***BOOOOM***

#!@&^%#$!

Just a quick sample of sounds from last Thursday’s engine test.

I have heard it said that “You aren’t a real rocket scientist until you’ve had a hard start.” I guess that means we’re real rocket scientists now. There wasn’t a detonation, just one engine part 600 feet from the test stand in the direction of the engine firing. Sorry we don’t have video, the video quality is so poor as to not be worth posting. The video we have looks like this: couple of seconds of black, one second of white, a split second of orange, a second or so of trailer with flames in it, and back to black.

Anyway, hard starting engines isn’t acceptable for VTVL vehicles, so we’ve been all over everything about it. We’ve figured out a lot about what happened, but we cannot pinpoint the root cause. The only thing we can figure is water ice in the LOX system somewhere. But there are two problems with that: first there is no evidence of ice damage to anything; and second, we haven’t done anything different than we’d do in the rain, sleet, and snow that we’ve already tested in. This was a nice dry Mojave desert evening. What I am most afraid of is that we will not be able to replicate the problem, but that it will come back to bite us.

The internal review did a lot of good, as did rebuilding the test stand. We have found a few things that can be done better in terms of operations and procedures. We also are fixing several test stand issues that were not critical but had been inconvenient, mostly tracing out and repairing instrument channels that were getting flaky.

The biggest pain from the hard start is that we have to wait another week or two (or more) before we can fly the vehicle. We need to make sure the engine chambers are not the problem, then have a replacement chamber machined, assembled and qualified.

In other news, I see from Hobbyspace that the Enviromental Assesment (EA) for our testing at Mojave Spaceport is up for comments at AST. We got a FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact). [Gomer Pyle voice]Surprise, Surprise, Surprise.[/Gomer voice] Not. Every rocket launch since NEPA was enacted had a FONSI. And some of them used really nasty rocket propellants. There are a few things in the EA that are not quite accurate, but we can live with them. These are mostly things that have changed recently but didn’t get into the draft.

Well back to work for me.