Falcon 9 launch ends in RUD

A routine Falcon 9 launch of a batch of Starlink satellites has ended in a RUD of the upper stage, putting an end to Falcon 9 Block 5's perfect launch record. This marks the first in-flight failure of a Falcon 9 since 2015, and the first failure of a Falcon 9 since 2016.

Starlink group 9-3 lifted off from Vandenberg AFB's SLC-4E at 10:35pm local time. As B1063 continued its way up into space, everything seemed nominal, and B1063 successfully landed itself on one of SpaceX's fleet of droneships early into the mission. Everyone expected the second stage to do its job; after all, the main element of complexity is with the booster, which has to land itself and has 9 engines. The second stage, in comparison, is much less complex, only having 1 Merlin Vacumn (MVac) engine.

On stream, we could see the foil coating of the MVac inflating, and a copious amount of ice formed on top of the coating. SpaceX hasn't commented on the issue yet, but all this seems like a liquid oxygen leak on the second stage MVac engine; after all, what else is cryogenic, is used by an engine and can cause bloating of the foil covering? Beyond SpaceX confirmation that the booster had landed, there was complete silence from SpaceX or Elon Musk himself.

This silence was broken by a tweet by Elon. In it, he said that the MVac had suffered a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, or in other words and explosion) when trying to restart. However, the Starlink satellites had successfully deployed, albeit in too low of an orbit. Time will tell if the Hall Effect thrusters on the satellites will be sufficient to raise them into their desired orbit, but for now, it pains me to utter these words: Falcon 9 has failed.

This is the first failure of a Falcon 9 since Amos-6 all the way back in 2016, when a Falcon 9 exploded on the pad. Apart from that, Falcon 9 has had a near-flawless launch record, clocking in almost 350 flights with only 3 failures. This is quite literally a drop in the ocean in terms of Falcon 9 flights.

This also comes as upper stages have been quite large headaches for the space community- earlier this week, Ariane 6 had a perfect debut launch, but upper stage problems caused it to fail its circularization burn and tumble back to earth.

Hopefully, this issue isn't too big and SpaceX can fix it within this week, so the unburdened streak of Falcon 9 launches can continue.

Edit: SpaceX and Elon Musk have confirmed the separation of the satellites. The team are working on a fix, boosting the throttle of the Hall Effect thrusters of 5 salveageble satellites. We will keep updating this article as things play out.