SpaceX wants the Federal Aviation Administration to allow its grounded Falcon 9 rocket fleet to fly again while an ongoing public safety investigation takes place. The company also wants to be allowed to resume its slate of unmanned commercial missions while engineers study what happened during Thursday’s upper stage failure.
But what about Falcon 9 missions with humans on board?
Polaris Dawn, a mission carrying billionaire commander Jared Isaacman and three fellow commercial astronauts in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as early as July 31. NASA’s Crew-9 is scheduled to follow suit and launch to the International Space Station in August.
More:SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets grounded by FAA, indefinitely suspending Space Coast missions
“I would imagine the requirement is that they understand what happened. They have a plan to fix it. And they fly at least one unmanned Falcon 9 to verify the repairs before Polaris Dawn is allowed to fly,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“And that won’t really be a problem because they have a bunch of Falcon 9s in reserve that are ready to go,” McDowell said.
Assuming SpaceX adds instrumentation to the rocket upon return to flight to collect additional diagnostic data for investigators, “the question is whether it will be weeks or months” before the FAA gives permission to resume crewed missions, McDowell said.
On Monday, SpaceX asked the FAA to agree that last week’s anomaly did not pose a risk to public safety and cleared Falcon 9s to fly again while the investigation continues. The ill-fated rocket, carrying a payload of 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, developed a liquid oxygen leak in its second, upper stage, forcing the satellites to be unexpectedly placed into a shallow orbit.
“The FAA is reviewing the request and will be guided by data and safety at every step of the process,” the agency said in a statement about SpaceX’s request on Monday. Further details remain unknown.
“It will have a bigger impact on crewed launches than on (regular) launches because they want to make sure everything is set up and safe before they put a new crew on board,” said Laura Forczyk, founder and executive director of Atlanta-based aerospace consultancy Astralytical.
Falcon 9s launched 46 of the 50 missions in Florida
Meanwhile, the Space Coast’s launch schedule — which has been moving at a record pace this year — remains largely on hold indefinitely. Falcon 9s are responsible for 46 of the 50 missions launched from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and neighboring Kennedy Space Center in 2024.
In a statement, SpaceX pledged to “conduct a full investigation in cooperation with the FAA, determine the root cause, and take corrective actions to ensure the success of future missions.” According to the federal agency, “a resumption of flight is based on the FAA’s determination that any system, process or procedure related to the accident does not impact public safety.”
FLORIDA TODAY reached out to NASA, which emailed the following statement:
“While the SpaceX Starlink launch was a fully commercial mission, NASA receives insight from SpaceX on all matters of interest regarding the Falcon 9 rocket as part of the agency’s standard fleet of monitoring activities. Crew safety and mission assurance are top priorities for NASA,” the statement said.
“SpaceX has been forthcoming with information and is engaging NASA in the company’s ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and determine the path forward. NASA will provide updates on the agency’s missions, including potential impacts to planning, if any, as more information becomes available,” the statement said.
John Holst, a Florida-based aerospace consultant and author of the blog Ill-Defined Space, said SpaceX has a reputation for being open about issues.
“This is a rare occurrence for SpaceX. So SpaceX, I’m sure, will try to process this quickly, but at the same time, the FAA and NASA have their mission assurance process that they’d like to go through to understand exactly what happened,” Holst said.
“Because they don’t want to have a second stage failure – RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) – among the astronauts trying to get into orbit,” he said.
What the FAA and SpaceX May Discover During the Investigation
McDowell said SpaceX operates under the philosophy that “good enough is never good enough.”
“They just keep tinkering with the design and improving it and changing it, right? They’re in that Silicon Valley mode, rather than the old NASA mode of ‘Yeah, once you get it working, don’t change anything,'” he said.
“Was this (the anomaly) the result of a design change? It’s not going to be a fundamental flaw in the existing design because they’ve had so many launches. So the other possibility is that it was a manufacturing or assembly error. And that’s what the investigators have to look at,” he said.
McDowell said SpaceX and the FAA need to make sure that a potential problem doesn’t impact the Polaris Dawn mission. If the same oxygen leak in the upper stage were to happen on Polaris Dawn, he said, SpaceX would lose the mission, not the crew — who could maneuver the Dragon for an emergency return to Earth.
He said he would be surprised if it took more than a month for SpaceX engineers to figure out the cause and fix for unmanned Starlink missions. But “then the question is, how long does it take for the FAA to be satisfied?”
What happened to the Falcon 9 upper stage?
During the launch in California on Thursday, SpaceX reported that the Falcon 9’s first stage performed nominally, delivering the second stage and the Starlink satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a successful drone ship landing.
“The second stage is put into a very low orbit, and then it rolls to the highest point of that orbit for about 40 minutes, and then restarts (its engine) to get into the orbit where they’re going to put all of the Starlink satellites. And what happened this time is that restart didn’t happen,” McDowell said.
SpaceX reported that the satellites were in an eccentric orbit just 84 miles (135 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, which is less than half the expected perigee altitude.
“The density of the atmosphere is quite high and the drag that the satellites experience as they plow through that upper atmosphere is going to bring them down pretty quickly. And worse yet, the small argon electric thruster engines on the satellites aren’t powerful enough to overcome that drag,” McDowell said.
“Although SpaceX tried to use the rocket engines to save the satellites and get them into a higher orbit, they just didn’t have the power to overcome the air drag at that low altitude,” he said.
“And so within a few hours to a day, all of those pistons were burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.
Businesses await return to flights
In addition to satellites, the Falcon 9 has launched a number of colorful missions into orbit from the Space Coast this year, including:
The day after Crew-8 launched in March, Cape Canaveral-based Sidus Space achieved a major milestone by launching its first satellite, LizzieSat-1, aboard a Falcon 9 during SpaceX’s Transporter-10 mission from Vandenberg.
“I’m shocked. They’ve been pretty successful,” Mark Lee, Sidus Space’s chief quality inspector, said of Thursday’s accident. He said his company is planning another launch later this year and he hopes the FAA grounding won’t affect that timing too much.
Starlink launches are now a common occurrence on the Space Coast, but they don’t draw the same attention — or crowds of spectators — as big-name rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
“We do not anticipate any immediate impacts as summer vacationers have largely made their plans,” Peter Cranis, director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism, said in an email about the FAA’s stay.
“There is always a slight decline from September into the fall, so we don’t expect that to be any different this year,” Cranis said.
Brooke Edwards is a space reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] or at X: @brookeofstars.