FAA confirms SpaceX Falcon 9 is grounded because of Crew-9 launch issue

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Sep 30, 2024

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The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it had grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket pending an investigation into why the rocket’s second stage missed its deorbit landing target zone after this weekend’s Crew-9 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX announced it was halting launches in a social media post late Saturday, but the FAA did not confirm whether or not it had grounded the rocket until late Monday.

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX NASA Crew-9 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on September 28,” the emailed statement reads. “The incident involved the Falcon 9 second stage landing outside of the designated hazard area. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.”

This is the third time this year the FAA has grounded the Falcon 9, and the second time because of an issue with the rocket’s second stage.

SpaceX said in its social media post the second stage “was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause.”

The launch happened Saturday afternoon with a Falcon 9 making its first human spaceflight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40. It sent the Crew Dragon Freedom with its two passengers safely on a trajectory to meet up with the International Space Station, where it docked on Sunday afternoon.

The first-stage booster also made a successful landing at Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1, but the second stage, which is normally brought down in the Atlantic and not recovered, missed the projected landing area.

The grounding took a planned Sunday launch for SpaceX from California off the board, and could affect three more within the next two weeks from the Space Coast.

The California launch was a Falcon 9 with a plan to send up the OneWeb Launch 20 mission for EutelsatGroup from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Federal Aviation Administration still has that launch on its operations plan advisory, but not until Oct. 9.

The FAA advisory also still has a Falcon 9 launch for a Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral, and that’s slated for as early as Oct. 5.

Two more Space Coast launches coming up have time-sensitive payloads. One is the Hera mission for the European Space Agency that’s slated to launch as early as Oct. 7 from Cape Canaveral on a Falcon 9, and the second is the Europa Clipper mission from Kennedy Space Center for NASA to send the massive probe to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa as early as Oct. 10.

Both the Europa Clipper and Hera missions, though, have launch windows that extend further into October.

FAA’s last grounding of Falcon 9 came in August, when a booster met a fiery end on its attempt to make a recovery landing downrange on one of SpaceX’s droneships after a Starlink launch.

“The FAA investigates commercial space incidents to determine the root cause and identify corrective actions so they won’t happen again,” the FAA said in a statement after that incident.

After that launch, SpaceX led an investigation and submitted a final report to the FAA, which was approved. That turnaround was quick, with the failed booster landing happening on Aug. 28, the report filed and submitted with a request to return to flight on Aug. 29 and approval on Aug. 30.

But the first grounding this year, which came in July, took longer to investigate.

In that incident, the FAA grounded Falcon 9 for 15 days when the video feed of a launch from California on July 11 showed the second stage’s engine freezing over in space. It resulted in SpaceX not being able to put its payloads into a correct orbit.

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