Haven't we just decided that regulatory agencies no longer have any say in the USA ?

We do still need regulations so everyone plays nice.

Congress just can’t make vague laws that they can blame someone else if there is blowback. (Management 101)

The recent judgement wasn't that regulators had no say, but that they could not interpret the law they enforce. Because of decades of poor drafting of legislation, there's lots of areas where a regulator might find there to be little clarity - hitherto they'd use their judgement, and the courts would generally back them. The recent judgement basically sets a precedent that only the legislature makes laws, and the interpretation of laws sits with the courts, not regulators.

Congress always have and always will make vague laws, but in future they'll have nobody but the courts to blame for any blowback. As one consequence, the courts will be clogged up with all the shitbag corporations of America (most of them) trying to minimise regulatory oversight.

It's also interesting to think how all of this would have played (and may yet) if the FAA and NTSB have to operate to the written word of legislation - how much do politicians and policy officers know about technology, aviations, or indeed any real world matter? And if the law is written without any understanding of the matters it applies to, without proper professional interpretation, what then?

It is worth noting that whilst the Texas court concerned is unsurprisingly anti-regulators, the key thing here is that the Supreme Court (stuffed with his lackeys by TOJ in his last presidency) have upheld it, and that's why it is a big deal. There would seem to be no reason to expect the situation to be changed, but this judgement is going to be bad for certain stakeholders and good for others. The people it is good for are investors, corporations, and howling MAGA types. For citizens at large, the environment, healthcare, food, public safety it could well turn out to be a disaster.

Always remembering that a lot of those citizens are also included in the investors, whether they realise it or not.

Er, the FAA were mentioned in the article... What's your point? SpaceX have no motivation to take shortcuts with their investigation into the root cause of this anomaly.

The rapidly with which SpaceX have chased down issues in the past isn't because they've taken shortcuts, but because so much of their manufacturing is in house - they're not chasing up lots of subcontractors across the country.

"Er, the FAA were mentioned in the article... What's your point? SpaceX have no motivation to take shortcuts with their investigation into the root cause of this anomaly."

You could equally argue that Boeing would have no motivation to take shortcuts with investigations.

Up until now, it's always been assumed that SpaceX could launch a Crew Dragon to bring the two astronauts apparently stuck on the ISS back to Earth.

This may have to make NASA think again about this, at least until Falcon 9 is flying again.

Crew Dragon does require Falcon 9 to fly again... Maybe you meant until Falcon 9 flies a few unmanned missions first?

In any case, Crew Dragon doesn't require a crew to be launched and rendezvous with the ISS.

Sending an uncrewed Dragon would get the Starliner crew home, but wouldn't help in relieving other ISS crew who are due a rotation.

SpaceX is, of course, looking deeply into what went wrong. But let's not forget that this is their first in-flight mission failure since 2015, on mission #19. This was mission #354. In the history of spaceflight, that's an unheard-of reliability rate for a launch platform.

It's also worth noting that, unlike the lower-stage booster*, the upper stage is not reused: a new one is built for every mission, so every flight is a shakedown flight. Rather like the SLS, in fact.

Clearly there was either a manufacturing error for this upper stage, or it was damaged during stacking, or there was a materials fault. Whichever it is, the authorities and SpaceX are absolutely correct to be going into analysis to determine the cause, and set it right. That's standard aerospace practice.

Would I happily fly in a Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 launch platform? Definitely. Don't forget: the payloads were undamaged and were deployed; it's just the rocket motor that blew up.

Would I fly atop a Falcon Heavy? No. Not enough launches to establish a safety pattern yet.

In a Starship? No way on Earth! At least not until they've proven it as reliable as F9 is now.

No, I'm not a SpaceX simp. I'm a former satellite engineer who's been impressed by their reliability.

(* In fairness, some boosters are contractually single-use. Personally, I'd prefer to use one that's got flight heritage, but I'm not writing cheques on Government accounts.)

Also, this anomaly would not have prevented a successful Dragon mission to the ISS, since the second stage engine isn't relit on an ISS mission.

Surely it would be better to track this down to a design fault or a quality control issue, either of which could be rectified?

Better than if they just shrug their shoulders and said, "Oh well, it was an isolated anomaly, let's try another one..."

Nobody is expecting SpaceX to shrug their shoulders on this. Remember that the cargo they lost was theirs, just as will be the case for their future Starlink missions, and their reputation for reliability is a commercial asset when they sell their launch services to others. It is absolutely in their interests to find the root cause and fix it, just as it has always been.

It's an interesting question - to an engineer - as to how to find faults in a piece of hardware that can't be examined hands-on. Obviously there is telemetry that might offer clues. And some companies use high resolution cameras to record the assembly at every stage of the production process - I don't know if SpaceX uses such a system.