SpaceX The company is missing its busiest rocket launch after a rare accident during a routine flight late Thursday night that was supposed to launch into space 20 new Starlink satellites that will provide internet connectivity to some of the world’s most remote places.
One of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets malfunctioned after lifting off from Vandenberg Space Center in California on July 11. The start of the flight was live-streamed on X, a social platform owned by the company. SpaceXBillionaire Founder of Elon MuskHowever, it appears the broadcast had ended before the incident occurred.
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Musk initially said the rocket’s upper stage engine had experienced a “RUD” – slang for a rocket breaking down or failing. In a statement, he said: SpaceX The rocket was safe, but the Starlink satellites it was carrying were not properly delivered into orbit, the company said.
A failed mission would mean the satellite would inevitably burn up or crash to Earth, he said. A statement posted on the company’s website SpaceX did not disclose the planned return date or location.
A screenshot from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket flight shows the rocket’s upper stage before it malfunctioned on July 11, 2024.
Credit: SpaceX / X Screenshot
As of Sunday, about three days after the Falcon 9 malfunction, the status of the satellite remained unclear, despite Mashable reaching out to SpaceX, the U.S. Space Command and the Federal Aviation Administration. An FAA spokesperson said in an email that someone would respond to inquiries on Monday.
SpaceX’s orbital data comes from on-board measurements and was shut down around July 12, said astrophysicist David Schneider of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. Known for tracking spacecraft and debris In a statement on Friday, the company insisted that the satellites “pose no threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety.”
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“I think it’s likely that all of the objects have already re-entered,” McDowell said in an email Sunday, “but we don’t know for sure.”
The tweet may have been deleted
X’s post above includes video of the troubled Falcon 9 rocket before the accident occurred.
Nicknamed SpaceX’s “workhorse” because it is the company’s most frequent launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 has a long and unblemished record, having launched more than 350 times and delivered thousands of Starlink satellites and commercial payloads to low Earth orbit.
It also National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) The last major failure of the vehicle that transports astronauts to the International Space Station was a launch pad explosion in 2016, four years before launches to the space station were due to begin. Flying Man.
The company has previously said it believes the problem was a liquid oxygen leak that prevented the upper stage’s engines from burning as much as they needed to. Flight controllers tried to send commands to the satellite to adjust its position, but they wouldn’t be enough to stop the hardware from plummeting to Earth.
The tweet may have been deleted
The FAA is asking SpaceX to conduct its own investigation into what went wrong and how to fix it, after which federal regulators will decide when the company can resume Falcon 9 launches.
How investigation This will disrupt SpaceX’s overall launch schedule, including crewed flights.
“We plan to do more Falcon flights this year than ever before. [NASA’s Space] “The shuttle took 30 years to accomplish that, most of it unmanned,” Musk said on X. “The big advantage of this ultra-high flight rate is that it allows us to identify and solve problems that only happen once in 1,000 flights, which you just can’t do with a low-flight-rate spacecraft.”
