Not a good day. I woke up to a phone call from Joe Kenahan telling me that “the rocket is gone.” We had no idea what happened for a few weeks. We had a war room set up in HT01 where we had high speed plots and video frame stills taped to the wall in chronological order, zoomed in to the order of milliseconds. We used accelerometer data to triangulate the origin of the failure, similar to what we did for the CRS-7 investigation. To our surprise it pointed to a similar location near the lox tank COPVs. It took weeks of testing to replicate the failure and when we did, it was a strange mix of feeling overjoyed that we figured it out and extremely sad that we didn’t prevent the failure in the first place. That said, shooting COPVs from a mile away with a long-range .50-caliber rifle was pretty cool. Thankfully we were able to close that branch of the fault tree 😂