SpaceX’s Falcon rocket fleet was grounded for the third time in three months after a problem occurred with the second stage on Saturday following the successful launch of the Dragon Capsule carrying two crews to the International Space Station. The suspension of flights comes as the company prepares to launch two missions to explore the solar system in October with tight launch windows.
SpaceX said the second stage of the Falcon 9 that launched NASA’s Crew 9 mission failed to properly fire its Merlin Vacuum engine less than 30 minutes after launching the Dragon Freedom into a planned orbit of 117 by 128 miles (189 by 206 km).
Engine operation is designed to prevent the rocket body from becoming space debris by propelling the platform into the atmosphere for destructive reentry. Any debris was supposed to fall into the ocean without causing any damage in an area previously designated in warnings to sailors and pilots.
“The Falcon 9 second stage was jettisoned into the ocean as planned, but experienced an indefinite deorbit burn,” SpaceX said in a social media post, shortly after midnight EDT Sunday. “As a result, the second stage landed safely in the ocean, but outside the target area.”
This incident is likely to trigger an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees the company’s launch licenses. SpaceX is currently in a dispute with the Federal Aviation Administration over fines related to Falcon 9 activities at Kennedy Space Center and a delay in obtaining authorization for the fifth Starship test flight from Starbase in Texas.
Spaceflight Now has reached out to the FAA for comment but has not yet received a response, with FAA offices closed for the weekend.
Debris from the rocket stage is supposed to have fallen in an area of the Pacific Ocean that started east of New Zealand, but it likely ended up falling farther, but still south of the equator, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and tracker of space launches and spacecraft. Satellite. Satellites.
“The most likely failure mode that still results in re-entry into the atmosphere is minor burn,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “So you would expect entry to be more advanced…but not by much.”
McDowell told Spaceflight Now that he estimates the orbital burn should have occurred around 1:55 p.m. EDT (1755 UTC) as the vehicle passed over Yemen. If everything had gone as planned, reentry into the atmosphere would have occurred about 35 minutes later.
Here is the ground track showing the planned reentry area at the bottom left. My analysis indicates that an orbit outside the nominal range that still ends in the return phase will impact the orange line somewhere between the end of the white rectangle and the equator pic.twitter.com/NgG2ZL3SIe
– Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) September 29, 2024
SpaceX was scheduled to launch 20 OneWeb satellites from a West Coast launch pad at Space Force Base Vandenberg late Sunday night local time, but that mission has been put on hold, along with a Starlink delivery mission from Cape Canaveral that was scheduled to take place. Originally on Wednesday.
“We will resume the launch after we better understand the root cause [of the problem]SpaceX said in its statement.
This will be the third downtime of the Falcon 9 fleet in three months. An upper stage problem led to the loss of 20 Starlink satellites on July 11. Flights resumed 15 days later after the company identified the cause of the liquid oxygen leak and came up with a quick solution. The briefest suspension came just three days when the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket landed on the deck of a SpaceX drone ship after a successful launch on August 28. The company did not reveal the cause of this unfortunate accident.
The grounding of the Falcon fleet will be of particular concern to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which plan to launch missions to explore the solar system within days of each other in early October.
On October 7, a Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral with ESA’s Hera mission to study the Didymos binary asteroid system impacted by the DART mission in September 2022. The launch window runs until October 27.
Then on October 10, the Falcon Heavy, which uses the same second stage as the Falcon 9, is scheduled to launch NASA’s Europa Clipper on a mission to explore one of Jupiter’s most interesting moons. The Falcon Heavy will need to be fully functional for the $5 billion mission and will require two burns for the rocket’s second stage.
The spacecraft will launch from the rocket at a speed of about 25,000 mph (40,200 kph), the fastest speed ever achieved by the upper stage of a Falcon rocket. The launch window for Europe Clipper will close on October 30.
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