After losing telemetry at an altitude of about 300 km, and dumping the second stage in the ocean after a half orbit, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, positioned last night's launch of the Falcon 1 as a 90% success. Certainly, this launch will go in the record books as a failure, but it has been shown that the rocket mostly works. Given a working rocket and a reasonably fat order book, the business case for a privately-funded rocket company probably has been closed from Musk's perspective. A bonus is that we were shown something closer to "responsive space launch" (i.e., fuel up and fire away). I would be interested in finding out whether there ever has been a similar ignition-abort-recycle-launch occurrence in the history of space launch.
It is often perceived that governments are the only entities that have the financial wherewithal and staying power to weather the inevitable failures in space launch development. Beal Aerospace's travails seemed to confirm that conventional wisdom. However, SpaceX is showing that private firms can be persistent as well, even without an unlimited bank account. To be sure, SpaceX has solid government customers in DARPA and the Air Force, which has helped. Perhaps DARPA will become the customer of choice for small, inexpensive launch vehicles as they are working through the teething process. At these prices, it shouldn't be much of a problem for DARPA to buy a half dozen demonstration launches.
From a non-engineer's perspective, this launch made me feel like the Falcon 1 is a sturdy machine and that SpaceX had the launch process under control. There was a lot of drama involved with the first countdown and ignition (I laughed at the F bombs dropped under the breath of the engineer on the countdown net -- I empathized with his plight). But the rocket was able to recycle for another attempt without incident. SpaceX had the information at its fingertips to determine that it was fine to proceed with another attempt. In hindsight, it's clear that I did not have the same feeling during last year's first launch attempt. I am hoping that SpaceX uses the lessons learned during this and future launches to continuously improve its systems and processes in order eventually to make launches bullet-proof.
Overall, I think that SpaceX moved the ball down the field with this launch. It is an incremental improvement in the business of space launch, but such improvements have been long in coming. For this, I think hearty congratulations to SpaceX are in order.
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