Wrong and right at the same time.
Right: A Chief Operations Officer does not know any technical details. Its not his/her business. A COO is responsible for forming the interface between executive board and the specialist departments. From down there, the COO is the little brother/sister of the CEO. And in 80% of all cases, the COO is a BA person, not an engineer.
Wrong: A COO is automatically a PR person. That's a lot of belittlement for such a responsible position. The COO is pretty much the person, who has least chances to pass the buck. If company processes are going wrong, quality assurance not working out (especially if a company implements TQM) - the COO is accountable and responsible at once. Also, the COO is a mostly internal position. Its pretty unusual, to have a COO represent the company to the outside, because thats the business of the CEO. The COO is there to free the CEO from internal responsibilities so he can focus on external responsibilities - towards investors and debtors.
But then: Shotwell is also president of SpaceX. She is the second in command and thus also responsible for representing SpaceX to the outside. And as much as you would like to rant about her performance there: She is an engineer. MSC in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. Also she worked in the aerospace sector for quite a time before going to SpaceX.
Trust me: She knows what is known and what is still a guess. And her statements will only be as good as the statements of the engineers working for her.
My comment was certainly not a "rant" or intended to criticize Shotwell. I was referring to her as a PR person only in the context of this particular event, the news conference. She did not have any technical details to share apart from what Musk had tweeted regarding 2nd stage LOX overpressure. She did not say explicitly that the destruct command was not given. She only said she was not aware that it had been given. I don't think she had specific knowledge one way or the other. While Shotwell may be a very qualified technical person, generally, in a damage control situation such as this, she is probably acting at a high level only and is busy doing press conferences and such. I'm not criticising her. I just don't think she has the technical details at this point in time to say whether or not the destruct command was issued.
---------- Post added at 08:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 PM ----------
At least stage 2 LOX tank overpressure event. Helium is not that mentioned.
But there are only very few possible sources for overpressure. For example an exothermic chemical reaction inside the tank, but also the gas bottles.
I suppose a structural failure at the top, with the LOX tank dome or Dragon adapter for example, could cause an overpressure if the tank began collapsing, with a decrease in volume for a moment before breaching, or if a smallish crack in the LOX tank allowed an inrush of hot, high pressure air (which would also rapidly vaporize the LOX). Although you would think a structural failure would be easy to detect in Dragon's telemetry if things had begun to move around.
The fact that the failure occurred right around the time that engine chill down should have started is significant, I think.
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