SpaceX Crew Dragon Suffered an Anomaly (may have been destroyed)
On Saturday April 20, 2019, SpaceX conducted a ground test fire of the thrust engines on the new Crew Dragon capsule. The tests were in preparation for the abort test coming up. The abort test is to demonstrate the capability to allow astronauts in the capsule to escape from the rocket should there be a problem with the rocket. The Crew Dragon would detach from the main rocket and the very powerful smaller rockets, called SuperDraco Thrusters, would push it up and away from the main rocket to get the capsule away from danger.
The test conducted was a ground test fire with the capsule bolted down (to put it mildly) to a test stand. The Super Draco engines were fired as were the even smaller maneuvering thrusters, called Draco. This allows the engineers to be sure the capsule's engines will work prior to strapped it onto a $50+ million rocket. In the sense that NASA and SpaceX's ground test prevented a loss of a very expensive rocket, the test was wildly successful.
However...
There was a problem. In aerospace speak, they call something, anything, that is out of the ordinary an 'anomaly.' They had an anomaly. In spades. There was an explosion and the cloud from the explosion could be seen for miles. I would post a picture, but steemit's image servers are problematic again. NASA and SpaceX have not been very forthcoming about the nature of the anomaly. Given the cloud, it couldn't be good.
Now, we know just how bad it was. Not officially. But! There was a video of the explosion posted to twitter:
https://twitter.com/Astronut099/status/1119825093742530560/video/1
It does not appear to be on youtube or I would embed that. Even so, it appears the anomaly was catastrophic: it appears the capsule was destroyed.
Rocket science is really plumbing dialed up to difficulty ten thousand. Knowing that, it would mean the probable cause is a valve that failed to properly close. SpaceX had a recent problem with a stuck valve, so that would strike me as the likely cause.
We await what NASA and SpaceX say about the test. It cannot be good for SpaceX putting astronauts up to the International Space Station by year's end though.