SpaceX’s Work at Pad 39A

Great piece by Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceFlight on Pad 39A and how much history has taken place there. This little bit about SpaceX’s work is intriguing:

Currently, it is understood that all plumbing and electrical modifications at the pad itself are complete, while there are still several outstanding items for the TE as well as full prop loading, detanking, and interface systems verifications and checks that need to be performed with an actual Falcon on the pad.

With each tweet from Elon Musk, it seems less and less likely to me that the Amos-6 incident was triggered from within the Falcon 9.

If it’s discovered that there was an issue with the TE, now would be the best time to discover that. They haven’t fully completed work on the TE at 39A, so they could implement an improved version without having to do a full teardown, if that does turn out to be the cause.