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.
