SpaceX has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to allow its grounded Falcon 9 rocket fleet to resume flights amid an ongoing public safety investigation, and the company wants to resume a series of unmanned commercial missions while engineers investigate what happened after Thursday’s upper-stage rocket failure.
But what about Falcon 9 missions with humans on board?
Polaris DawnA mission carrying billionaire commander Jared Isaacman and three private sector astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on July 31, followed by NASA’s Crew 9, which was due to launch to the International Space Station in August.
more:SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket grounded by FAA, Space Coast missions halted indefinitely
“I would imagine they’ll want to understand what happened and have a plan to fix it, and then fly at least one unmanned Falcon 9 to verify the repairs before Polaris Dawn is given the go-ahead to launch,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“And that’s not really going to be an issue because they have a bunch of Falcon 9s ready to go,” McDowell said.
Assuming SpaceX adds additional instrumentation to the rocket when it resumes flight and gathers additional diagnostic information for investigators, “it’s just a matter of weeks or months” before the FAA gives the go-ahead to resume crewed missions, McDowell said.
SpaceX on Monday asked the FAA to confirm last week’s anomaly did not pose a threat to public safety, allowing the Falcon 9 to resume flights while the investigation continues. The ill-fated rocket, carrying 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Center in California, suffered a liquid oxygen leak in its upper second stage, forcing it to unexpectedly deploy the satellites into too-shallow an orbit.
“The FAA is reviewing the request and will make decisions based on data and safety at each stage of the process,” the FAA said in a statement about SpaceX’s request on Monday, without providing further details.
“Crew launches will be affected more than (regular) launches because they need to make sure everything is perfect and safe before they bring on the next crew,” said Laura Forczyk, founder and executive director of Astrallytical, a space consulting firm in Atlanta.
Falcon 9 flies 46 of 50 Florida missions
Meanwhile, the Space Coast’s launch schedule, which has been running at a record-breaking pace this year, remains on an all-but indefinite halt. 46 of 50 missions to launch in 2024 From Cape Canaveral Space Station and the adjacent NASA Kennedy Space Center.
In a statement, SpaceX promised to “work with the FAA to conduct a thorough investigation to determine the root cause and take corrective actions to ensure the success of future missions.” According to the federal agency, “return to flight will be contingent on the FAA determining that the systems, processes, and procedures related to the accident do not affect public safety.”
FLORIDA TODAY reached out to NASA, who sent the following statement via email:
“While the SpaceX Starlink launch was an entirely commercial mission, NASA has received information from SpaceX regarding all matters of concern regarding the Falcon 9 rocket as part of the agency’s standard rocket tracking activities. Crew safety and mission assurance remain NASA’s highest priority,” the statement said.
“SpaceX has been proactive in providing information and has engaged NASA in the ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and next steps. NASA will provide updates on the agency’s mission, including any impacts to the schedule, 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.
“This is unusual for SpaceX, so I’m sure they’re going to try to process this quickly, but at the same time, the FAA and NASA are going to want to look at the mission assurance process and understand exactly what happened,” Holst said.
“They don’t want the second stage to fail and have a RUD (rapid unplanned disintegration) while the astronauts are trying to get into orbit,” he said.
What the FAA and SpaceX might discover during their investigation
McDowell said SpaceX operates under the philosophy that “enough is never enough.”
“They keep tinkering and improving and changing the designs. They’re doing it the Silicon Valley way, not the old NASA way of saying, ‘Yes, once it works, don’t change anything,'” he said.
“Was this anomaly the result of a design change? There have been many launches before, so it’s unlikely that there was something fundamentally flawed with the existing design. So another possibility is that it was a manufacturing or assembly failure. That’s what investigators will have to look at,” he said.
McDowell said SpaceX and the FAA need to ensure that the potential problem doesn’t impact the Polaris Dawn mission. If the same upper stage oxygen leak incident had occurred during Polaris Dawn, SpaceX would lose the mission, but not the crew, he said, who would have been able to return the Dragon to Earth in an emergency.
He said he would be surprised if SpaceX engineers took longer than a month to identify the root cause and solution for unmanned Starlink missions, “but that leaves the question of how long it will take before the FAA is satisfied.”
What happened to the Falcon 9 upper stage?
During Thursday’s launch in California, SpaceX reported that the Falcon 9’s first stage performed successfully, delivering the second stage and Starlink satellites into orbit before returning to Earth and successfully landing the drone ship.
“The second stage is launched into a very low Earth orbit, then it coasts to the top of that orbit for about 40 minutes, and then it restarts to get to the orbit where it’s going to deploy all of the Starlink satellites. And what happened this time was that that restart didn’t happen,” McDowell said.
SpaceX reported that the satellite was left in an eccentric orbit just 135 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, less than half the expected perigee altitude.
“The atmosphere is quite dense, and the resistance the satellite would encounter as it moves through the upper atmosphere would quickly cause it to fall. To make matters worse, the satellite’s small argon-electric rocket engines simply wouldn’t be powerful enough to overcome that resistance,” McDowell said.
“SpaceX tried to ignite the rocket engines to save the satellite and put it into a higher orbit, but it didn’t have enough power to overcome the drag at low altitude,” he said.
“And we estimate that within probably a few hours to a day, all of those bombs fell and burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.
Companies waiting for flights to resume
In addition to satellites, the Falcon 9 has launched a variety of missions into orbit from the Space Coast this year, including:
The day after Crew 8 launched in March, Cape Canaveral-based Cydus Space First satellite launched, achieving key corporate benchmarkLizzySat 1 aboard a Falcon 9 on a SpaceX Transporter 10 ride-share mission from Vandenberg.
“It’s a shock, because it’s been pretty successful up until now,” Mark Lee, chief quality inspector at Sidus Space, said of Thursday’s accident. He said the company is planning another launch later this year and hopes the FAA’s grounding ban won’t have a major impact on that timing.
Starlink launches, now commonplace on the Space Coast, don’t garner the same attention or crowds as high-profile rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
“Summer vacation travelers have already made their plans, so there should be no immediate impact,” Space Coast Tourism Executive Director Peter Kranis said in an email about the FAA suspension.
“There’s always a bit of a slowdown in September and into the fall, so we’re not expecting this year to be any different,” Klanis said.
Brooke Edwards is Florida Today’s space reporter. She can be reached at [email protected] or for X: Brooke of Stars.
