FAA grounds SpaceX ahead of historic Polaris Dawn commercial spacewalk | Hacker News Reader

FAA grounds SpaceX ahead of historic Polaris Dawn commercial spacewalk

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36 pointsdmoy33 comments

This is politically motivated pure and simple. Most companies dump their boosters in the ocean and no one bats an eye. Unfortunately Musk should have foreseen not rolling the dice on the starlink mission when the Polaris got pushed back.

Please leave the FAA alone. It has never been political. They literally have a fiduciary interest in helping aviation companies. SpaceX works really closely with them.

> politically motivated pure and simple. Most companies dump their boosters in the ocean and no one bats an eye

If you file a flight plan from New York to Sydney and have to ditch in San Francisco, the FAA isn’t out for you because someone else flew to Denver.

Put another way, this triggering not only your suspicions but rendering a conclusion around bias is a strong indicator that your calibration is off. (I’m saying this as someone with a huge bias in SpaceX’s favour.)

> This is politically motivated pure and simple.

Any deviation from normal operation may result in a grounding. Groundings can be implemented by the operator, the manufacturer, or the authority having jurisdiction.

Groundings are typically caused by a request for an investigation or an emergency airworthiness directive mandating inspections or repairs.

Last week Boeing themselves grounded the 777-9 and it is a prototype that doesn't even carry passengers. When there was an uncontained engine failure on a United 777 all 777s with the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine were grounded. When there was an uncontained engine failure on a British Airways 777 all 777s with specific types of the GE90 engine were grounded.

When there was a door plug blowout all Boeing 737-9 MAXs were grounded.

I'm not just picking on Boeing, A320neos with the PW1100G were grounded.

And it's not just the US, though the FAA seems to be a little more aggressive. EASA grounds aircraft in Europe, Japan grounded an entire airline for weeks after a maintenance worker was found to have done repairs and inspections while drunk, and Qatar grounded an Airbus type due to chipping paint.

In this case a booster of the same type that is scheduled to carry humans into space had an engine malfunction during its landing and the FAA is waiting for SpaceX to determine its cause.

If a Delta A350 got done flying and was pulled onto an apron for storage prior to maintenance and it just "blew the fuck up", it is highly probable that the FAA would ground all A350s until it figured out what caused the explosion.

The Falcon 9 was grounded for several weeks last month. SpaceX performed an investigation said "liquid oxygen leak, we'll double-extra check it next time" and the FAA was like "roger dodger space cowboy" and flights resumed.

It's normal.

Even when your booster falls in the ocean you need to have first submitted the paperwork to say that's what you are going to do. Safety is very important where falling back from high altitude and the authorities what to know exactly where you are coming down and what the risk of accidentally killing someone is. So no, they do care if your booster comes down in the wrong place, or if your landing plan doesn't work out as expected.

Politically motivated attacks on his companies do exist, but I don't think this is one of them. The Falcon 9 flight plan had a major hiccup and it's standard FAA procedure to always investigate the failure when these things occur. Once they identify that the issue is something to do with the landing hardware and (hopefully) not the engines' booster burn Polaris Dawn will be back in business. This will likely take just a couple of days.

Due to the booster failure, see earlier submission from before the grounding action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41377762

Which is ridiculous. It was it's 23rd flight (the longest record holding booster)

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.

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.

What expertise do you have in this industry that makes you better suited to determine that it's safe for them to continue without grounding?

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.

> Boeing, their competitor, can’t even do it.

I think you mean ULA. Boeing proper doesn't build or launch rockets anymore, but they do own a part of a launch provider.

And the SpaceX flight that is grounded will have passengers.

No one cares about the booster that's already failed, they care about making sure others don't.

Yes but the one that they grounded is not some record breaking booster thats flown 23 times lol

It’s a booster SpaceX flew and attempted (and expected) to land. The deviance from expectations merits investigation.

Broadly speaking, this is really good for SpaceX. It is probably the only launch company that can withstand FAA scrutiny of spacefaring like aviation.

As another post said, just because a failure happened on this stage of flight, doesn't mean it couldn't happen on another, including a manned mission.

> it was not anticipated that it would fail this time due to a known issue

It was anticipated it would fail eventually. They will review this failure and use information from it to bolster their refurbishing program.

> For comparison, if a plane crashed after 23 flights everyone would assume it was a factory defect.

Planes are meant to fly well more than 23 flights so that's a bad comparison.

No other booster has flown more than 23 flights, this is unchartered territory.

> It was anticipated it would fail eventually.

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."

> They will review this failure and use information from it to bolster their refurbishing program.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Due to the booster's failure to relight for landing. Humans wouldn't be anywhere near it at that point, so it doesn't have much to do with Polaris Dawn directly.

Just because a failure occurred at one point in a flight does not mean that's the only point in the flight that the underlying issue could cause a failure.

Not even the engine relight, it was just the landing leg suffered a structural failure and the engine bonked into the ground which caused the fire.

SpaceX has seen a couple boosters destroyed in a landing failure. Did the FAA ground them after those failed landing attempts? Genuinely asking because I don’t remember if they did or not.

No. But those were experimental landings. This was an unexpected failure.

Are you sure? They initiated an investigation for the first 3 Starship launches and those were experimental.

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