SpaceX is asking 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 suite of unmanned commercial missions while engineers investigate what happened during of the upper stage failure on Thursday.
But what about Falcon 9 missions with humans on board?
Polaris Dawn, a mission featuring billionaire commander Jared Isaacman and three fellow commercial astronauts in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, was scheduled to lift off as early as July 31 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Following suit, NASA’s Crew-9 was scheduled to launch immediately in August to the International Space Station.
More ▼:SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets have been grounded by the FAA, putting Space Coast missions on indefinite hold
“What I guess the requirement will be that they understand what happened. They have a plan to fix it. And they’re flying at least one uncrewed Falcon 9 to check the fixes before Polaris Dawn is allowed to go,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“And that’s not really going to be a problem because they’ve got a lot of spare Falcon 9s going,” McDowell said.
Assuming SpaceX adds instruments to the rocket on return to flight to gather additional diagnostics for researchers, McDowell said “the question is whether it will be weeks or months” before the FAA gives permission to resume manned missions.
On Monday, SpaceX asked the FAA to agree that last week’s anomaly did not endanger public safety, allowing the Falcon 9s to return to flight while the investigation remains open. The ill-fated rocket, which was carrying a payload of 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, developed a liquid oxygen leak on its second, upper stage — unexpectedly forcing the satellites into too-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 Monday request. More details remain unknown.
“It’s going to affect crewed launches more than (regular) launches because they’re going to make sure everything is completely figured out and safe before they put another crew on board,” said Laura Forczyk, founder and CEO of Atlanta Space Consulting company Astralytical.
Falcon 9s launched 46 of 50 missions in Florida
Meanwhile, Space Coast’s launch schedule — which has been progressing this year at a record pace — remains largely on hold indefinitely. Falcon 9s account for 46 of the 50 missions launched in 2024 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the adjacent NASA Kennedy Space Center.
In a statement, SpaceX promised to “conduct a full investigation in coordination with the FAA, determine the root cause and take corrective action to ensure the success of future missions.” According to the federal agency, “the return to flight is based on the FAA’s determination that any system, process or procedure related to the accident does not affect public safety.”
FLORIDA TODAY contacted NASA, which emailed the following statement:
“Although the SpaceX Starlink launch was an entirely commercial mission, NASA is getting insight from SpaceX about all the interesting elements about the Falcon 9 rocket as part of the agency’s standard fleet tracking activities.” Crew safety and mission assurance are top priorities for NASA,” the statement said.
“SpaceX is providing information and involving NASA in the company’s ongoing investigation of the anomaly to understand the problem and the way forward. NASA will provide updates on the agency’s missions, including potential schedule impacts, if any, as more information becomes available,” the statement said.
John Holst, a Florida-based space consultant and author of the blog Ill-Defined Space, said SpaceX has a history of being open about issues.
“They are rare for SpaceX. So SpaceX, I’m sure, will try to move quickly through this, but at the same time, the FAA and NASA have their mission assurance process that they would like to go through and find out exactly what happened,” Holst said.
“Because they don’t want the second stage to go out of order — RUD (rapid unplanned disassembly) — under the astronauts trying to get to orbit,” he said.
What FAA, SpaceX may find during investigation
McDowell said SpaceX operates under the philosophy “good enough is never good enough.”
“They keep tinkering with the design, improving and changing, right? They’re in that Silicon Valley mode, not the old NASA mode of ‘Yeah, once you get it working, don’t change anything,'” he said.
“Was this (anomaly) the result of a design change? This will not be a fundamental flaw in the existing design because they have had so many launches. So the other possibility is that it was a manufacturing error or that’s what the investigators have to look at,” he said.
McDowell said SpaceX and the FAA need to ensure that a potential problem does not affect the Polaris Dawn mission. If the same upper-stage oxygen leak accident happened during Polaris Dawn, he said SpaceX would lose the mission, not the crew — who could maneuver the Dragon toward an emergency return to Earth.
He said he would be surprised if SpaceX engineers took more than a month to navigate the root cause and its solution for unmanned Starlink missions — but “then the question is, how long will it take for the FAA to be happy? “
What happened to the top of the Falcon 9?
During Thursday’s launch in California, SpaceX said the Falcon 9’s first stage performed nominally, lifting the second stage and the Starlink satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a successful drone ship landing.
“The second stage accelerates into a very low Earth orbit, then coasts for about 40 minutes to the high point of that orbit, and then restarts (its engine) to get to the orbit where all the Starlink satellites will be deployed. And what happened this time is that restart didn’t happen,” McDowell said.
SpaceX reported that the satellites remained in an eccentric orbit just 135 kilometers above Earth’s surface, or less than half the expected altitude at perigee.
“The density of the atmosphere is quite high and the drag that satellites experience going through that upper atmosphere will collapse them quite quickly. And even worse, the small argon electric motors on the satellites’ rocket engines are not powerful enough to overcome this drag,” McDowell said.
“So even though SpaceX tried to ignite those rocket engines to save the satellites and get them into a higher orbit, they just didn’t have the power to overcome the drag at that low altitude,” he said.
“And so within, I would probably guess, a couple of hours to a day, all of those suckers were taken down — burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.
Companies awaiting return to flight
In addition to satellites, the Falcon 9 launched a colorful variety of missions into orbit this year from the Space Coast, including:
A day after Crew-8 lifted off in March, Cape Canaveral-based Sidus Space reached a critical corporate milestone by launching its first satellite, LizzieSat-1, aboard a Falcon 9 on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission from Vandenberg.
“I am shocked. They were quite successful,” Mark Lee, Sidus Space’s lead quality inspector, said of Thursday’s incident. He said his company plans another launch later in the year and hopes the FAA grounding won’t significantly affect that time.
Now a common sight on the Space Coast, Starlink launches don’t draw the same interest — or crowds of spectators — as high-profile rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
“We don’t anticipate any immediate impact as summer vacationers for the most part have made their plans,” Space Coast Office of Tourism Executive Director Peter Kranis said in an email about the FAA grounding.
“There’s always some delay in September into the fall, so we don’t expect this year to be any different,” Kranis said.
Brooke Edwards is a space reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at bedwards@floridatoday.com or at X: @brookeofstars.
