SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket hit a little bit of a snag this week.
On Monday (Feb. 2), a Falcon 9 efficiently launched 25 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) from California. However the higher stage did not carry out its deorbit burn as deliberate and ended up crashing again to Earth in an uncontrolled vogue. (The Falcon 9’s first stage aced its touchdown on a drone ship within the Pacific Ocean.)
Monday’s anomaly was the fourth Falcon 9 upper-stage incident up to now 19 months.
An higher stage sprang a leak of liquid oxygen throughout a Starlink launch on July 11, 2024, inflicting the satellites to be deployed too low; they had been quickly pulled down into Earth’s environment by drag. The FAA mandated an investigation into that incident, which took two weeks: The Falcon 9 was cleared to launch once more on July 25, and it returned to flight with a profitable Starlink mission two days later.
One other concern popped up on Sept. 28, 2024, through the launch of the Crew-9 astronaut mission to the ISS. The Falcon 9 bought the spaceflyers the place they wanted to go, however the higher stage carried out an off-nominal deorbit burn and got here again to Earth outdoors its goal zone.
The FAA once more required an investigation, which resulted in clearance to return to regular flight operations on Oct. 11. The company granted SpaceX a particular exemption, nonetheless, for the Oct. 7 launch of Europe’s Hera asteroid-inspecting spacecraft, as a result of it despatched the probe far past LEO and didn’t contain an upper-stage reentry.
Then, on Feb. 1, 2025, a Falcon 9 higher stage did not carry out its deorbit burn on an in any other case profitable Starlink mission. The rocket physique got here crashing again to Earth uncontrolled on Feb. 19, producing a fiery sky present for folks throughout Western Europe. The FAA didn’t require an investigation into that incident, telling Ars Technica that “all flight occasions occurred inside the scope of SpaceX’s licensed actions.”
So, what can we make of this information set? The 2 investigations cited above took about two weeks. So, if that is a dependable precedent, then the Falcon 9 ought to return to flight round Feb. 16 — 5 days later than Crew-12’s present goal date.
Such a delay would put Crew-12’s liftoff just about on its unique schedule. NASA and SpaceX had been concentrating on Feb. 15 for the mission however fast-tracked it to reduce the period of time the ISS is staffed by a skeleton crew of three, which has been the scenario since Jan. 15. (Crew-12’s predecessors, the 4 Crew-11 astronauts, got here residence a month early within the first-ever medical evacuation from the ISS.)
However we do not understand how predictive the above precedents actually are. The pattern measurement may be very small, and SpaceX might have realized sufficient from the opposite current incidents to chop the Falcon 9 grounding time down considerably. We’ll simply have to attend and see.
It is also price stressing that Falcon 9 incidents are only a few and much between, given how usually the rocket flies. For instance, the 4 upper-stage points mentioned on this story occurred throughout a stretch by which SpaceX launched greater than 240 Falcon 9 missions, the overwhelming majority of which had been utterly profitable. (SpaceX misplaced first-stage boosters throughout or shortly after touchdown twice on this span, however the payloads reached their locations on each events.)
