FAA halts SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch after upper stage issue
The US Federal Aviation Administration has grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet pending an investigation into an upper stage problem.
SpaceX wants the Federal Aviation Administration to allow its grounded Falcon 9 rocket fleet to return to flight amid an ongoing public safety investigation, allowing the company to resume its batch of uncrewed commercial flights while engineers study what happened during Thursday’s upper stage failure.
But what about Falcon 9 flights carrying astronauts?
The Polaris Dawn mission, with billionaire commander Jared Isaacman and three other commercial astronauts in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, was scheduled to launch as early as July 31 from Cape Canaveral Space Station. Similarly, NASA’s Crew-9 spacecraft was scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in August.
more: The US Federal Aviation Administration has grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, suspending Space Coast missions indefinitely.
“What I imagine the requirement would be that they understand what happened, have a plan to fix it, and at least send an uncrewed Falcon 9 to verify the fixes before Polaris Dawn is cleared to launch,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“That won’t really be a problem, because they have plenty of spare Falcon 9s, ready to go,” McDowell said.
Assuming SpaceX adds instruments to the rocket upon return to flight to gather additional diagnostics for investigators, McDowell said, “the question is whether it will be weeks or months” before the Federal Aviation Administration gives permission to resume crewed missions.
On Monday, SpaceX asked the Federal Aviation Administration to approve that last week’s anomaly did not pose a safety risk, giving the Falcon 9 rocket the green light to return to flight while the investigation remains open. The ill-fated rocket, which was carrying a payload of 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Spaceport in California, had leaked liquid oxygen in its upper second stage — unexpectedly forcing the satellites to deploy into a very shallow orbit.
“The FAA is reviewing the application and will be guided by data and safety at every step of the process,” the FAA said in a statement about SpaceX’s application, which was filed Monday. Other details are still unknown.
“This will impact crewed launches more than (regular) launches because they will make sure they have planned well and everything is safe before they put another crew on board,” said Laura Forczyk, founder and CEO of space consulting firm Astralitekal in Atlanta.
Falcon 9 rockets have launched 46 of the 50 missions to Florida.
Meanwhile, the Space Coast program’s launch schedule — which has been on a record-breaking run this year — remains largely on hold indefinitely. Falcon 9 rockets were responsible for 46 of the 50 missions launched through 2024 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s neighboring Kennedy Space Center.
In a statement, SpaceX pledged to “conduct a full investigation in coordination with the FAA, determine the root cause, and take corrective actions to ensure the success of future missions.” According to the federal agency, “return to flight is contingent upon the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the incident does not impact public safety.”
Florida Today reached out to NASA, which emailed the following statement:
“While the SpaceX Starlink launch was an all-commercial mission, NASA is receiving information from SpaceX on all items of interest related to the Falcon 9 rocket as part of standard fleet monitoring activities. Crew safety and mission assurance are NASA’s top priorities,” the statement said.
“SpaceX has been forthcoming in providing information and is including NASA in the company’s ongoing investigation into the anomaly to understand the issue and the path forward,” the statement read. “NASA will provide updates on the agency’s missions, including potential impacts to the schedule, if any, as more information becomes available.”
SpaceX has a history of being open about problems, said John Holst, a Florida-based space consultant and author of the blog Ill-Defined Space.
“These are rare cases for SpaceX. So I’m sure SpaceX will try to get through this quickly, but at the same time, the FAA and NASA have a process to ensure the mission they want to go through and understand exactly what happened,” Holst said.
“Because they don’t want the second stage to go wrong — the unscheduled rapid disassembly — under astronauts trying to get into orbit,” he said.
What the FAA and SpaceX might find during their investigation
SpaceX operates under the philosophy of “good enough is never good enough,” McDowell said.
“They keep tinkering with the design and improving it and changing it, right? They’re in the Silicon Valley mode, not the old NASA mode, which says, ‘Yeah, once you get it working, don’t change anything,’” he said.
“Was this (anomaly) the result of a design change? It wouldn’t be a fundamental design flaw, because they’ve done so many launches. So the other possibility is that it was a manufacturing or assembly error. That’s what investigators have to look at,” he said.
McDowell said SpaceX and the FAA must ensure that any potential problem doesn’t impact the Polaris Dawn mission. If the same upper stage oxygen leak occurred during Polaris Dawn, SpaceX would lose the mission, but not the crew — who might be able to maneuver Dragon for an emergency return to Earth, he said.
He said he would be surprised if SpaceX engineers took more than a month to get to the root cause and fix it for uncrewed Starlink missions — but “the question is, how long will it take for the FAA to be satisfied?”
What happened to the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket?
During the launch in California on Thursday, SpaceX announced that the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket performed normally, lifting the second stage and Starlink satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a successful landing of the drone ship.
“The second stage goes to very low Earth orbit, then it goes for about 40 minutes to the highest point in that orbit, then it restarts (its engine) to get to the orbit where they’re going to deploy all the Starlink satellites. What happened this time is that the restart didn’t happen,” McDowell said.
SpaceX said the satellites were left in an eccentric orbit just 135 kilometers above Earth’s surface, or less than half the expected perigee altitude.
“The atmosphere is very dense, and the drag that satellites experience as they make their way through the upper atmosphere will cause them to fall very quickly. What’s worse is that the small argon-powered electric rocket motors on the satellites aren’t powerful enough to overcome that drag,” McDowell said.
“Although SpaceX tried to fire those rocket engines to rescue the satellites and lift them into a higher orbit, they didn’t have enough power to overcome the drag at that low altitude,” he said.
“So, within a few hours to probably a day, all those lollipops would have fallen — burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.
Companies waiting to return to flying
Beyond satellites, the Falcon 9 has launched a colorful variety of missions into orbit this year from the Space Coast, including:
The day after Crew-8 launched in March, Cape Canaveral-based Sidus Space achieved a major corporate milestone by launching its first satellite, LizzieSat-1, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on a SpaceX Transporter-10 mission from Vandenberg.
“I was shocked,” said Mark Lee, chief quality inspector for Sidus Space, of Thursday’s incident. “They had a great success.” He said his company is planning another launch later in the year, and hopes the FAA ruling won’t significantly impact that timing.
Now that it’s commonplace on the Space Coast, Starlink launches don’t get the same attention — or crowds of spectators — as high-profile rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
“We do not anticipate any immediate impact as most summer vacationers have already made their plans,” Peter Kranis, executive director of the Space Coast Tourism Bureau, said in an email about the FAA’s decision.
“There is always a bit of a slowdown from September to the fall, so we don’t expect it to be any different this year,” Cranes said.
Brooke Edwards is a space reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] Or on X: @Brook of stars.