SpaceX rocket grounded after failure dooms some Starlink satellites

SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after one broke apart in space and doomed its payload of Starlink satellites, the first failure in more than seven years of a rocket relied upon by the global space industry.

Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites on a shallow orbital path where they will reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

The attempt to reignite the engine "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote early on Friday on his social media platform X, using initials for the industry term Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion.

The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the failure, fixes the rocket and receives the FAA's approval, the agency said in a statement. That process could take several weeks or months, depending on the issue's complexity and SpaceX's plan to fix it.

Musk said SpaceX was updating the software of the Starlink satellites to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric re-entry.

"Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said.

NASA said in a statement on Friday it monitors all of SpaceX's Falcon 9 missions.

"SpaceX has been forthcoming with information and is including NASA in the company's ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and path forward," a U.S. space agency spokesperson said.

SpaceX said the second stage's failure occurred after engineers detected a leak of liquid oxygen, a propellant.

Although Thursday night's Falcon 9 flight was an in-house mission, the rocket's grounding is likely to impact upcoming SpaceX customer missions.

(Cover image via CFP)