SpaceX's Historic Falcon 9 Success Streak Is Over

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.'

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