Comment Re:Good or bad news? (Score 2) 38
It's good that they are able to track things down to a reproducable root cause.
There might be room for improvement if the root cause is something that the rest of the industry figured out decades ago.
The deeper root cause question is should/could they have forseen this failure mode if they had used lessons already learned from prefious industry failures.
If the answer is yes, then the corrective action should be to figure out a creative way to add the necessary information path while still staying nimble.
The ultimate root cause seems to have been a lack of understanding of how some of their systems function during the fuelling phase, which lead SpaceX operators to fill a tank with super-cooled fluid at a dangerous rate. The solution seems to be to change their filling procedures until they have a better tank design in place.
You can bet that SpaceX has learned a lot about how fuel tanks work at extreme temperatures and pressures during this investigation.
I look forward to seeing the F9 fly again once they've finished the investigation.