So I was half-watching the Starlink livestream last night the way I half-watch most SpaceX launches now, which is to say with one eye while doing dishes, because that's what nine years of Falcon 9 not blowing up does to a person. You stop treating it like an event. It's just a Tuesday and there's a rocket going up from Vandenberg and it'll be fine, same as the last however-many-hundred times.
Except last night it wasn't fine.
The second stage had some kind of issue on its way to deploying the Starlink satellites. Early reporting is pointing at a liquid oxygen leak that caused the upper stage engine to shut down before it should have. The satellites got released, but into the wrong orbit, way lower than intended, and SpaceX itself said afterward that most of them probably won't be recoverable and will just burn up reentering. The FAA has already grounded Falcon 9 pending an investigation, which is the standard move but still a big deal given how much stuff is currently queued up behind this rocket.
And that's the part that actually made me sit up from the dishes. Falcon 9 hasn't had an honest-to-god mission failure since CRS-7 back in 2015. Nine years. I genuinely could not tell you the last time I saw a headline about a Falcon 9 going wrong, because there wasn't one — the whole pitch of the thing, the reason NASA trusts it with crew and the reason half the satellite operators on earth use it, is that it just works, over and over, boringly, hundreds of times in a row. That reliability is the product as much as the rocket is. Watching it snap on a random Thursday night Starlink mission, of all things, not some flashy crewed flight, feels almost anticlimactic and also somehow worse for it.
I'll admit part of my reaction here is not purely journalistic distance. I've got Starlink at my in-laws' place up in the mountains because cable never made it out there, and yeah, I did have the dumb passing thought of "great, is my father-in-law's internet about to get worse." Which is a ridiculous thing to worry about compared to what NASA is dealing with right now, but that's honestly where my brain went first. Priorities.
Because here's the thing that makes the timing rough: NASA does not need another rocket headache this month. Boeing's Starliner is still sitting docked at the ISS with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, well past its original week-long test flight window, while engineers keep working through thruster problems and helium leaks before anyone commits to a return date. That story's been dragging for weeks now and isn't really mine to relitigate here, but it's the backdrop this Falcon 9 news lands against. Two of America's crew-capable rocket programs having a rough stretch at the same time is not a great look, even if the Falcon 9 issue happened on an uncrewed Starlink run and not anything with people aboard.
What happens next matters more than the failure itself, honestly. SpaceX's whole operating model depends on flying constantly: Falcon 9 was averaging something like a launch every few days this year between Starlink batches, commercial payloads, and crew missions. There's a private astronaut mission and a NASA crew rotation both sitting somewhere in the queue depending on how fast the investigation wraps and how fast the FAA signs off on a return to flight. SpaceX has historically moved through these reviews quickly compared to, well, basically everyone else in the industry — they grounded and returned to flight in a couple weeks after a partial failure in 2023, if I remember right. So I wouldn't bet on this being a long pause. But "wouldn't bet on it being long" and "it's already fixed" are different things, and right now nobody outside SpaceX actually knows which one this is.
Anyway. Nine years is a genuinely wild run for a piece of hardware that leaves the atmosphere on purpose repeatedly. I'll take the streak ending as a reminder that none of this stuff is actually as routine as it's started to feel, which I think is a healthier way to watch a rocket launch than however I was watching it last night, half paying attention, doing dishes.