SpaceX grounded after fumbling Falcon 9 landing for first time in years SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been grounded following a rare mishap during the landing of a veteran booster. The Falcon 9 first stage, which had performed a record-breaking 23 flights, made what appeared to be a hard landing on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean, toppled over, and exploded. The incident marked the end of a …
It didn't do what it was expected to do, so an investigation is required to make sure there's no additional heretofore unforeseen risk elsewhere in the flight plan.
- eg if this was a landing leg failure, perhaps the leg could have fallen off earlier in the flight, or during a contingency flight plan if that had been necessary?
Once the mishap is sufficiently well-understood, they'll return to flight, probably with minor procedure changes - eg replacing a cotter pin after fewer flights.
The articles says Jon Edwards, SpaceX VP of Launch Vehicles, said: "We are working as hard as we can to thoroughly understand root cause and get corrective actions in place ASAP. One thing we do know, though, is this was purely a recovery issue and posed no threat to primary mission or public safety."
I'd have thought that until they do an investigation and determine the root cause there's no way to know whether whatever the fault was could have affected either or both of the primary mission and public safety. And I'd have expected a senior SpaceX person to understand that!
Yes, because apart from anything else, this booster was on it's 23rd flight and longevity of boosters and their component parts is still a guessing game. Materiels science and past experience can only get you so far when you are subjecting materials to previously unknown patterns of stress over far longer time periods and repetitions than has been done before.
As others have mentions, it's the first landing failure in something over 260 consecutive launches. Eventually there was bound to be failure even if just from wear and tear. Now they can go over the affected parts with a fine tooth comb and set a new "service interval" on said parts. And then somewhere down the line they'll likely find something else fails after, say 30 launch/landing cycles because now they replace the the legs (or part thereof) every 15 launches.
Other industries went through the same processes and eventually set service and maintenance intervals to suit, either for reputational reasons or mandated regulatory reasons. SpaceX (and other also developing similar re-usable launch vehicles) have those lessons and significant advances in simulations and materials science to work with, but there are still unknowns and actual real world stresses to learn from.
With the best will in the world, thanks to swells occasionally a platform moving at sea is going to be moving UP at the same time as the rockets are coming DOWN even with all the fancy stabilisation gubbins and without a telemetry link between the two (yes, really - but there are reasons for that), the rocket might not react in time to avert a slightly hard landing
You can see in the reported vertical speed at landing, it's higher than it should have been, so there may have been a glitch in thrust too
That said, it looks like the thing would have survived if the piston/leg joint hadn't broken - but at 23 flights it was well past the original expected lifespan anyway
It will be interesting to see the post-flight report but I'm chalking this up to "How many flights will these actually do before breaking?" finally having a broken one
SpaceX need to state that each mission will "attempt booster recovery" so that a non mission-critical failure that does not endanger life or property does not lead to grounding of the entire fleet.
These boosters are now flying 230% into their expected life and SpaceX are trying to find the operational limit, so some failures are only to be expected.
Early Falcon returns were licensed with the expectation of a hard landing so the RUDs were haps. not mishaps. Current flights are licensed with the expectation of a soft landing so the recent one qualifies as a mishap. SpaceX will/has file/d some "no risk to public safety" paperwork and the FAA will likely authorise return to flight today even though it may be a few days before SpaceX hands in their full mishap report.
Originally the landings were described as "experimental" in the FAA licence applications so if they didn't work that was still in accordance with the licence. After 267 straight landings they're no longer experimental so a crash like this is outside the licence conditions so must be investigated. On the plus side, reliable sources have said the cause is trivial to fix and the shutdown may be even shorter than the one after the second stage failure.
"Did the FAA launch investigations like this in the early days of Space X, after each recovery failure until the first successful landing? If not, why now?"
Perhaps because of other US space related activity, the investigation and pause on launches has wider commercial-political impacts? In that reading, the FAA are having their chain yanked by somebody further up, and Space X are not the intended target but just an attack vector.
The FAA has been under tremendous scrutiny thanks to the Regulatory Capture aspects uncovered during the McBoing investigations
It may well be that rather than just quickly writing this off, they're having to do everything "by the book"
Land or sea, there's no danger to public safety because it came down quite accurately in the landing zone, which is a public exclusion space and even if it had toppled/exploded onshore the only thing required is "A broom" (for some values of broom) rather than "an ambulance"
"SpaceX need to state that each mission will "attempt booster recovery" so that a non mission-critical failure that does not endanger life or property does not lead to grounding of the entire fleet."
Maybe Boeing could try that trick? On the other hand, crashing aircraft full of passengers and doors falling off might be classed as mission critical.
The way the FAA works is you file the paperwork describing how the flight will go. If the flight doesn't go the way you said it would, they investigate. The FAA likes predictability; you can actually get waivers for all kinds of unlikely-sounding things, but there has to be a plan, and you have to stick to it.
So far here on The Register Comments there have been no Musk Bashing comments (simply for the sake of it) so that is good & perhaps a somewhat a recent first if it continues (yes please).
Given that landing a booster is somewhat tricky perhaps we should reflect & compare the SpaceX record with that of other companies on landing a booster.
A stretch might think the authorities are thinking of an earlier landing failure whilst descending but as far as I can see the boosters are over the sea so perhaps a few fish may want to be concerned.
So ole musky didn't have a mini meltdown on twitter posting AI generated response to the likes of Stephen King who merely posted that space x had been grounded after the booster fell over... that was all he said... But ole musky who holds more grudges than the avg trump didn't like that because it hurt his ickle feelings.
Stuff like that you mean?
what looks like small drones to you could very well be an entire intergalactic battlefleet.
> what looks like small drones to you could very well be an entire intergalactic battlefleet.
“Oh great, another brilliant landing attempt. One of the struts, of course, couldn’t be bothered to do its job — typical. And naturally, the Falcon 9 collapsed, because why wouldn’t it? Just another day of pointless existence in an uncaring universe.”
Space-X should have this nailed down very quickly. You can see from the video that one of the inline piston/struts that extend and then keep each of the 4 landing legs in place failed during the landing and then the lander toppled over. It's lying on the barge so they'll be able to see exactly what part failed. It sort of looked like the lower attachment point from the video, but could have been the lower strut snapping.
It looked to me like it came in a little quicker than usual. So potentially a combination of a weakened leg which potentially might have been ok for a few more landings, plus coming in a little "hot" and possibly even the barge was on the rise due to waves all coming together at once to increase the landing impact.
they do bring those boosters back to land on land (if the mission profile lets them) so the FAA could be saying "well they could be a hazard where ever they land"
But it looks like a leg failure of some sort on its 23rd landing...... not bad for something that spacex thought.. it may make 10 if we're lucky...
> The Falcon 9 first stage, which had performed a record-breaking 23 flights, made what appeared to be a hard landing on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean, toppled over, and exploded.
Not bad for twenty three successful flights. Landing 25-30 metric tons at 4.5mph. Looks to me like one of the landing gear struts collapsed. It would be interesting to know what the weather conditions were like at the landing site.
Curse my aging brain because I'm searching and failing to find and link a very interesting video someone posted.
The showed a side by side of a nominal ship landing of a launcher with this RUD flight, and apparently this one came down hotter (11 units, rather than 4 units - and I can't even recall whether that was m/s, kmh, angstrom per fortnight or what! :( )
As someone whose aged hips and knees also go crack, snap, pop like a bowl of rice crispies, I completely sympathise!
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