this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
36 points (97.4% liked)

SpaceX

1943 readers
44 users here now

A community for discussing SpaceX.

Related space communities:

Memes:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
36
SpaceX grounds its Falcon rocket fleet after upper stage misfire – Spaceflight Now (spaceflightnow.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
7 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Not surprised there are anomalies. The falcon 9 launches so frequently, there are bound to be some issues.

This is why NASA needs Boeing to get it together with their crew vehicle. Right now there's no way to get new crew up there, until falcon 9 gets cleared again.

We need more than just one company to run away with the launch market.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It was inevitable that they'd have some issues after the crazy success streak, it's just frustrating and feels bad that there have been 3 groundings in quick succession. Hopefully they root cause and fix this new issue just as fast as the last two.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

There were/are other companies but they are so horrendously expensive that SpaceX becomes the default choice.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (3 children)

This is the second upper stage issue this year. I wonder if they're encountering quality issues as they ramp up the production rate of upper stages, or whether they're simply discovering new (rarer) failure modes as they increase their launch cadence.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah, it feels like they're hitting engineering and/or process corner cases. We also might just be emotionally drawing connections between totally unrelated things when there isn't any actual thread to pull on here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Could also be due to engineers switching from F9 to SS/SH.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

More likely it's a bit of both.