Optimistic report from SpaceX

Dale Amon has an upbeat report on the recent test flight data from SpaceX:

It turns out that as many of us suspected, there was a feedback between fuel slosh and the control equations:

In a nutshell, the data shows that the increasing oscillation of the second stage was likely due to the slosh frequency in the liquid oxygen (LOX) tank coupling with the thrust vector control (engine steering) system. This started out as a pitch-yaw movement and then transitioned into a corkscrewing motion. For those that aren't engineers, imagine holding a bowl of soup and moving it from side to side with small movements, until the entire soup mass is shifting dramatically. Our simulations prior to flight had led us to believe that the control system would be able to damp out slosh, however we had not accounted for the perturbations of a contact on the stage during separation, followed by a hard slew to get back on track.

There was indeed a contact of the first stage with the bell of the stage two motor at stage separation and it was indeed not a big thing [. . .] The vehicle will be launching a satellite on its next flight