SpaceX announced Sunday that after the successful launch of the Crew-9 mission, “the Falcon 9 second stage was placed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn.”
“As a result, the second stage landed safely in the ocean, but outside the target area,” SpaceX saying in a post on X. Elon Musk’s company said it will “resume the launch after we better understand the root cause.”
The NASA-SpaceX Crew 9 mission launched aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft on Saturday. A few minutes after launch, Dragon separated from the “Falcon 9 second stage” and began its solo journey to the International Space Station.
As the Falcon 9 rocket landed back on Earth, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov continued their journey in the Dragon spacecraft to the ISS.
First and second stages of the Falcon 9: What exactly happened?
Following the launch of Crew 9, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage booster landed at the company’s Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Meanwhile, the second stage headed toward orbit.
Unlike the Falcon 9’s first stage, which returned to Earth for a planned landing, the second stage is expendable. The second stage was planned to be discarded after launching the Crew Dragon Freedom into orbit.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft separated from the second stage 12 minutes after launch from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
“At 1:29 EDT, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft separated from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket and is now flying on its own,” NASA said.
The failures of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in the past
In August of this year, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 after it failed to land on Earth during a routine Starlink mission.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successfully launched a batch of Starlink internet satellites into orbit from Florida in August. The reusable booster from the rocket’s first stage returned to Earth and attempted to land on a barge as usual, but fell into the ocean after a fiery landing, Reuters reported.
The failure marked the second time this year that the FAA grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The rocket had already been grounded in July for the first time since 2016, following a second-stage failure in space that doomed a batch of Starlink satellites.
Falcon 9 is a two-stage reusable rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX for the reliable and safe transportation of people and payloads to Earth orbit and beyond.
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