that would kill all of us sitting next to the rocket in the plane’s seats. So I jump up and tell everyone to get in front of the rocket.”
Dunn, who joined SpaceX as an intern in 2006 and quickly went on to become a propulsion engineer, was on the verge of saving the rocket, its engineers and SpaceX itself.
In the belly of the beast
An engineer asked the planes to make the plane fly higher, where the air pressure was lower. But the pilots had enough fuel to surround the base one more time before landing. According to Berger, the SpaceX engineers bought about ten minutes.
They cut open the shrink wrap that encloses the rocket and find the C-17’s toolkit on board.
According to the book, Dunn told engineer Mike Sheehan to hold on to his ankles and rip him out if the rocket exploded. He winds in the scene of the Falcon 1 – the part between the voluminous base of the rocket that drives it through the air and the smaller part that stays in orbit.
In the darkness of the Falcon 1 belly, Dunn crawls to the liquid-oxygen tank, with sharp rockets scraping his back. He reached a large pressure line to the fuel tank, turned on a wrench and, according to the book, heard the whistling of the air. Then he asked Sheehan to help him.
“Sheenhan took it as a cry for help and ripped Dunn out of the scene over the tangle of pressure lines and valves,” Berger wrote. “It hurt like hell, but Dunn came forward to see his efforts bear fruit.”
The SpaceXers returned to their seats, and the rocket blew up in front of them again as the plane landed in Hawaii.
The rocket launcher that saved SpaceX
Although it survived the flight, the Falcon 1 was damaged by its explosion brush. With just one week left, Berger wrote the SpaceX team rushed to take it down, replace broken parts, repair others, and reassemble the rocket.
On September 28, the Falcon 1 roars to life on Omelek Island, pulls it off the ground and soars in orbit.
In the control room, the team members ‘just exploded’, Dunn told Berger. “We went completely wild. We all jumped around. Hugged each other. Gil. It was a fair celebration,” he added.
SpaceX has proven its rockets can come from the planet. After that, the company scraped together enough contracts to get the financing flowing.
Dunn stayed at SpaceX for another decade and eventually became senior vice president for production and launch. Last year, he left SpaceX to oversee production at Relativity Space, a startup that hopes to automate the rocket production process with 3D printing.
Read the original article on Business Insider