The last time a Falcon 9 failed to land was on February 21, 2021.
SpaceX lost a rocket that was completing its 23rd flight.
SpaceX is ready to launch its riskiest mission yet: Polaris Dawn. The aerospace company has scheduled it for tomorrow, Aug. 30, but may not take off. The reason? An investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
A failed landing. Early Wednesday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, launching 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, 13 of them with Direct to Cell connectivity. It was just another routine mission, like the 80 others SpaceX has completed this year.
There were no problems with the rocket’s launch or when it separated from the second stage to return to Earth. But something went wrong when the rocket landed on the autonomous barge A Shortfall of Gravitas, which was waiting for it in the Atlantic Ocean, 370 miles off the coast of Florida.
It was its 23rd flight. The rocket that SpaceX lost was serial number B1062. It had landed 22 times after launching all sorts of payloads, including two GPS satellites, two crewed spacecraft (Inspiration 4 and Axiom 1), and competing satellites part of the OneWeb constellation.
For reasons still unknown, after its 23rd launch, it hit the barge 8 kmh (5 mph) faster than usual, broke a leg, and fell to the side.
The first in three years. The last time a Falcon 9 failed to land was on February 21, 2021, on a primitive Starlink mission. On that occasion, the B1059 rocket failed due to an early engine shutdown. SpaceX made 267 consecutive successful landings, resetting the counter to zero on August 28.
The FAA has called for an investigation. It ordered SpaceX to “determine the root cause of the event and identify corrective actions to avoid it from happening again.” NASA, which will launch two astronauts aboard a Falcon 9 in September, has also joined the request.
When the FAA analyzes a problem with a space launch, it orders the suspension of flights of the same family of rockets until it finishes the investigation or determines that there’s no risk to public safety. This could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. SpaceX has already postponed a Starlink mission and could postpone Polaris Dawn if it doesn’t explain the reason for the failure in time.
Striking investigation. It’s striking that the FAA is investigating a landing failure when only SpaceX rockets can land after putting a payload into orbit. All other companies jettison their rockets at sea after the launch phase.
In addition, many SpaceX rockets exploded during early landing attempts, and the FAA never investigated those failures. There’s a reason for this: A regulation change that went into effect in March 2021, days after the latest SpaceX landing failure at that time. The new rules streamline operations for reusable rockets, but in return, they consider landing failures to be flight incidents.
Two failures in one summer. This year has shown that SpaceX isn’t immune to problems. On July 12, after more than 300 successful launches, a failure in the second stage of a Falcon 9 resulted in the loss of 23 Starlink satellites due to a liquid oxygen leak from a crack in a pressure sensor line.
SpaceX suspended all launches and feared a months-long delay but completed the investigation in record time. It fixed the problem by removing the oxygen line and sensor, which it could replace with others already on the rocket and flew again two weeks later.
Image | SpaceX
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