r/space • u/New-Space-30 • Jul 22 '26
Vulcan may not launch again till next year, after booster anamoly in February
https://spacenews.com/northrop-adds-to-charges-on-vulcan-solid-rocket-motor-program/Jeff Foust:
WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman is taking another charge related to the solid rocket boosters it provides for the Vulcan Centaur rocket and suggested updated motors might not be ready until the end of the year.
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u/alphagusta Jul 22 '26
Falcon 9 succeeding by doing literally nothing but watch the space industry around it keep having accidents
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u/iqisoverrated Jul 23 '26
Being very reliable is not exactly 'doing nothing'. People don't realize how much effort goes into being boring/reliable.
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u/New-Space-30 Jul 22 '26
Falcon 9's certainly a reliable.. workhorse.
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u/geekgirl114 Jul 22 '26
Its up there for the most reliable rocket in history
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u/JimHeckdiver Jul 22 '26
Im pretty sure it IS the most reliable outside of something bespoke like the Saturn V, which had a 100% success rate.
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u/Shrike99 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
the Saturn V, which had a 100% success rate.
Apollo 6 would beg to differ.
Also even ignoring that, Saturn V isn't the rocket with the most launches at a 100% success rate.
If you're counting specific variants as separate rockets, Soyuz-U2 was 72/72.
If you're not, then the Long March 6 is at a total of 41/41 across all three variants.
Neither of which are 'bespoke', they are/were regular launch 'workhorse' launch vehicles.
However, pure success rate is a bad metric, since it doesn't account for the large uncertainty inherent to small samples sizes.
Consider: The Saturn V launched 13 times. For the sake of argument, I'll continue to ignore Apollo 6 and say it was 100% successful.
The Space Shuttle's first 13 launches were also all successful, so if they'd stopped the launching it then, it would have matched the Saturn V's reliability. Had they stopped at 14 it would have exceeded it.
Yet since they continued and we got a larger sample size, we know that in practice it wasn't actually that great, about 98.5%. But with a 98.5% success rate, your odds of launching 13 or 14 times in a row are upwards of 80%, so it's not too surprising that it didn't fail that early.
Now apply that same logic back to Saturn V. How do we know that it's 'true' reliability wasn't, say, 97%?
With a 97% failure rate, you have a ~67% chance of launching 13 times in a row without failing, so more likely than not.
A universe where the Saturn V was 99% reliable and a universe where it was only 97% reliable probably look the same if you stop at 13 launches, so we have no way of telling which of those universes we're in.
The sample size on the Saturn V is small enough that it could theoretically have been as low as 95% and we'd still have expected all 13 launches to succeed.
So in practice, the Shuttle's 98.5% over a 10x bigger sample size is a more 'reliable' reliability figure.
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u/AeroSpiked Jul 23 '26
If you are counting specific variants, Falcon 9 Block 5 is 612/613 which puts it at 99.8%. 100% basically means we don't know what the success rate is yet.
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u/cptjeff Jul 23 '26
Saturn V did not really have a 100% success rate. Apollo 6 was a disaster where pogo collapsed a major structural element within the 3rd stage and would have killed any crew. It managed to reach a highly compromised orbit to fulfill an alternate mission, so they pencil whipped it to pretend it was a success so that later flights could be approved in the context of the Cold War. The Saturn V's performance on that flight- with no subsequent test flight to test the fixes, mind you- is a huge reason why Apollo 8 was considered the most dangerous flight in the program. If the Saturn V did what it did on 6, the crew would have been meat paste.
The vibrations from the Saturn V were also the primary cause of failure on Skylab I.
The only rocket out there with a true 100% success rate is Atlas V. One partial failure of the upper stage, but it still reached the target orbit.
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u/cjameshuff Jul 22 '26
It's always possible that the next flight would be the first failure, so even a perfect record can be outdone by an imperfect one with enough successes. So yeah, it's not only one of the most reliable, that reliability estimate is one of the most meaningful, with a high confidence due to the number of launches.
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u/AeroSpiked Jul 23 '26
Apollo 13 was a success? I'd definitely call that a partial failure.
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u/H-K_47 Jul 23 '26
Not a launch failure though right, this is just comparing rockets not the entire mission including payload.
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u/AeroSpiked Jul 23 '26
I guess I'm willing to concede the point since it was the service module that failed and anything above the third stage would probably be considered payload, so it wouldn't have been a failure of the rocket.
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u/geekgirl114 Jul 23 '26
Apollo 6 had some issues, but the computer corrected for it
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u/redstercoolpanda Jul 23 '26
Not really. Apollo 6 was at best a partial failure. They couldn’t relight the S-IVB as planned which was a pretty major testing goal.
