Why Did the SpaceX Upper Stage Explode
This video is probably more detailed than you want, however, from my search today it is the best presented answer so far as to why SpaceX’s Flight-8 Ship tumbled, exploded and become a massive fireworks display. Earlier, SpaceX's first stage booster had performed flawlessly and was left safely hanging there in the "chop sticks" on the launch tower, just as planned.
The fact that SpaceX now has high-resolution, real-time video cameras literally everywhere on board the Ship certainly makes post-failure problem solving easier. The only video we had when I was building Atlas missiles in San Diego at General Dynamics Convair was taken from the ground a mile away from a launch. All we knew is that "launch-went-boom” and even that knowledge was classified.
The reason SpaceX does not push the mission-destruct-button when a problem first emerges is that every second of additional video might hold the key as to what went wrong.
I remember our Convair engineers laying out the few twisted pieces of an exploded Atlas missile that had been recovered from a launch pad explosion on a giant table in a locked room …. trying to diagnose what went wrong.That table was covered in clean, white cloth, under bright over-hanging lights like an operating room facility.
Many years later when I was at Barnes Engineering, where we were building science payload instruments and infrared Earth sensors for highly classified missions run by the Air Force and unnamed government agencies, I was invited to be at Vandenberg Air Force Base the day of launch. The booster exploded during lift-off. Immediately, teams of men in uniforms without insignias appeared from nowhere in jeeps. Their mission was to secure the debris field and pick up all the pieces from the surrounding beach. A few minutes later, inflatable fast boats arrived with scuba divers to search the surf line and adjacent ocean floor.
Many months later we actually received the Barnes Engineering earth sensor that had been in that massive explosion and a USAF contract to "perform a post mortem" on it. Although the exterior was scorched, it had survived the blast quite well, including the optics. The internal electronics was fried. The worst observable damage was from salt water immersion. It had never been designed to be water-tight.
So far, this video is what is known.
