SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after a rocket broke apart in space and damaged an entire constellation of Starlink satellites, the first time in more than seven years that the rocket has been relied upon by the global space industry.
About an hour after the Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket’s second stage failed to restart and deploy 20 Starlink satellites into a shallow orbit, where they would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.
An attempt to restart the engine “caused an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X on Friday morning, using the industry acronym for Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly, which typically means an explosion.
The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the incident, repairs the rocket and receives FAA approval, the agency said in a statement. That process could take weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the incident and SpaceX’s plan to fix it.
The failed mission of the world’s most active rocket ended a successful streak of more than 300 consecutive missions that had kept SpaceX’s dominance of the launch industry. Many nations and space companies rely on the privately held SpaceX, valued at about $200 billion, to get their satellites and astronauts into space.
Musk said SpaceX is updating the software of Starlink satellites to force the thrusters on the satellites to work harder than usual to avoid violent re-entry.
“Unlike an episode of Star Trek, this probably won’t work, but it’s still worth a try,” Musk said.
SpaceX wrote on X Friday night that the satellites pose no threat to the public. The company did not estimate when they would return to Earth, which would appear as streaks of light in the sky.
“Meteor,” Musk replied to SpaceX’s post.
SpaceX said earlier in the day that their altitude was so shallow that Earth’s gravity pulled them closer to the atmosphere by 3 miles (5 km) with each orbit, confirming they would “re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and completely disappear.”
In a statement Friday, NASA said it tracks all of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 missions.
“SpaceX has been open in providing information and is inviting NASA to participate in the company’s ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and the way forward,” a spokesperson for the US space agency said.
SpaceX said the second-stage failure occurred after engineers detected a leak in liquid oxygen, a propellant.
‘INCREDIBLE RUN’
The incident occurred on the Falcon 9’s 354th mission. It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its payload, an Israeli communications satellite.
“We knew this incredible journey was going to end at some point,” Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s former vice president of propulsion who designed the Falcon 9’s engines, told Musk on X. “… The team will fix the problem and start the cycle over.”
The failure will likely hamper SpaceX’s increasing pace of Falcon 9 launches. Last year’s 96 launches were the most to date and exceeded the annual total of any country. By comparison, China, a U.S. space rival, launched 67 missions into space in 2023 using a variety of rockets.
“Falcons very rarely fail. They have a much higher mission success rate than most other rockets in development,” said Will Whitehorn, president of venture capital firm Seraphim Space Investment Trust.
While Thursday night’s Falcon 9 flight was an internal mission, the rocket’s stall could impact subsequent SpaceX customer missions.
The Falcon 9 is the only US rocket capable of carrying NASA crews to the International Space Station. NASA is scheduled to launch its next astronaut mission in August, with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launching aboard the rocket.
NASA is trying to help fix unrelated issues with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which is currently undergoing testing to prove it can become NASA’s second astronaut flight into orbit alongside Crew Dragon.
SpaceX is ready to launch its Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon mission as early as July 31, sending four private astronauts into orbit for a few days to conduct the first commercial spacewalk in the company’s newly designed spacesuits.
Jared Isaacman, head of the Polaris program and a crew member, said he hoped SpaceX would recover quickly from the incident.
“For Polaris Dawn, we will fly whenever SpaceX is ready and have full confidence in the rocket, spacecraft, and its operations,” Isaacman wrote on X.
Musk responded that “we will investigate this issue and look for any other near misses.”
SpaceX has launched about 7,000 Starlink satellites of various designs into space since 2018 for its global broadband internet network. Industry analysts said the satellites in Thursday’s mission could be worth at least $10 million combined.
