The United States Federal Aviation Administration said Monday that SpaceX must examine why the second stage of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket failed after a NASA astronaut mission on Saturday, grounding the rocket for the third time in three months.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday evening after launching into space on Saturday despite a Falcon 9 rocket malfunction.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov flew to the ISS on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, leaving two seats open to return the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts to Earth in February.
The Crew-9 Dragon successfully docked with the ISS, but the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that sent it into orbit allegedly encountered a problem after detaching from the Dragon capsule.
While the most critical part of the mission went off without a hitch, the problem happened during the second stage’s deorbit burn, making it Falcon 9’s third anomaly in three months.
The deorbit burn is a precise firing of the stage’s solitary Merlin Vacuum engine to ensure that any reentry debris hits a specific zone of the ocean.
“After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area,” SpaceX posted to X.
“We will resume launching after we better understand the root cause,” it said, implying that the rocket would be out of use for a while.
This anomaly comes after another issue with the second-stage Merlin vacuum engine in July. When attempting to launch a batch of Starlink satellites, an oxygen leak in a sensor line led to ice accumulation around the engine.
This reduced the temperature of the components, resulting in a “hard start” that harmed the engine. The next month, a Falcon 9 first stage toppled over while landing on one of the company’s drone ships. Both mishaps resulted in a brief pause in launches.
We earlier reported that in a $15 million lawsuit, the makers of the mocking party game “Cards Against Humanity” are accusing Elon Musk’s SpaceX of unlawfully dumping “gravel, tractors, and space garbage” on their immaculate property.
