Updated September 30: adding statements from the FAA and NASA. Updating the Europa Clipper home window.
SpaceX's fleet of Falcon rockets was grounded for the third time in three months after a second-stage problem occurred Saturday following the successful launch of a Dragon capsule carrying two crew members to the International Space Station. The suspension of flights comes as the company prepares to launch two solar system exploration missions in October with narrow launch windows.
SpaceX said the second stage of the Falcon 9 that launched NASA's Crew 9 mission failed to successfully perform the ignition of its Merlin Vacuum engine less than 30 minutes after launching Dragon Freedom to a planned 117 × 128 mile (189 × 206 km).
The engine ignition is designed to prevent the rocket body from becoming space debris by propelling the stage into the atmosphere for destructive reentry. Any debris was supposed to fall harmlessly into the ocean in an area previously identified in warnings to sailors and aviators.
“The Falcon 9 second stage was placed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn,” SpaceX said in a social media post shortly after midnight EDT on Sunday. “As a result, the second stage landed safely in the ocean, but outside the target area.”
The mishap has sparked an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees the company's launch licenses. SpaceX is currently in dispute with the FAA over fines related to Falcon 9 activities at the Kennedy Space Center and delays in obtaining clearance for the fifth test flight of its Starship vehicle from Starbase in Texas.
“The FAA is aware that an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX NASA Crew-9 mission,” the FAA said in a statement issued Monday. “No public injuries or damage to public property have been reported. “The FAA demands an investigation.”
Debris from the rocket stage should have fallen into a stretch of the Pacific Ocean that started east of New Zealand, but probably ended up falling further down, but still south of the equator, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and satellite and space launch tracker. .
“The most likely failure mode that still results in reentry is a light burn,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “So the entry is expected to be further along… but not too far along.”
McDowell told Spaceflight Now that he estimates deorbitation should have occurred around 1:55 p.m. EDT (1755 UTC) as the craft passed over Yemen. If everything had gone as planned, re-entry would have occurred about 35 minutes later.
Here is the ground track showing the planned re-entry area at the bottom left. My analysis suggests that an off-nominal deorbit that still ends with a stage re-entry 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 satellites for OneWeb from its West Coast launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sunday night local time, but that mission was suspended, along with a Starlink delivery mission from Cape Cañaveral originally planned for 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 grounding of the Falcon 9 fleet in three months. An upper stage problem caused the loss of 20 Starlink satellites on July 11. Flights resumed 15 days later, after the company determined the cause of a liquid oxygen leak and found a quick solution. A shorter suspension of just three days came when a first stage of the Falcon 9 made a crash landing on the deck of SpaceX's unmanned craft after a successful launch on August 28. The company has not revealed the cause of this mishap.
The grounding of the Falcon fleet will be of particular concern to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which had planned to launch solar system exploration missions a few days apart in early October.
A Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on October 7 with ESA's Hera mission to study the Didymos binary asteroid system that was impacted by the DART mission in September 2022. Its launch window extends until October 27.
Then, on October 10, a Falcon Heavy, using the same second stage as the Falcon 9, will launch NASA's Europa Clipper on a mission to explore one of Jupiter's most intriguing moons. The Falcon Heavy will need its full performance for the $5 billion mission and two burns of the rocket's second stage will be required.
“NASA is fully committed to SpaceX research as NASA prepares for its upcoming missions and is assessing any impacts to the Europa Clipper mission,” the agency said in a statement Monday.
The spacecraft will be released from the rocket at a speed of approximately 25,000 mph (40,200 km per hour), the fastest speed ever achieved by a Falcon upper stage. The Europa Clipper launch window was recently extended to November 6.
