What happens if a rocket fails during launch?

Every crewed rocket needs an answer to one question: if this goes wrong, how do the people get out? Older designs put a solid-fuel escape tower on the nose and threw it away once it was no longer needed.

Dragon does it differently. The escape engines are inside the capsule itself, in four pairs around the sides, so the system is never discarded and is available for the whole ride. They are hypergolic — the propellants ignite the instant they touch, with no igniter to fail — which is exactly the property you want in a system that may have to work once, immediately, after months of sitting idle.

The engines are 3D-printed in Inconel, a nickel alloy that tolerates the heat, and they are throttleable and restartable. The pairing matters too: an abort remains survivable with an engine out.

It is not theoretical. Dragon has demonstrated a pad abort, from a standing start on the ground, and an in-flight abort at Max Q — deliberately triggered at the moment of greatest aerodynamic stress, which is the hardest case there is.