Ever since it finally launched back in June, critics have been devouring every detail of Boeing Starliner’s malfunction-plagued crewed test flight.
All the while, NASA has remained intent on getting Boeing’s commercial crew vehicle human-rated to provide a backup option to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But instead of giving NASA a solid alternative to SpaceX’s commercial crew vehicle setup, Boeing’s ongoing, seemingly unending test flight has only made SpaceX’s Dragon, launched repeatedly without incident atop the Falcon 9 rocket for more than a decade, look better and better.
At least that was the case until last week when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 went through a routine launch to get a set of 20 Starlink satellites into orbit—and failed to do so.
The initial launch from Vandenburg Space Force Base in California went off without a hitch last Thursday, but during the second stage the Falcon 9’s upper stage engine was unable to complete the second burn. Instead, the attempt to reignite the rocket “resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk stated on the social media platform, X, using an inside-baseball acronym to relay the rocket’s rapid unscheduled disassembly.
In other words, it blew up.
As a result, the satellites were launched into a lower-than-intended orbit. Although company officials made some efforts to get the satellites back into their correct orbit by using satellite thrusters, they’ve ultimately concluded that SpaceX is going to lose all 20 of the Starlink internet devices, which will descend and ultimately burn off in Earth’s atmosphere. The satellites shouldn’t pose a threat, according to Musk, who has stated on social media that the fragments will look like “shooting stars” as they disintegrate above us.
Sparkly streaks of light across the sky aren’t where this story ends though. The failure has already triggered a Federal Aviation Administration investigation into the causes. The FAA has grounded the rocket until the investigation has been completed, and NASA officials have acknowledged that this could affect the next scheduled astronaut launch. In addition to that, SpaceX is busily conducting its own investigation into what went wrong, with promises to provide the FAA and NASA with a full report.
Before Falcon 9’s incident, the plan was to use SpaceX’s commercial crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket to bring a quartet of astronauts to the ISS in mid-August, relieving the current crew which has been stationed aboard the ISS since March. (Indeed, some have been hypothesizing that SpaceX’s setup could provide Boeing Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore with an alternative ride home, if necessary, although NASA has denied any solid plans to do so, as we’ve noted.)
But now SpaceX is also having problems.
However, while it must be a relief to the folks at Boeing right now to see that even SpaceX isn’t perfect, SpaceX’s situation boasts some key differences from that of the Boeing Starliner, a project that is coming in years behind schedule, more than $1.5 billion over budget and has left its test flight crew cooling their heels on the ISS while engineers work to understand the issues that have come up since its June 5 launch.
By contrast, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has an excellent track record. It has launched more than 350 times since June 2010 and has recorded only one catastrophic in-flight failure when the rocket exploded in 2015, obliterating a Dragon space capsule that was hauling cargo to the International Space Station. The rocket has also been rated for human flight since 2020, completing 13 astronaut launches without incident.
That said, an exploded rocket is an exploded rocket, and it has left behind questions that NASA will need answered before putting more astronauts aboard the company’s Dragon spacecraft atop another Falcon 9 rocket.
But only to a point, it seems. NASA officials have allowed that SpaceX’s rocket failure could cause “schedule impacts” of its own for the upcoming crewed launch but noted that they don’t have any problem with how the company is handling this situation. “SpaceX has been forthcoming with information and is including NASA in the company’s ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and path forward,” the agency stated in a release.
Even the team of private astronauts in the Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon mission which is slated to head to the ISS using a Falcon 9 as early as July 31 have stayed positive about this incident. “As for Polaris Dawn, we will fly whenever SpaceX is ready and with complete confidence in the rocket, spaceship and operations,” Jason Isaacman, the head of the program and a crew member for the upcoming flight, stated on X.
So what happens next? On Monday SpaceX requested that the FAA allow the Falcon 9 to resume activity while the investigation – which could take weeks or months to complete – continues. If the FAA signs off on this request, we could see Falcon 9 rockets back in business shortly. Alternatively, if the FAA sticks to keeping the rocket grounded until the investigation is completed, that will mean not having any approved mode of transportation to get astronauts into space from U.S. soil.
Here’s what we know for sure though: right now, there are seven astronauts on the ISS, and Starliner still hasn’t been approved for crewed flight. It hasn’t even returned from its test flight. And now, with the Falcon 9 grounded, the only other alternative to get astronauts into space from U.S. soil isn’t on hand either, which seems like exactly the situation NASA officials wanted to avoid.
Fingers crossed it all gets sorted soon.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
