SpaceX wants the Federal Aviation Administration to clear its fleet of grounded Falcon 9 rockets to resume flights amid an ongoing public safety investigation, allowing the company to resume its line of uncrewed commercial missions while engineers investigate what happened during Thursday’s upper stage malfunction.
But what about Falcon 9 missions with humans on board?
Polaris Dawn, a mission that was to carry billionaire Jared Isaacman and three other commercial astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, was scheduled to launch as early as July 31 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Similarly, NASA’s Crew-9 was scheduled to launch as early as August to the International Space Station.
More:SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets grounded by FAA, suspending Space Coast missions indefinitely
“I suspect what will be required is for them to understand what happened, have a plan to fix it, and fly at least one uncrewed Falcon 9 to verify the fixes before Polaris Dawn is allowed to go,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“And that won’t really be a problem because they have plenty of Falcon 9s in reserve, ready to go,” McDowell said.
Assuming SpaceX adds instrumentation to the rocket during the return flight to gather additional diagnostics for investigators, McDowell said, “the question is whether it will be weeks or months” before the FAA grants permission to resume crewed missions.
On Monday, SpaceX asked the FAA to acknowledge that last week’s anomaly did not endanger public safety, allowing the Falcon 9 rocket to resume flights while the investigation remains open. The rocket, which was carrying a payload of 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, developed a liquid oxygen leak on its upper second stage, unexpectedly forcing the satellites into too shallow an orbit.
“The FAA is reviewing the application and will rely on data and safety every step of the way,” the agency said in a statement about SpaceX’s application Monday. Details remain unknown.
“It will impact crewed launches more than (regular) launches because they will have to make sure everything is absolutely set and safe before they put another crew on board,” said Laura Forczyk, founder and executive director of Atlanta-based space consultancy Astralytical.
Falcon 9s have launched 46 of 50 missions in Florida
Meanwhile, the Space Coast’s launch schedule, which accelerated at a record pace this year, remains largely on hold indefinitely. Falcon 9s accounted for 46 of the 50 missions launched in 2024 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s adjacent Kennedy Space Center.
In a statement, SpaceX pledged to “conduct a full investigation in coordination with the FAA, determine the root cause, and take corrective action to ensure the success of future missions.” According to the federal agency, “a return to flight is based on the FAA’s determination that any system, process or procedure related to the incident does not affect public safety.”
FLORIDA TODAY contacted NASA, which emailed the following statement:
“While SpaceX’s Starlink launch was a fully commercial mission, NASA receives information from SpaceX on all items of interest related to the Falcon 9 rocket as part of the agency’s standard fleet monitoring activities. Crew safety and mission assurance are top priorities for NASA,” the statement said.
“SpaceX has provided information and is including NASA in the company’s ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and the path forward. NASA will provide updates on the agency’s missions, including potential schedule impacts, if any, 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 problems.
“These cases are rare for SpaceX. So SpaceX, I’m sure, will try to address this issue quickly, but at the same time, the FAA and NASA have their own mission assurance process that they would like to look at and understand exactly what happened,” Holst said.
“Because they don’t want a second stage to go haywire – the RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) – under astronauts trying to reach orbit,” he said.
What the FAA and SpaceX Might Find During the Investigation
McDowell said SpaceX operates under the philosophy that “good enough is never good enough.”
“They keep changing the design and improving it and changing it, right? They’re in the Silicon Valley mode, rather than the old NASA mode of, ‘Yeah, once it works, don’t change anything,'” he said.
“Is this anomaly the result of a design change? It is not a fundamental flaw in the existing design because there have been so many launches. So the other possibility is that it is a manufacturing or assembly error. That is what the investigators need to look at,” he said.
McDowell said SpaceX and the FAA must ensure that any potential problem will not impact the Polaris Dawn mission. If the same upper-stage oxygen leak problem were to occur during Polaris Dawn, he said SpaceX would lose the mission, but not the crew, who could maneuver the Dragon for an emergency return to Earth.
He said he would be surprised if it took SpaceX engineers more than a month to determine the root cause and its solution for uncrewed Starlink missions — but “then the question is, how long will it take the FAA to be satisfied?”
What happened to the Falcon 9 upper stage?
During the launch in California on Thursday, SpaceX said the Falcon 9’s first stage performed normally, lifting the second stage and Starlink satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a successful drone ship landing.
“The second stage boosts itself into a very low Earth orbit, then travels for about 40 minutes to the highest point of that orbit, and then restarts (its engine) to reach the orbit where they’re going to deploy all of the Starlink satellites. And what happened this time is that restart didn’t happen,” McDowell said.
SpaceX said the satellites were left in an eccentric orbit just 84 miles (135 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, less than half the planned perigee altitude.
“The density of the atmosphere is quite high, and the drag that satellites experience as they pass through that upper atmosphere is going to cause them to fall back down quite quickly. And worse, the small argon-fueled electric rocket engines on satellites aren’t powerful enough to overcome that drag,” McDowell said.
“Although SpaceX tried to fire these rocket engines to save the satellites and get them into a higher orbit, they simply did not have the power to overcome the drag at that low altitude,” he said.
“And so within a matter of hours or a day, all this debris had fallen, burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.
Businesses await resumption of flights
Beyond satellites, the Falcon 9 has launched a wide variety of missions into orbit from the Space Coast this year, including:
The day after Crew-8 lifted off in March, Cape Canaveral-based Sidus Space achieved a critical corporate goal by launching its first satellite, LizzieSat-1, aboard a Falcon 9 on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission from Vandenberg.
“I’m shocked. They did pretty well,” Mark Lee, a senior quality inspector at Sidus Space, said of Thursday’s incident. He added that his company was planning another launch later this year and hoped the FAA’s flight ban wouldn’t have a big impact on that schedule.
Now commonplace on the Space Coast, Starlink launches don’t draw the same interest — or the same crowds — as larger rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
“We do not anticipate an immediate impact as summer vacationers have mostly made their plans,” Space Coast Tourism Office Executive Director Peter Cranis said in an email about the FAA grounding.
“There’s always a slight slowdown in September and the fall, so we don’t anticipate it will be any different this year,” Cranis said.
Brooke Edwards is a space reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at bedwards@floridatoday.com or on X: @brookeofstars.