Rick Jones wrote:
In sci.space.policy Jeff Findley wrote:
For now, it's looking like that's not a big issue. So far, the
Falcon 9R tests (up to the latest which had to be destroyed during
flight, not landing) have all been successful during the landing
phase. If this were an issue, I think we would have seen a failure
sooner than now and it would have been during landing.

Was the "during flight" test object an F9R or was that a Grasshopper?

Neither really, it was "F9R Dev1" in the "F9R Dev" series, formerly
known as "Grasshopper v1.1". The original Grasshopper was smaller and
used one Merlin-1D.

F9R-Dev1 didn't have all the stuff from F9 that the final product will
have, it was built from an existing F9 v1.1 1st stage (previously used
for F9 "qualification test") in which they put 3 Merlin-1D engines
(F9/F9R obviously have 9) and various electronics and equipment as
needed, I doubt they had the same electronics in it for all the
different tests.

They're now building a F9R Dev2 which sounds like it should be a lot
closer to the final F9R but undoubtedly there will be more tweaking
after the first Dev2 test.

It's possible that if they hadn't been forced to blow Dev1 up, they
would just have kept adding hardware instead of building a new Dev2.

But I expect they're not surprised that somthing blew up, it happens
in rocketry development even you can't necessarily predict WHEN.

http://www.spaceflight101.com/spacex...t-updates.html