A New Benchmark for Launch Vehicle Robustness

SpaceX’s July 11 launch failure sent a wave of panic through the industry, with many fearing that the commercial market’s only high-cadence heavy-lift rocket would be out of service for months.

Precedent suggested that a stand-down time of at least two months was reasonable, though the more complicated the failure cause, the longer the delay. SpaceX compressed that to about two weeks, returning the workhorse Falcon 9 to service with a trio of missions inside 30 hours. 

The Quilty Space chart above shows the return to flight time for flagship rockets with 10 or more flights after experiencing an upper-stage failure (with the exception of Soyuz, for which the failure mode was a destructive separation of the first-stage booster engines). Proton was excluded due to a lack of data.

SpaceX was clear on the reasoning: with more than 350 launches of the Falcon 9, including 298 (and now 301) on pre-flown boosters, the company had a trove of data it could use to quickly ID the anomaly. That, combined with SpaceX’s already high production rate – the company expects to produce ~200 upper stages this year – made it possible to return to flight at breakneck speeds.

While the industry will still benefit in the long term from having multiple high-cadence paths to orbit, SpaceX has shown that a launch failure doesn't have to be the showstopper it used to be. 

SOURCE: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/spacex-roars-back-to-orbit-barely-two-weeks-after-in-flight-anomaly/