SpaceX's Historic Falcon 9 Success Streak Is Over (reuters.com) 46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after one broke apart in space and doomed its payload of Starlink satellites, the first failure in more than seven years of a rocket relied upon by the global space industry. Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites on a shallow orbital path where they will soon reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
The attempt to reignite the engine "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote early on Friday on his social media platform X, using an industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion. The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the failure, fixes the rocket and receives the agency's approval, the FAA said in a statement. That process could take several weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the failure and SpaceX's plan to fix it. Musk said SpaceX was updating the software of the Starlink satellites to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric re-entry. "Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said.
The satellites' altitude is so shallow that Earth's gravity is pulling them 3 miles (5 km) closer toward the atmosphere with each orbit, SpaceX later said, confirming they would inevitably "re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise." SpaceX said the second stage's failure occurred after engineers detected a leak of liquid oxygen, a propellant. The mishap occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission. It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite. The failure "breaks a success streak of more than 300 straight missions," notes Reuters.
"We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point," Tom Mueller, SpaceX's former vice president of propulsion who designed Falcon 9's engines. "... The team will fix the problem and start the cycle again."
The attempt to reignite the engine "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote early on Friday on his social media platform X, using an industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion. The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the failure, fixes the rocket and receives the agency's approval, the FAA said in a statement. That process could take several weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the failure and SpaceX's plan to fix it. Musk said SpaceX was updating the software of the Starlink satellites to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric re-entry. "Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said.
The satellites' altitude is so shallow that Earth's gravity is pulling them 3 miles (5 km) closer toward the atmosphere with each orbit, SpaceX later said, confirming they would inevitably "re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise." SpaceX said the second stage's failure occurred after engineers detected a leak of liquid oxygen, a propellant. The mishap occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission. It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite. The failure "breaks a success streak of more than 300 straight missions," notes Reuters.
"We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point," Tom Mueller, SpaceX's former vice president of propulsion who designed Falcon 9's engines. "... The team will fix the problem and start the cycle again."
Streak of 365 launches (Score:2, Informative)
"Over 300" the author of the article didn't feel like doing basic math, apparently
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"Over 300" the author of the article didn't feel like doing basic math, apparently
I think you'll find that 365 is indeed "more than 300".
And yet, your response does not excuse the author's outright laziness for omitting "more than" 20% of SpaceX's launches within the streak.
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Yep, username checks out. There are "more than one" of you cowards.
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Which his an English construction issue on his part, 365 is over 20% greater than 300. If I told you to estimate something, and the real number was over 20% higher than the number you gave me, that would be a shit estimate.
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Which his an English construction issue on his part, 365 is over 20% greater than 300. If I told you to estimate something, and the real number was over 20% higher than the number you gave me, that would be a shit estimate.
At one significant digit, accurate. The casual news reader doesn't care about three significant figures of accuracy.
Of dozens of items in the news that are actually inaccurate every day, not sure why you are bothering to criticize something that is factually correct, merely not given to enough significant digits to satisfy you.
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At one significant digit, accurate. The casual news reader doesn't care about three significant figures of accuracy.
Of dozens of items in the news that are actually inaccurate every day, not sure why you are bothering to criticize something that is factually correct, merely not given to enough significant digits to satisfy you.
I think we can all agree that 300 and 365 are quite different numbers. Both of those two numbers are represented by three significant digits; high school and college classes would mark this paper down for being inaccurate.
Re:Streak of 365 launches (Score:4, Funny)
One is a good movie, the other a shitty collaborative suite.
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Funny, because it's true!
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I think we can all agree that 300 and 365 are quite different numbers.
And I think we can all agree that 365 is literally "more than 300."
You kvetching about something that is literally true. Why not spend your energy nitpicking something that isn't.
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You kvetching about something that is literally true. Why not spend your energy nitpicking something that isn't.
Ironic, you picking me for this.
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It's interesting you call it basic, and yet get it wrong. Let's ask an outside source, shall we??
Dear ChatGPT: "what percentage increase is 300 to 365"
ChatGPT: To calculate the percentage increase from 300 to 365, you can use the formula: ((snip)) So, the percentage increase from 300 to 365 is 21.67%.
Watch the re-entry here (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting video (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, seems they were talking about an O2 leak - that may have been pure frozen oxygen. That's probably not the best.
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It hadn't occurred to me that a LOX leak would do that; but I suppose it's similar to the way you make dry ice by releasing liquid CO2 through a valve. There could have been O2 in all 3 phases around the engine, adjacent to things that get really hot. Obviously a good way to make something go boom.
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At sufficient levels, O2 has a way of turning things in to fuel. Ordinary air is 20%. Back in the good ol' day of the Internet there was a dude who used to pour LOX on BBQ grills, resulting in the grill, all of it, steel--burning itself in to a pile of slag. We don't think of steel as fuel, but with enough O2 it is. Aside from the usual "don't try this at home", he was also adamant that you not soak briquettes in LOX because he claimed that it was like a stick of dynamite. I find that plausible.
