The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free. According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand “due to a structural failure.”
Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site.
To paraphrase Scott Manley; they got the rocket science down but need to work on their bolt science
(Fly safe)
By any chance, were the clamps filled with styrofoam or something? 😁 (Tofu-dreg joke)
I saw this movie. Did it involve bringing kids to outer space and an AI robot that just wanted to help?
That’s what happens when you build hardware out of cheese and spit like China is known for. One day it’s going to bite you in the ass.
Maoist rocket says, “Fuck your imperialist and capitalist clamps” and commits revolutionary suicide.
Unintended catastrophic disassembly due to structural failure.
Uh, I guess that’s why many of the more reasonable static test rigs have the rocket flat on the ground with a hill on the pointy side just in case.
That’s for testing engines alone. Static fire is separate yes way further down the line when you have the rocket built and ready to fly
That’s a different type of test for a different type of rocket.
Plus some bay or gulf, relatively quiet, very close by the site helps. It’s too bad the Chinese don’t have any of those.
Yeah, it was crazy how close a city was - one of the things Scot Manley went over
I think we’ve all been there
The test stand is only about 5 km away from the city’s downtown and less than a kilometer from a smaller village.
No NIMBY in The People’s Republic ™.
I’m pretty sure it’s ridiculously hard to stop government projects in your backyard there. The best you can do is refuse to sell your land.
It‘s impossible. You can protest against mid sized manufacturers that pollute the environment but you cannot do anything whatsoever against directly state baked companies that do the real damage at which point you might rightfully ask yourself: „Why bother about the environment or safety whatsoever? The state says it takes care of it and I have no say in it anyway.“
It won’t matter if you do, unless you’re a Party member. Example: the completion of the Three Gorges Dam was accompanied by forcing upwards of 30 million people to move. No compensation or new housing provided…just move somewhere else or you’ll drown. Fascinating book based on his long term reporting (I think New York Times IIRC), “River Town” by Peter Hessler. He was there, he lived it.
Chinese don’t own the land, the government is. And even if they own it, local officials can always call in the bulldozers midnight.
These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.
Yet those don’t have cities right next to the blast zone
Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn’t exactly lightly developed.
From Apple Maps, it looks like it’s on a mostly undeveloped island, with the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away. I can’t tell how far away Orlando is, but much further.
Compared to this Chinese test site, it looks like population centers are 5x - 10x farther, plus you have an entire ocean to blow stuff up
the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away
The Falcon 9 that made an uncontrolled reentry in March of 2021 spread debris from Washington to Oregon.
Chinese Long March rocket failures have dropped parts into Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Ten miles isn’t far for a vehicle moving 17,500 mph during the 12 minutes or so necessary to break Earth’s gravity well.
None anymore at least
Gotta admire the rocket’s enthusiasm.
Is anyone speaking Chinese able to tell me what the guy in the first scene of the video is crying out? The one where the rocket falls horizontally. I mean, I have a general idea what is being said there conceptually, but I’d love to get an actual, accurate translation.
Basically it’s two people saying “Is it falling? Wouldn’t it explode? I’m recording it. Fuck the rocket is falling!”
From 5-8 seconds, the person seems to be saying争着争着中火大了, which doesn’t mean anything to me, but it may be something of the local dialect.
Hey, much appreciated!
Damn that rocket told everyone “fuck you” when it launched and then said “no seriously…fuck you” and then decided to meet its fiery demise.
oopsy doodle
- rocket clamper guy
Actually - “structural engineering team”, you can see it was ripped apart when it came off the test stand.
They should probably not rip off rocket (from spacex) when they dont have the intelligence to engineer it in the first place.
Real life Kerbal Space Program accident.
Except the test facility was dangerously close to city resulting at minimum in an enormous amount of broken windows (clearly heard in the recorded videos) and no doubt damage to people associated with large volumes of windows breaking.
Sounds pretty Kerbal to me.
But at least they already figured out how to land on the Mun and come back. They just need to go back to a previous save.
Someone messed up their staging… again.
Lives were lost, equipment destroyed, lessons has been learned-ish.
