SpaceX says that it has discovered the cause of the failure that doomed its Falcon 1 rocket on Saturday. The new Merlin first-stage engine that founder Elon Musk praised as the major achievement of the failed flight may have performed a little too well.
The new engine added a more thrust to the first stage than the one used on the previous flight. This caused the first stage to ram into the second stage after the two segments separated at 2 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight, Space.com reports.
“We have quite a definitive understanding of what went wrong on the last flight,” Musk told reporters in a teleconference, adding that the timing error was on the order of seconds. “If we were to increase that gap by even a second or two, this problem would not have arisen.”
Yep, that’s all it takes. A mere second to destroy a multimillion-dollar rocket and consign its payloads to a watery grave. Musk and his team are now learning the difficult lessons that every other rocket pioneer has learned before them.
