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发帖数: 29576 | 1 Strut是对外采购的，宇航零件能自己造还是自己造靠谱。
On June 28, we saw SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket explode in spectacular fashion
just two minutes and 19 seconds into its mission supply mission to the
International Space Station. For three weeks afterward, the world has been
waiting to get some answers as to what happened and, yesterday, Elon Musk
finally provided an aggressively mundane “initial assessment.” Musk blamed
the explosion on a broken piece of steel called a strut, which is just two
feet long and an inch wide, but stopped short explaining the moral of the
story, which is that commercial space travel has a supply chain problem.
If the rocket had gone up, we would have witnessed the third attempt by
SpaceX to successfully bring it back down. But, as it stands, SpaceX lost
face and about 4,000 lbs of cargo.
The faulty strut takes on — or rather, is supposed to take on — 10,000
pounds of force, even though the actual launch only requires it to withstand
3,500 pounds of force. But SpaceX’s investigation of the explosion found
that some of the struts maxed out at 2,000 pounds. Musk refused to name the
outside supplier that manufactured and sold the struts to SpaceX, but did
tell reporters the strut was “not something that should ever have failed at
this force level.”
The strut that’s presumed to have broke would normally play a role in
holding helium bottles in place in the liquid oxygen tank. The Falcon 9
rocket burns oxygen as fuel as it flies up, and needs to be replaced so that
pressure in the oxygen tank remains stable — thus why the helium is needed
. But during launch, the strut seems to have snapped, causing helium to leak
into the oxygen tank and creating too much pressure. Everything happened in
the span of just 0.893 seconds. The end result is, well, you can see for
yourself.
Will whoever sold the company its struts face a financial penalty? Should
they?
Obviously, SpaceX plans to use different struts in future rockets and apply
much more scrutiny in making sure they can hold up to higher amounts of
force. Musk also announced that the company will begin installing new
software that allows the Dragon capsule to parachute back to Earth in case
another explosion prevents it from making it into space, allowing NASA and
the company to salvage the supplies at the very least. |
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