Is Falcon 9 Ready to Fly Again? Already?

To refresh the date in everyone's mind, on Friday, July 12, a Falcon 9 flying a Starlink mission had an upper stage anomaly and lost the load of satellites aboard the upper stage when the stage's second ignition failed, resulting in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. 

The FAA declared that they are "requiring an investigation" and would work with SpaceX on corrective actions. 

I've been of two minds on this; the first is the obvious, "old space" or "Space 1.0" way of doing things. Typically, after a launch failure, a rocket will be sidelined for months while engineers and technicians comb over the available data and debris to identify a cause, perform tests, and institute a fix. The second observation is this is SpaceX we're talking about here. I mean, if it takes the legacy space industry six months, what will they take to see what went wrong and fix it?  Six weeks seems way too long. How about twenty minutes? A half hour?  

So while I've been keeping an eye on NextSpaceflight I haven't been so anal retentive that I check every few minutes, or even every day.  Nevertheless I have been checking. Sure enough, this afternoon, I found this, implying the return to flight will be two weeks to the day from the lost mission:

Screen capture from NextSpaceflight.com 

Unfortunately, this isn't quite the whole story, but a little poking reveals the SpaceX has said they're ready to go, so if the FAA wouldn't mind, would they be so kind as to let them get back to keeping the highest launch cadence in world going?  And, oh by the way, Tuesday night the 23rd would be really nice.

In a summary of the anomaly posted shortly afterward, SpaceX did not identify the cause of the failure beyond saying, "The Merlin Vacuum engine experienced an anomaly and was unable to complete its second burn."

Officially, the company has provided no additional information since then. However, the company's engineers were able to identify the cause of the failure almost immediately and, according to sources, the fix was straightforward.

Yeah... sounds like they understood what went wrong within twenty minutes. Certainly not twenty days. 

Now, internally, SpaceX was confident enough that they understood the issue and how to fix it to schedule a launch for July 15th. They just needed to be polite and respectful to the FAA. 

To that end, a week ago on July 15, SpaceX submitted a request to the FAA to resume launching its Falcon 9 rocket while this investigation into the anomaly continues. "The FAA is reviewing the request and will be guided by data and safety at every step of the process," the FAA said in a statement at the time.

In my mind, I see the FAA bureaucrats filling a tub o' coffee and getting ready to settle down and study reports for a few months. Then they get a message saying, "please sir, can we launch some more?  Say, Tuesday night?" 

The company plans to launch at least three Starlink missions in rapid succession from its two launch pads in Florida and one in California to determine the effectiveness of the fix. It would like to demonstrate the reliability of the Falcon 9 rocket, which had recorded more than 300 successful missions since its last failure during a pad accident in September 2016, before two upcoming crewed missions.

There is still a slight possibility that the Polaris Dawn mission, led by commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman, could launch in early August. This would be followed by the Crew-9 mission for NASA, which will carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.

Notably, neither of these crewed missions requires a second burn of the Merlin engine, which is where the failure occurred earlier this month during the Starlink mission.

There's a couple of things to note here.  First is that the FAA hasn't approved the two launches mentioned in the screen capture above.  Second is that neither of those two launches are tonight, July 23rd, but rather they're both Thursday night/Friday morning EDT. The first time I looked at NextSpacflight today, all three launches were Falcon 9s instead of two with one Atlas V. That was maybe two hours before I found the referenced article about SpaceX's attempts to get permission to launch, so earlier Tuesday afternoon, it showed the first of three launches as Tuesday night, EDT local.  

EDIT July 25, 2024 at 08:50 PM EDT to add: the FAA has cleared SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 flights.  In a statement posted Thursday evening, SpaceX explained the anomaly: "During the first burn of Falcon 9’s second stage engine, a liquid oxygen leak developed within the insulation around the upper stage engine. The cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system. This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line." 

FAA says fly away ...

The next launch is currently shown to be Saturday morning EDT. Sat Jul 27, 2024 12:21 AM EDT - which to locals feels like Friday night after midnight. The launch is from LC-39A, on the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA