Now That It's Happened

I seem to be losing track of just when the SpaceX Falcon 9 launches are scheduled. Wondering most of all about updates on New Horizon's approach to Pluto, I went to the official NASA site only to start seeing notices that something had gone wrong. Before long, I had sorted out the rocket had exploded well into flight; a little while after that, I was seeing news the specific problem seemed to have been with the oxygen tank in the second stage overpressurising while the first stage had still been burning.

After two previous failures of different supply rockets to the space station, I do have the sensation superstition may be threatening to set in. I'm also remembering, though, that SpaceX had tried several times to launch its first Falcon 1 rocket before getting one to work, whereupon they immediately started work on the larger Falcon 9. I can certainly hope they'll be able to identify the problem and bounce back, but even so the feeling the company had managed to "build up reliability" may have been dented, and once more they may have to work at keying back into that casual feeling that "private organizations" are obviously more competent than "government bureaucracies." (For some reason, when I saw the movie Interstellar last year its establishing "NASA," even with a new and presumably not necessary to authorize logo, as the can-do organization working in secret to save humanity was one point where it didn't quite seem aligned with the casual invocations of the written science fiction I'm familiar with.)