SpaceX's Crew Dragon Got Destroyed During Test By An "Anomaly"

An official staff from SpaceX announced in a press briefing last Thursday about the destruction of a Crew Dragon capsule.  As stated by CNBC, the Crew Dragon capsule, designed for crewed spaceflight got demolished during a test flight. This announcement from SpaceX affirmed an earlier report regarding the failure of one of their tests on April 20^th. However, aside from the plain statement, no further information is provided by the company.

A Mysterious "Anomaly"

About the incident, the company said that it was due to an "anomaly.” Nonetheless, with such failure in the test, SpaceX doesn’t plan to stop conducting future launches. In fact, they will continue the test to launch a similar capsule, the Crew Dragon to dock with the ISS (International Space Station).

Response From SpaceX

Back to the briefing on Thursday, we were able to hear from Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s president of mission assurance. In the session, Hans Koenigsmann highlighted how right their test went. The capsule (Dragon) powered up according to their plan while the thrusters (Draco) fired off properly for around five seconds.

Koenigsmann believed that the cause of the failure, the anomaly, occurred briefly prior to the firing of the SuperDraco engine. In order to find out the cause of the issue, both NASA and SpaceX are looking into telemetry data as well as information from the firing test.

Crew Dragon's Stability?

For SpaceX, they would care much more about this significant setback rather than the loss value from the vehicle. It was the same vehicle that managed to dock with the ISS 2 months before, in March 2019. NASA confirmed this, saying after 18 orbits around the Earth, SpaceX’s #CrewDragon spacecraft successfully attached to the ISS while it was floating above New Zealand, 5:51 am ET, Mar 3^rd, 2019. The crewless Crew Dragon stayed there for five days. It then went back and landed in the Atlantic Ocean.