Tim Dodd

CRS-7, the upper stage, had one of the bottles inside the tanks that are filled with helium.

And one of those bottles broke off on ascent and actually just completely overpressured the upper stage.

And the upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went kaboom in an uncontrolled manner.

And so then they came back with vengeance.

When they came back, the first mission back is the first time that they landed a rocket, which was awesome.

So they returned to flight after the anomaly was, yeah, was landing a rocket.

Just, I was surprised at how much bigger the rocket was than I imagined.

I was, I originally, when I was going down to Kennedy Space Center, I was disappointed that I wasn't seeing like a, you know, I didn't know a ton about rockets.

I knew enough to like know what a space shuttle was, what like the Saturn V was, you know, but that was probably about the end of my knowledge.

I just remember being disappointed that I wasn't seeing a big quote unquote NASA rocket flying.

You know, I was thinking in my head like, oh, I'm going to see this launch.

It's probably going to be like...

you know, three stories tall or something, you know, just some little skinny little stick and some little firecracker and yay, you know, and I think I'd almost been pitched that too.

I think the, the people that I was working for at the time, I think they kind of were downplaying it as like, well, it's not a big rocket, sir.

It's not going to be that exciting, you know, but we get out there to the pad and I'm like, this thing's huge.

This is not a small rocket.

Like this is,

It's 70 meters tall, 220 feet tall.

It's huge.

And I think people forget the scale of that.