Glitch on SpaceX Space Station Flight Grounds its Rockets
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov onboard, Saturday, September. 28, 2024, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Photo: Getty Images.
A minor mishap during Saturday’s launch of the SpaceX “Crew 9” flight of a Dragon capsule atop a workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, prompted Elon Musk’s company to temporarily suspend flights of those rockets. The glitch didn’t threaten the mission, but the internal investigation the incident triggered points up how difficult rocket science is and may illustrate how SpaceX could be a victim of its own business success.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, configured to fly with two crew members on Saturday, is made up of three main sections. The biggest section–stage 1–is packed with nine Merlin rocket engines and enough fuel to get the rocket through most of the atmosphere to the edge of space. When its fuel is exhausted, it returns to land on Earth to be reused. Stage 2 is shorter and has just one engine configured for flight in space itself. It carries the rocket’s payload right up into orbit, letting go of it at just the right point, and then it fires its engine one last time to target a fiery re-entry and destruction over a chosen, deep part of the ocean. Stage 2 is not reused, so SpaceX “deorbits” it so as not to create troublesome space junk. The third section, in this case a Dragon space capsule, then flies on to complete its mission.
On Saturday, the missions of stage 1 and Dragon went off flawlessly. And for the most part stage 2 worked great too…until it came to the final “deorbit” burn. In a post on X the company explained that: “Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn.” That means its engine fired but either sent the rocket a little in the wrong direction or gave the stage either too much or too little a push. This meant that while “the second stage safely landed in the ocean” it was “outside of the targeted area.” The company added it was pausing launches until it could find the root cause.
So far, so much rocket engineering, and no fatal mishaps, just a used rocket landing in the wrong part of the ocean. But why should you or your company care about the issues hitting a rocket-building enterprise? For a couple of reasons.
It starts with responsibly dealing with an error: SpaceX was contracted by NASA to fly astronauts in the Dragon capsule, and that went perfectly. But when it deorbits the second stage, it has to do so responsibly–ensuring no people, or ships, are in the targeted blank spot in the Indian or Pacific oceans. China has gained a terrible reputation in this regard, letting spent rockets fall on its own land, or come down from orbit unpredictably, and thus dangerously. SpaceX is aware that its stage 2 could’ve come down in the wrong place and hurt someone, so it’s trying to work out what happened.
The other lesson here comes from the fact SpaceX is busy doing things no one has ever done before. Firstly, the Falcon 9 is the first reusable rocket capable of sending satellites to orbit, and some first stages have been reused over 20 times. Second, it’s operating at breakneck speed, and had originally planned to launch its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets 140-plus times this year. No one has ever come close to this pace: In late 2023 the company announced it had launched 80 times that year, taking over 1,000 tons to orbit. Company owner Elon Musk said the second place went to an entire nation’s efforts, rather than one company, with Russia flying 500 tons to orbit using a variety of different types of rockets, none of which are reusable.
What this means is that SpaceX is operating in truly uncharted waters. By achieving incredible innovations so successfully, so fast, the sheer law of probability means the company was likely to encounter hiccups that it hadn’t seen before, or that no one else had.
The company is known to have an incredibly robust lessons learned process in place, however. And it’s likely busy using its engineering talent to work out what went wrong, and then make sure it doesn’t happen again. For context, Boeing’s first crewed flight of its Starliner space capsule encountered so many issues it had to leave two astronauts stuck in space, to come home (at a later date) aboard SpaceX’s Dragon.