Two hours after SpaceX launched its latest Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday evening, a message popped up from CEO Elon Musk on X : “Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted.
Two hours after SpaceX launched its latest Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday evening, a message popped up from CEO Elon Musk on X: “Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown.” Translation, per the New York Times: The second stage of the rocket “sustained a rare but catastrophic failure”, disintegrating while in orbit with a cargo of 20 Starlink satellites aboard. Musk added that his team was “reviewing data tonight to understand [the] root cause” of the rocket’s RUD, or rapid unscheduled disassembly, which came after an uneventful first launch phase from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base.
