Not necessarily a smoking gun, since it would have been set up to resist pressure from the exterior but suddenly subjected to high pressure from the interior side.
I’m more intrigued by the image I’ve seen elsewhere of what looks like the titanium mating surface that the front hemisphere bolted to, which would have been bonded to the carbon fiber cylinder section. The photo didn’t show a single shred of carbon fiber still attached to the titanium, which suggests bond failure at the interface between metal and composite components. Whether that was the initial point of failure or just the result of the strains experienced by the fragments of the cylinder as it fractured and imploded peeling everything away, I don’t know.
And it looks like for the nose cone, the strap is going in the viewport hole, meaning there is no more plexiglass there?
Not necessarily a smoking gun, since it would have been set up to resist pressure from the exterior but suddenly subjected to high pressure from the interior side.
I’m more intrigued by the image I’ve seen elsewhere of what looks like the titanium mating surface that the front hemisphere bolted to, which would have been bonded to the carbon fiber cylinder section. The photo didn’t show a single shred of carbon fiber still attached to the titanium, which suggests bond failure at the interface between metal and composite components. Whether that was the initial point of failure or just the result of the strains experienced by the fragments of the cylinder as it fractured and imploded peeling everything away, I don’t know.