In any
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I watched about an hour later from the SpaceX website (not narrated) before the video got taken down. I noticed the ice build-ups too. Usually there is a bit of ice, but the chunks seemed larger and much more prevalent this time. I remember thinking "that's weird."
Still Hypergolic TEA/TAB? (Score:2)
I'm old enough to remember when S2 was considered temporary and BFR would be in service by 2022.
Oh, well, it's still cheap.
Never lick crashed rocket parts, boys.
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Falcon 9 doesn't use hypergolic fuel. Both stages burn RP-1 kerosene and LOX. What are you talking about?
Re:Still Hypergolic TEA/TAB? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Failure rate (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like they are doing better than the shuttle which had a failure rate of 1.5%. Looking at the geometric distribution, if the Falcon had a 1.5% failure rate they would have a 99.6% chance a rocket would blow up by 365th flight.
I'm not sure how to do formal confidence intervals for this, but a failure rate of 0.8% would give them around a 95% chance of failure in 365 flights, so it looks like they are doing significantly better than the shuttle, but definitely not something I would set foot on.
Re:Failure rate (Score:5, Insightful)
You are analyzing this backwards. Calculate the failure rate that gives them a 50/50 chance of 365 successful consecutive launches. That is 0.19%. So yeah, a lot better than 1.5%. And if calculate the failure rate for Falcon 9 the way you got that 1.5% (by dividing 2 by 135) then we get 1/365 or 0.27%.
Re: Failure rate (Score:3)
Falcon 9 has had 3 failures in 354 missions, or if you exclude the earlier versions of the rockets, 1 failure in 298 Falcon 9 Block 5 missions.
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Well stats is backwards probability which is partially why it's confusing.
By itself, the 50/50 number can be misleading since they might have just gotten lucky. With just that piece of information, what's to say that a 1.5% failure rate isn't also fairly likely to generate 365 consecutive successes.
People typically give a c
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I cheated by not giving the confidence interval for the shuttle. Assuming a Binomial distribution, a standard, exact 95% confidence interval for failure rate is [0.0018, 0.0525]. To make matters worse, you want both confidence intervals to contain their failure rate which is less likely than 95%...
One could probably attack the problem more directly to show a difference rather that giving confidence intervals, but there is a pretty big overlap. The problem is with so little shuttle data (135) flights,
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Looks like they are doing better than the shuttle which had a failure rate of 1.5%. Looking at the geometric distribution, if the Falcon had a 1.5% failure rate they would have a 99.6% chance a rocket would blow up by 365th flight.
I'm not sure how to do formal confidence intervals for this, but a failure rate of 0.8% would give them around a 95% chance of failure in 365 flights, so it looks like they are doing significantly better than the shuttle, but definitely not something I would set foot on.
Came here to say that. By comparison is the only way to judge this.
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Looks like they are doing better than the shuttle which had a failure rate of 1.5%.
To do an apples-to-apples comparison, the space shuttle had one launch failure on the first 135 launches, so 0.74% launch failure rate. Over the same period, the Falcon 9 also had one launch failure on the first 135 launches. (Two failures, if you count the one that blew up on the pad during a fueling test in 2016.)
So, identical failure rates over the same number of launches as long as you don't count the on-pad failure.
Shuttle also had one (very spectacular) failure on landing. But, for an apples to apples
well less than 3x9 reliability? (Score:2)
Another case of "unscheduled rapid disassembly" At least Boeing shows remorse when their stuff fails.
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Elon only blew up his own shit in this case. Boeing failures are wrecking other people and their things.
Re:well less than 3x9 reliability? (Score:5, Informative)
It did not blow up. The 2nd stage failed to relight when it was meant to circularize the orbit. Probably due to an oxygen leak. The first stage landed just fine, and will be reused. It was also carrying Starlink satellites, not a customer payload. And had it been carrying a Dragon capsule it probably would have still been able to manage a safe re-entry, since Dragon has its own manoeuvring thrusters that have a higher impulse than the station keeping thrusters of the Starlink satellites.
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Yeah, I figure a material or manufacturing defect.
At least I don't think they have changed anything on the 2nd stage recently, so probably not a recent change that is causing this problem.
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It did not blow up. The 2nd stage failed to relight when it was meant to circularize the orbit. .
Musk: "Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown."
-- https://x.com/elonmusk/status/... [x.com]
The phrase "RUD" ("Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly") is Musk's euphemism for "exploded" (old rocket-slang joke term).
bag (Score:2)
>Another case of "unscheduled rapid disassembly"
That's just spreading RUD !
Makes you wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
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The company with the lowest failure rate. So ... SpaceX? Are you under the impression that any company anywhere on the planet can build any product perfectly? That's a silly impression to have.
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Who's going to rescue the astronauts from the ISS now? Boeing?!?
Somebody with a higher failure rate, which would be ... everybody else? No, probably SpaceX.