
IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration
SpaceX Falcon 9 Grounded After Upper Stage Liquid Oxygen Leak
• https://www.nextbigfuture.com, by Brian WangSpaceX 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.