Musk Says SpaceX Failure Caused by Strut in Liquid Oxygen Tank

The explosion of SpaceX’s most recent space station resupply mission was caused by a structural failure in a strut holding one of the Falcon 9 rocket’s helium tanks, Elon Musk said in a conference call on Monday.

The struts are created to handle 10,000 pounds of force at liftoff; at the time of the accident, they would have been seeing only 2,000 pounds of force. If the strut snapped as engineers believe, according to Musk, the bottle would have shot to the top of the tank at high speed, dooming the rocket and its Dragon supply ship for the global Space Station. The rocket carrying supplies to the worldwide Space Station broke apart shortly after liftoff.

Preflight photos showed all of the struts to be fine.

The part that failed was from a supplier, although Musk would not name the company.

To avoid this type of accident occurring in the future, the company will now individually test every strut it installs on a Falcon 9, regardless of its material specification. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will switch to a different kind of strut and independently test it. “And not seen failure quite as much”, he said.

“That’s an unfortunate thing because we could have saved Dragon [supply ship] if we had the right software there”, he said. The next Dragon capsule flight will have software added that will deploy parachutes if another emergency happens.

SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Musk said flights will not resume until September at the earliest.

The rocket was the company’s 19th Falcon 9 launch since its 2010 debut, including six previous cargo runs for NASA under a 15-flight contract worth more than $2 billion. The flight delays will result in the loss of “hundreds of millions” in revenue, as well.

Musk pointed out that it’s the first rocket failure in seven years for his company, which had 500 people then and 4,000 now.

Company CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk has scheduled a half-hour news teleconference at 3 p.m. Eastern time today.

He admitted that SpaceX may have become “a little bit complacent”, and that the blast offered an “important lesson” for the future.