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“It has many memories of accidents occurring during fueling that resulted in the loss of the spacecraft.”

Does it? I did a brief search and only found SpaceX’s explosion and an old Soviet ICBM accident where the engines ignited during fueling. I certainly may have missed something.




It's not really NASA, but Atlas D and similar early vehicles did have fueling failures. But they also failed sitting empty on the pad and a hundred other ways.

Propellant loading is a state change, and so it's theoretically more dangerous. But examples of real problems are rare.


I hit up Wikipedia to see if they discussed any of those. The Atlas had so many problems that they don’t dedicate much space to discussing individual ones, but I did come across this amazing quote:

“Convair engineers noted with some pride that there had never been a repeat of the same failure more than three times....”

The past sure was a different place.




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