SpaceX Falcon 9 Grounded After Upper Stage Liquid Oxygen Leak

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The FAA grounded the SpaceX Falcon 9 after an in space failure of the Falcon 9 upper stage. There was a liquid oxygen leak.

SpaceX had a good first burn and deployed the satellites but did not get them to the right orbital altitude. The satellites will be de-orbited.

The Falcon 9 had the longest series of successful launches.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 is used for manned missions so they have to re-certify everything. It depends if the root cause is simple whether they can get a fast certification.

SpaceX will investigate the issue and look for any other potential near-misses.

SpaceX is tracking to do more Falcon flights this year than Shuttle did in 30 years, the vast majority of which are uncrewed.

A major advantage of this super high flight rate is that we can identify and resolve problems that may only occur once every 1000 flights. This is impossible on a low flight rate vehicle.

17 thoughts on “SpaceX Falcon 9 Grounded After Upper Stage Liquid Oxygen Leak”

    • They evacuate the area before launches, you know, and are pretty good about looking for stragglers.

      Because the sound level from a large rocket launch is lethal. Literally will homogenize your brain if you were close enough to hit it with a gunshot.

  2. This is, unfortunately, exactly what the Europeans have been salivating for. One mess-up from SpaceX, and now the billions of Euro they spent on Ariane 6 are entirely justified! I can almost guarantee that we’re now going to see messaging from Europe that they won’t fly on Falcon 9 due to “reliability concerns” (never mind that their own Ariane 6 only flew once and had a similar upper stage failure). A similar win was handed to Amazon in their shareholder lawsuit for refusing to launch Kuiper satellites through SpaceX. Blue Origin is sure to do what they can to keep Falcon 9 grounded for as long as possible. In this industry there are a lot of actors who dislike SpaceX and will use any dirt they can to make life difficult for them. SpaceX was previously shielded from this with a stellar 8 year record, but that won’t work anymore.

  3. I’d like to preface that I’m a supporter of SpaceX and love everything they do, but I also think that the FAA’s treatment of SpaceX is fair and reasonable. It’s standard procedure to ground a rocket when it experiences a significant in-flight failure, as did this Falcon 9. Thursday’s mishap left over orbital debris from the upper stage that will reenter the atmosphere without control over where it will crash down. A one in three hundred failure rate is still far too high to fly with. Logically SpaceX would to solve this issue anyways to placate future customers, and it’s not safe to fly further like this. In such cases it makes perfect sense (and is standard policy) to allow no further launches until the issue is found and solved.

    For all those who would like to compare Falcon 9’s record to the Space Shuttle, just because the Space Shuttle was a death trap and was allowed to fly doesn’t mean we should do the same thing for any other rocket. A whole host of factors (political, financial, egotistical) allowed the Shuttle to fly when it probably should have been grounded. The Falcon 9 shouldn’t receive special treatment. Hopefully it will be solved in a matter of weeks not month, and soon begin rebuilding its record.

  4. Meanwhile NASA flies astronauts aboard a Boeing capsule which has yet to demonstrate a single flight with a serious failure, and has (not) stranded them aboard the ISS.

  5. More likely the Biden regime is getting back at Musk for having the audacity to object the inane policies and activities being foisted on the population by the Washington elitists.

    • You can agree or disagree with the FAA’s policies, but there’s no denying that grounding a rocket is standard procedure after a significant in-flight failure. SpaceX is not being singled out for worse treatment over here.

  6. The VAST majority of everything that goes into space recently has been on Falcon 9 craft.
    The falcon 9 record has been EXEMPLARY for a while now. A SINGLE failure should not be enough to ground the entire fleet. This reaction by the FAA is WAY too extreme.
    SpaceX SHOULD be launching in International waters, from modified old oil rigs, and just avoiding a lot of the EPA and FAA oversight and regulations.

    • The basic problem Musk faces in that regard is that SpaceX was founded in the US, operates under American law, and rockets are legally classed as “munitions”, subject to very strict regulation that would preclude his moving his operations out of US territory without US government permission. Which, realistically, would not be granted.

      Sure, in retrospect he should have chartered SpaceX in one of those small countries that derives income from being the nominal country of a ship, or tried to convert some small country into a “rocket republic”. Too late for that now, and given how close SpaceX came to bankruptcy before its first successful launch, it likely wasn’t economically feasible.

      • I doubt they have the FAA has the statutory support for the political action they just took. The recent Supreme Court overturning of the Chevron doctrine allows Musk to take the FAA to court, as Musk’s company is obviously being damaged. That will, however, take years to actually obtain a remedy.

  8. One failure in, what, 300 freaking launches? And they ground it?

    Do they ground entire car models when somebody gets a flat? No.

    This is just more proof that the FAA simply can’t accept that rocketry has made the transition from experimental to routine.

    • Couldn’t agree more. They could limit it to launching satellites and have it recertified for human flights. But to say that SpaceX and other satellite companies cannot take a calculated risk 1 in 300 to have their satellites be lost? What is the risk of loosing a satellite for all the other certified launchers? Surely it’s more than 1 in 300?

    • If one in every 300 cars failed destructively, it would rightly be grounded. This might be the best record in spaceflight history, but it’s still not enough for launches at scale.

      • The problem with saying that is that, if THIS level of risk justifies grounding rockets, they should really be grounding every rocket in existence, because even with this relatively minor failure, (It did reach orbit, after all, just didn’t circularize.) Falcon is still the most reliable rocket in existence.

        All the others are LESS reliable!

        Keep in mind they let astronauts fly to the ISS on Starliner, even though it already had mechanical failures every single time it went to the pad, and including the time they launched it. And they still haven’t ruled out bringing them back on a capsule with known mechanical problems.

        So there absolutely is a double standard in operation here.

        • Falcon 9 isn’t clearly the most reliable rocket, it just has the clearest reliability statistics. The failure rate of other rockets isn’t as clear; the Atlas V has a 100% success rate, but less than a third the launches of Falcon 9. It’s difficult to say what its rate would be if extended out to over 300 flights. The point is, if you have a known failure mode of your rocket that presumably has a 1 in 300 chance of occurring, that is not an acceptable risk and should be fixed before flying again. This is exactly what the FAA is demanding. For other rockets, we can’t just assume that they’re equally or even more likely to fail without any proven failure modes. If such failure modes are found, however, than they too would be grounded.

          Double standard or not, I don’t see why it’s reasonable for SpaceX to fly a Falcon 9 with a 1 in 300 chance of failure that is entirely fixable.

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