Comment by debatem1

12 hours ago

how did you compute that?

Sedov-Taylor-Rayleigh blast equation, though this video isn't high enough frame rate to more than ballpark it I think. Tower is ~180m high, so 0.2 sec would be a bit over 1 kiloton instead? But definitely not remotely 13 kt. Still serious of course, when SpaceX suffered launch complex damage during some of its incidents it took a solid 6-12 months to fix.

Everyone can be glad though that no hypergolics are involved at least!

  • You are talking about the energy of the blast. In my comment I was talking about the heat output. From the followup comments it seems I have not made it sufficiently clear.

    The energy of the detonation wave in rocket explosions is typically 1-2% of the energy in the fuel, at least that is the ballpark of what people use for estimating the effects of mishaps.

    We also do not know if the tanks were fully filled -- it the past, rocket companies have called 10 second static fire tests a "full duration static fire test." We will probably find out later what it actually was meant to be.