The Federal Aviation Administration is requiring an investigation into the in-flight failure from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as it was launching a batch of Starlink internet satellites.
The second-stage engine failure occurred on Thursday evening during a routine launch of the satellites from Vandenberg space force base in Santa Barbara county, California.
Approximately an hour after the rocket took off, the rocket’s second stage, which was carrying 20 Starlink internet satellites, failed to reignite and instead deployed the satellites in a dangerously low orbit where they run the risk of burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, Reuters reported.
In a statement on X, SpaceX posted: “During tonight’s Falcon 9 launch of Starlink, the second stage engine did not complete its second burn. As a result, the Starlink satellites were deployed into a lower than intended orbit.
“SpaceX has made contact with 5 of the satellites so far and is attempting to have them raise orbit using their ion thrusters,” the company added. The SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, who also owns X, formerly Twitter, followed up with a highly technical explanation about ion thrusters, a form of electric propulsion used in spacecraft.
“We’re updating satellite software to run the ion thrusters at their equivalent of warp 9. Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it’s worth a shot,” he said.
In a separate post on X, Musk said: “Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown,” referring to a rapid unscheduled disassembly – a euphemistic industry acronym for explosion, adding: “Team is reviewing data tonight to understand root cause.”
Thursday’s failure occurred on the rocket’s 354th mission and marks the first Falcon 9 failure since 2015 when the rocket exploded on a launch site in Florida.
The FAA released a statement, saying: “The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 9-3 mission that launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 11 … The incident involved the failure of the upper stage rocket while it was in space. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.
“The FAA will be involved in every step of the investigation process and must approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions.”