1. No indication before FTS, public affairs officer was commenting on a good flight, fractions of a second later, the cloud appears.
2. SpaceX is trying to recover final telemetry frames by hex editor for finding the CAUSE. If you would have the cause seconds earlier, you would not need that in that urgency, restoring the final telemetry frames is for telling what happened last, if necessary at all. (Not all telemetry is transmitted at once and at the same rate, usually, less the important values multiple times per second, the house-keeping data every other second)
Much of the data in the telemetry might be subtle, and would not necessarily be obvious in real time. There is TONS of data, and it's not possible to analyze it all in real time. And the public affairs narrator would only announce what's totally obvious or what he's already overheard on the main voice channel.
Lack of a commanded destruct doesn't tell us anything useful. Range Safety doesn't destruct the vehicle simply because there's an anomaly. Only when the vehicle is out of control and threatening to leave the safety corridor, or after it's 100% obvious that the vehicle won't make it to orbit, then they'll command destruct. For example, when the Merlin engine failed on a previous flight, the FTS wasn't activated. Lack of a destruct command is not evidence of no anomalies.
I don't think too much should be read into the fact that engineers were looking at the last few milliseconds of data. I'm sure engineers want ALL the data available, including the final milliseconds. But this does not exclude the possibility that there is relevant data prior to the final milliseconds. After all, Musk commented about the LOX overpressure almost immediately after the incident. So this data obviously wasn't from the final milliseconds of telemetry that needed to be reconstructed. The overpressure event could have been from ANY time prior to this.
---------- Post added 07-03-15 at 05:29 AM ---------- Previous post was 07-02-15 at 11:15 PM ----------
Thinking about it now, the LOX tank probably has 2 redundant vent valves, so it seems less likely to be related to a sticky vent valve or such, as I earlier suggested. Although I'm still not convinced it had to be a sudden failure which gave no earlier indications in telemetry or engineering video. I think it likely that SpaceX has at least some information which they haven't shared.