It’s looking like there was a second-stage problem, either separation, or ignition (or both, since one could cause the other).
As I said last night, this is obviously a disappointment to the SpaceX team. Particularly since they had previously had a flight where this wasn’t a problem, so in a sense it was two steps forward, one step back. I think that at this point, almost anyone is going to be pretty leery of putting a payload on the vehicle until it’s had at least one successful flight. Is it the end? Despite what Elon said a long time ago about three strikes, it’s hard to see it now. He’s fully invested now, both financially and (I would imagine) emotionally, and he’s not going to come this far just to give up, particularly when tantalized by his previous almost-success on the second flight.
They’ll go through the telemetry, figure out as best they can what happened, and try again, and hopefully soon. In a sense, as someone noted in comments in the earlier post, Falcon 1 is really a test program for the bigger vehicles, though they should get an operational small launcher out of it as well.
As always, this points up the problem with expendable vehicles. They are very expensive to flight test, so you can’t afford to do very many, and every flight is a first flight, so you can’t wring bugs out of a vehicle with incremental testing. And it’s a lot harder to figure out what went wrong because you generally don’t get much debris to analyze (the first flight that failed off the pad was a rare exception)–you have to dig through electronic entrails. And NASA, of course, in its cargo-cult determination to redo Apollo, is taking exactly the same expensive and unreliable approach.
And just checking now, I see that Clark is having similar thoughts to mine.
Once the problem that caused this failure is determined, I would suggest that SpaceX just bite the bullet and allocate 2 or 3 Falcon I vehicles for test flights and fly them within a relatively short period, say six months.
This would represent a $20M-$30M investment but until the Falcon I is flying reliably, SpaceX will find it very difficult to get any more commercial or government payload contracts and it won’t have any chance of getting COTS D (ISS crew transport) funding. The Falcon 9 is a completely different vehicle but the Falcon I is what currently defines the company’s ability, or inability, to deliver what it says it can.
Anyway, best of luck to them in the future, but they know that they need more than just luck.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I see that Elon has a statement, which confirms my suspicion above:
There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.
That’s the kind of attitude you have to have, even if eventually, you do in fact have to give up. I hope he won’t have to.
Also note Clark’s comment at the end of the post, that SpaceX is following in the tradition of all expendable staged launch vehicles in its failure modes, though they do seem to be getting the avionics right.