SpaceX gets good news from the Air Force on the Zuma mission

The important national security customer gives SpaceX a vote of confidence.

A little more than two weeks have passed since the apparent loss of the highly classified Zuma mission. Since then, SpaceX has publicly and privately stated that its Falcon 9 rocket performed nominally throughout the flight—with both its first and second stages firing as anticipated.

Now, the US Air Force seems to be backing the rocket company up. "Based on the data available, our team did not identify any information that would change SpaceX's Falcon 9 certification status," Lieutenant General John Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, told Bloomberg News. This qualified conclusion came after a preliminary review of data from the Zuma launch. That's according to Thompson, who said the Air Force will continue to review data from all launches.

However tentative, this statement buttresses the efforts by SpaceX to say that, from its perspective, the mission was a success. The statement also adds to the concerns of Northrop Grumman, which built the Zuma payload and the adapter that connected it to the Falcon 9 rocket. Northrop Grumman was also responsible for separating after the second stage of the Zuma rocket reached space. The aerospace veteran has yet to publicly comment on specifics of the Zuma mission since the launch.

No one has officially confirmed this on the record, but sources have told Ars that, after the launch, the Zuma payload never successfully separated from the rocket. Instead, it remained partially or completely attached to the second stage and re-entered Earth's atmosphere after 1.5 orbits.

Following the Zuma accident, critics of SpaceX have seized the opportunity to question the reliability of the rocket company, even though it has introduced serious competition into the US and global launch industries. However, this statement from the Air Force—which would have access to definitive data about the Zuma accident—is likely to go a long way toward answering questions about SpaceX's reliability.