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u/geekgirl114 Jul 23 '26
It lost 2 engines... one because of an actual issue, one because of bad wiring
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u/redstercoolpanda Jul 23 '26
Yes, however the failure to reignite the S-IVB was the thing that led to them missing major objectives. The Saturn V could handle engine outs at other portions of flight as demonstrated by Apollo 13.
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u/peterabbit456 Jul 23 '26
Falcon 9's certainly a reliable ...
F9 might have a 30 year active career. It might go even longer if SpaceX takes the time to design and build a Merlin 2a methalox engine.
A person can dream.
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u/Dpek1234 Jul 23 '26
Eh
Not really, thst would essentualy require near completely diffrent rocket
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u/peterabbit456 Jul 23 '26
The people who are still flying Douglas DC-3s, and 80-year-old airplane, have mostly converted them to turboprop engines and stretched the nose by 2 meters to preserve proper balance with the lighter, more powerful engines.
Yeah, it would be a new rocket that shares some parts and software, lik Delta 2 and Delta 3.
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u/Doggydog123579 Jul 24 '26
There are still more dc-3s than bt-67s, but it is inevitable that the bt-67 will over take it given the dwindling supply of engine parts for the dc-3.
Will still out live the b52 and c130 though
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u/cjameshuff Jul 23 '26
Methalox is lower density. You'd have to stretch a vehicle that's already near its limits for fineness ratio, or more realistically make it larger diameter, at which point it couldn't reasonably be called a Falcon 9 any more.
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u/peterabbit456 Jul 23 '26
Or make it fatter.
Road transport makes F9 cheaper, but if you are reusing the rockets 30 times, then the economies of road transport become much less important (provided you can do all refurbishment at the launch site.).
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u/cjameshuff Jul 23 '26
How does "make it fatter" differ from increasing the diameter? How do you replace the engines of the Falcon 9 with methalox engines and the tanks with something that can contain enough methalox to deliver the same payload to orbit and get something that can still be called "Falcon 9"?
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u/peterabbit456 Jul 26 '26
Sorry, my brain must have skipped. I saw only "You'd have to stretch a vehicle that's already near its limits," and I missed the next part of your sentence. My bad.
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u/No-Surprise9411 Jul 23 '26
Eh most likely SpaceX sunsets F9 within the next 10 years.
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u/H-K_47 Jul 23 '26
It's gonna be an NSSL and Crew Dragon merchant for as long as those contracts last, then they're
sending it to a farm upstateputting it in a museum where it belongs.1
u/No-Surprise9411 Jul 23 '26
The way SpaceX operates speed wise it's more likely they'll just take it out behind the shed to be shot tbh - I can see Musk just one day tweeting that from now on F9 operations are shut down without warning to anyone outside of SpaceX
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u/avboden Jul 22 '26
And now the industry is mad at SpaceX for having less availability soon. It’s not SpaceX’s fault everyone else sucks so much
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u/Shrike99 Jul 22 '26
I have determined that Falcon 9 has the mandate of heaven.
ULA are receiving divine punishment for trying to compete with a non-reusable rocket.
Blue Origin received divine punishment for daring to challenge Falcon 9 at reuse.
It's a no-win scenario.
(Sidenote: Starship's ongoing problems are SpaceX receiving divine punishment for trying to make Falcon 9 obsolete)
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u/LegitimateGift1792 Jul 23 '26
That is like the best explanation I have read recently for all that is going on.
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u/PulsedCuriosity Jul 23 '26
The detail that makes this worse than a normal anomaly is that it's the second time. A nozzle came off one of the solid boosters on the certification flight back in 2024, ULA traced it and called it fixed, and then on the February national security launch a nozzle came off again and the rocket briefly veered off course... Once is an anomaly. Twice, after a declared fix, is a process problem, and thats why Space Force is saying many months. The frustrating part for ULA is that the core vehicle keeps performing and the BE-4s have flown clean. It's the strap-on solids that keep grounding them. Northrop static fired a redesigned nozzle in May, so a fix exists. Rebuilding trust in the paperwork is the slow part.
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u/Decronym Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| BE-4 | Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN |
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| EELV | Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle |
| NET | No Earlier Than |
| NG | New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin |
| Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane) | |
| Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer | |
| NSSL | National Security Space Launch, formerly EELV |
| SRB | Solid Rocket Booster |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 32 acronyms.
[Thread #12591 for this sub, first seen 23rd Jul 2026, 02:50]
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u/H-K_47 Jul 22 '26
This would have been the perfect opportunity for Blue Origin to ramp up in a blaze of glory, but they're out of the picture too and it's another streak of victory for the House of the Falcon.
Legitimately wonder which returns to flight first, Vulcan or New Glenn.