It's not ridiculous. While of course everything will fail eventually, it was not anticipated that it would fail this time due to a known issue. Until the cause is determined, it can not safely be assumed that the issue was due to age.
For comparison, if a plane crashed after 23 flights everyone would assume it was a factory defect.
A better analogy would be a Jet engine that has an expected lifetime of 5,000 hours, but operated for 100,000 hours caught fire on the tarmac while no passengers were aboard. Therefore all flights from all aircraft with the engine are grounded indefinitely.
Even by the FAA’s standards for passenger aircraft (Not an experimental Rocket) that’s incredibly unlikely.
> better analogy would be a Jet engine that has an expected lifetime of 5,000 hours, but operated for 100,000 hours caught fire on the tarmac while no passengers were aboard. Therefore all flights from all aircraft with the engine are grounded indefinitely
If the airline attempted to take off with it, yes, that merits a grounding.
As I stated in the part of that sentence you omitted, everything fails eventually. It is very reasonable to expect a better estimate than that for a human spaceflight. If something fails, you need to know why it failed, it doesn't matter if it flew once, 23 times, or 2300 times.
> Planes are meant to fly well more than 23 flights so that's a bad comparison.
The point of the comparison is that for aerospace hardware 23 uses is not decrepitly old, and a manufacturing defect can easily take that long to cause an issue.
> No other booster has flown more than 23 flights, this is unchartered territory.
And it will remain uncharted territory if the reaction to a failure is "eh rockets just aren't supposed to work after that point."
Except that a plane has passengers. But this rocket had none. It did not even have cargo. And it crashed in a pre-evacuated zone. There is no need to have the same level of security for these two situations.
He doesn’t need to be a vet to know the difference between a dog and a cat. Retrieving the booster is optional. Boeing, their competitor, can’t even do it.
So because Boeing can't do it, we should just forget about safety investigations and let SpaceX do whatever? That logic doesn't fly. Neither does your nonsense analogy. Either we give a shit about safety or we don't. FAA previously grounded the Falcon 9 and cleared it to fly once they determined it was safe. They will do the same here. I feel like you and others are severely misjudging the formalities and expertise required for these things and so you're just armchairing this shit. It's tiring. You're not as smart as you think you are.
Yeah because Boeing can't do it and the FAA is OK with it, then SpaceX should be held to THAT same standard and not judged differently otherwise it treates SpaceX differently and contributes to complaints of political double standards. If it's safe enough for a Boeing booster to burn up on entry then the line should be drawn there. If SpaceX managed to land a booster to help recover costs that's a financial benefit to them and has no impact whatsoever on safety.
1 in 23 flights resulting in booster loss due to an uncontrolled fire is not good enough for human space flight. The space shuttle had a catastrophic failure rate of 1 in 67 flights. This is a very high risk to human life that NASA and others have agreed is unreasonable.
Whether the booster that failed this time was reused many times is irrelevant. There does not seem to be evidence that reuse correlates with landing failure risk. Several Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters have failed[0] after a much lower number of flights and the sample count is much too low to infer a trend.
This was also not a freak incident. On average, Block 5 boosters fail to land 1 in 28 times. This is about on par with the catastrophic failure rate of De Havilland Comet, which was notorious for failing.
Although admittedly rarer, Falcon 9s have also had ascent-related failures. CRS-7 mission saw Falcon 9 explode 139 seconds after liftoff. Another one failed in AMOS-6 during a static fire test. This is about 1 in 190.
In this context, it is wise to demand that SpaceX investigates the failures before putting humans in space for tourism. I know we all want to see private astronauts, but it only took two spacecraft failures to end the entire Space Shuttle program. Today, with increased safety expectations, it would not take more for NASA to re-evaluate their partnership with SpaceX and set back private space flight significantly. It's best to take due care.
For comparison, there was 1 Concorde crash per 7,957 flights. It was deemed too unsafe as a vehicle.
Putting it all in context shows that Falcon 9 does not have an excellent safety rating. And while more modern Falcon 9 boosters may have it one day, today is not that day.
> 1 in 23 flights resulting in booster loss due to an uncontrolled fire is not good enough for human space flight. The space shuttle had a catastrophic failure rate of 1 in 67 flights
I think your numbers are a bit off. The space shuttle had a failure rate of 1 in 67 as a whole program, using multiple vehicles. The 1 in 23 is just that single booster.
Before this failed landing they had 267 consecutive successful landings.
From the numbers I’m seeing online Falcon 9 has launched 377 times and had 374 successful missions so the failure rate is 1 in 126
EDIT: I’m not going to comment on the rest of your comment because you went all over the place grabbing data at random to try justify your view.
You're conflating payload delivery with booster recovery. The booster went 23/23 on payload delivery, which is clearly safe enough for human flight.
If you want to compare it with the space shuttle, you should compare apples to apples. In terms of booster recovery--where the Falcon 9 failed--the comparison would be 0/67 for the shuttle vs. 22/23 for the Falcon 9.
Seems a tad odd to say that 0/67 is acceptable, yet 22/23 is suspect.
