SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket can return to flight, FAA says

Well that was quick! As we figured it would be. Thanks to Mike for working a Friday evening to publish the great news to start the weekend with!

Kudos too to the FAA for responding so quickly. For all those bashing them for what seemed like an overreaction, being that the incident happened 400 miles offshore on an unmanned drone/barge, they were just doing their job to ensure public safety. Without knowing if it was just a collapsed landing leg (or actuator, as I'd read someplace else), or something more major like a failed engine having burned through the side of the rocket, they had to err on the side of caution. Especially too since often SpaceX does a return to landing site.

Honestly the FAA have been really cooperative with the space industry and I'm sure are feeling damned if they do, damned if they don't. The SpaceX haters accuse the FAA of being too cozy with SpaceX and we SpaceX fans accuse the FAA of being an impediment to SpaceX controlled by a higher, nefarious authority.

Hoping the coastal weather improves quickly so we can get Polaris Dawn off on it's exciting adventure!

It still seems to me that the FAA's default position is that they should stop everything while they ask if there is any reason to stop everything, and need assurance that there is no reason to stop everything before letting anything continue.

I just don't think that is the proper default position. Having worked as a risk assessor for some technological industry regulators, I helped establish a process for rapidly reviewing event reports to develop an understanding of the potential risk implications. From there, we modulated the response efforts to appropriately assign investigative resources and, if it seemed to be necessary, issue orders to the company involved.

Given the small fraction of SpaceX Falcon 9 launches that have landing failures and the location and type of failure in this case, it just does not seem warranted to stop all Falcon 9 launches. Perhaps stopping return-to-launch-site landings on land, as opposed to uncrewed barges at sea, would have been warranted. Maybe still is, until a cause and fix are identified and implemented. At least there is a potential public safety connection with that more limited restriction.

Unclear Engineer said:

It still seems to me that the FAA's default position is that they should stop everything while they ask if there is any reason to stop everything, and need assurance that there is no reason to stop everything before letting anything continue.

I just don't think that is the proper default position. Having worked as a risk assessor for some technological industry regulators, I helped establish a process for rapidly reviewing event reports to develop an understanding of the potential risk implications. From there, we modulated the response efforts to appropriately assign investigative resources and, if it seemed to be necessary, issue orders to the company involved.

Given the small fraction of SpaceX Falcon 9 launches that have landing failures and the location and type of failure in this case, it just does not seem warranted to stop all Falcon 9 launches. Perhaps stopping return-to-launch-site landings on land, as opposed to uncrewed barges at sea, would have been warranted. Maybe still is, until a cause and fix are identified and implemented. At least there is a potential public safety connection with that more limited restriction.

We did not know the failure was with a system that is used only for landing. What if a turbopump exploded a half-second before touchdown was the cause? Unlikely but it could have been the cause. It seems they quickly figured out it was a landing-only issue.

If the regulatory agencies start reacting to unlikely "what ifs" every time some failure happens, then they need to do it in a process similar to what I described, where they put it in a logical context of what the "if" probabilities are and what the conditional consequences are. That process is called risk assessment. It is used elsewhere, including by NASA. It isn't perfect, but it is better than just stopping everything that you don't understand (because you weren't involved) until you learn and catch-up. In this case, it only took 2 days for the FAA to agree that it was not something that needed to ground all Falcon 9 launches indefinitely. What would have been the risk if they had not immediately issued a stop, but studied it quickly to decide if they should issue a stop? It looks like SpaceX might have been able to get off 2 more launches in that time frame, both landing on barges. If both of those had resulted in the same landing failures, what would the consequences have been to public safety? The answers is there still would have been no consequences to public safety. And, SpaceX's next 2 launches and barge landings both were accomplished without any further "mishaps".

The contrast between how the FAA is handling "mishaps" at SpaceX compared to how it has handled the Boeing 737MAX crashes (note the plural) and the Boeing StarLiner thruster failures (note the plural) reminds me of the types of biases I have seen elsewhere in other regulatory agencies. No, that does not "prove" that the FAA is biased against SpaceX, but it does not look good for the FAA's reputation, either. And, like it or not, even "independent" regulatory agencies are not immune to political pressures and interventions - in multiple directions, simultaneously. There are often "middle managers" with conflicting agendas responding to outside or higher-up pressures in conflicting manners. I would be very surprised if the FAA is just "one big happy family" on many of these issues - but not surprised that some spokesperson for the agency would make that claim.