Do gifv's work on forums? Guess we'll find out. Edit: nope. Fixed. As some of you may know, Falcon 9 (a reusable space rocket) went kaboom. It isn't so reusable anymore. Professionals are calling it a static launch failure, which in lazy terms means something went wrong, then boom. But yeah, this is interesting to talk about. Found a YouTube link where people synced the audio, sounds scary. Watch it here Here's Nar's nice post getting more detailed with it. Thoughts?
I would recommend anyone who hasn't seen it to go watch the episode "Apollo One" from the HBO mini series "From the Earth to the Moon". Mankind's Space Endeavour will be filled with setbacks and sacrifices. I do believe it is worth it, to better ourselves. Here's a clip from that episode. Apollo One Accident
For clarification, it wasn't the rocket's fault, and in professional terms, there was an anomaly on the launchpad that led to catastrophic destruction. Basically, either there was a problem with the fuel mixing, or some other thing that didn't have to do with the rocket. The rocket wasn't even activate. Nobody was injured. What most people don't realise is that unlike NASA, SpaceX is more suited to an explosion like this. While NASA has a much larger amount of funding, that's to make sure that nothing will go wrong, while SpaceX are saying that it's way too costly to do that. Instead, they believe that it is better, faster, and cheaper to learn from mistakes as long as human lives aren't lost. SpaceX understands that to innovate more rapidly comes with the risk of more issues (part of the reason why they haven't done any manned flights yet). So, this isn't as devastating to SpaceX as most people assume. Yes, it is still devastating, but SpaceX is more ready to handle this kind of failure. Other Clarification (Edit): The payload that was lost was a $200 Million Dollar (just to build, the launch and other costs would have added another $85 million) satellite that was owned by SpaceCom and leased by FaceBook and Eutelsat for $95 Million Dollars over the course of five years, and would provide Internet Service to African businesses. This is the real devastating loss as SpaceCom was going to be sold to a Chinese Telecommunication company for $285 million dollars (SpaceCom is also $390 million dollars in debt) contingent on the successful launch of AMOS-6. Sadly, now it's probably going to get bought by SES or someone for a much lesser sum.
I mean I'm not a rocket scientist or anything but.. I'm pretty sure it exploded and there was a fire. Then the top part fell and exploded. Pretty scary stuff. OR The fire nation attacked.