SpaceX has published their findings regarding the “anomaly” that caused their last launch attempt to go kerblooey. Simply put… carbon fiber and really cold liquid oxygen do not make the best of friends.
Anomaly Updates
Each stage of Falcon 9 uses COPVs to store cold helium which is used to maintain tank pressure, and each COPV consists of an aluminum inner liner with a carbon overwrap. The recovered COPVs showed buckles in their liners. Although buckles were not shown to burst a COPV on their own, investigators concluded that super chilled LOX can pool in these buckles under the overwrap. When pressurized, oxygen pooled in this buckle can become trapped; in turn, breaking fibers or friction can ignite the oxygen in the overwrap, causing the COPV to fail. In addition, investigators determined that the loading temperature of the helium was cold enough to create solid oxygen (SOX), which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen becoming trapped as well as the likelihood of friction ignition.
SpaceX is targeting a January 8 launch of an Falcon 9 with an Iridium payload from Vandieland. Consider this hypothetical: “Hello, this is NASA. Remember that launcher of ours that went foom four months ago? We figured out the problem, we fixed it, and we’re launching next week.” Kinda boggles the mind.