SpaceX has announced the temporary suspension of Falcon 9 rocket flights. This happened after malfunctions occurred during the launch of the manned Crew-9 mission.
The Crew mission was launched on September 29 from Cape Canaveral Space Center. Within its program, Falcon 9 put into orbit the spacecraft Crew Dragon, on board of which were two people: NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
A Crew Dragon crew usually consists of four people. This “low number” of Crew-9 is due to the fact that NASA had to free up two seats for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams. They remained on the ISS due to malfunctions of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which eventually returned to Earth empty.
The Crew-9 mission launch was completed without any problems. The first stage successfully operated its section and then successfully landed at Cape Canaveral. The second stage put the spacecraft into the desired orbit, after which it docked with the ISS.
The anomaly under discussion occurred during the disposal of the second stage. SpaceX pays great attention to ensuring that the spent stages of its rockets are not left in space, and tries to get them out of orbit as quickly as possible. This usually occurs on the next turn after payload separation.
However, this time the operation didn’t go perfectly as planned. According to SpaceX, there was an abnormal orbital descent due to an anomaly that occurred during the maneuver. As a result, the stage fell into the ocean outside the design area in the Pacific Ocean (the so-called spacecraft graveyards).
After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s 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.
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 29, 2024
We will resume launching after we…
While SpaceX engineers are looking into the causes of the incident, the company has announced a temporary suspension of Falcon 9 flights. How long the pause will last is not yet known — but we can assume it won’t be very long. The previous Falcon 9 “downtime”, caused by a much more serious incident when the entire payload was lost due to a second stage failure, lasted only two weeks.
Earlier we reported on how China’s Nebula-1 reusable rocket prototype crashed during landing.
