SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket failed on its first flight since 2015, sending 20 Starlink satellites into dangerously low orbit. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said it was unclear whether the spacecraft could be saved using onboard ion thrusters.
SpaceX’s 70th orbital launch of the year, dubbed Starlink 9-3, initially went well after liftoff from the Vandenberg Space Force Station Thursday night at 7:35 pm PDT (10:35 pm EDT, 0235 UTC). But as Falcon 9’s second stage burned, camera footage from the rocket showed an unusual amount of ice building up around Merlin’s vacuum engine.
About an hour after the satellite was deployed, Musk posted on his social media platform X: “Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD. [Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly] For currently unknown reasons. The team is reviewing the data tonight to understand the root cause.
The one-second burn of the second stage to orbit was scheduled to occur 52 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff.
As for the fate of the rocket’s payload, Musk added: “Starlink satellites were used, but they may be too low in perigee to lift into orbit. We’ll know in a few hours.”
13 of the 20 Starlink satellites have cell phone capabilities. SpaceX says it has successfully contacted five satellites and is attempting to raise their orbits. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which maintains the space flight database, predicts that the satellites could be in orbits of 295 by 138 km. The planned deployment orbit is 296 x 286 km.
“We are updating the satellite software to operate the ion thrusters at their Warp 9 equivalent,” Musk said in a social media update. “Unlike a Star Trek episode, it doesn’t work, but it’s worth a shot. Satellite thrusters have to raise orbit faster than atmospheric drag pulls them down or they burn up.
The last failure of the Falcon 9 rocket was on June 28, 2015, when the Dragon cargo delivery mission ended in flight 139 seconds into the flight. On September 1, 2016, another Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral during the process of refueling for a pre-flight static test fire, destroying an Israeli communications satellite and causing extensive damage to Space Launch Complex 40.
Falcon 9’s first stage booster for the Starlink 9-3 mission, tail number B1063 in the SpaceX fleet, flew for the 19th time. Its previous launches include NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, the Transporter-7 rideshare mission and 13 batches of Starlink satellites.
Eight minutes after liftoff, B1063 landed on the SpaceX droneship, saying, ‘Of course I still love you.’ This is the 96th landing at OCISLY and the 329th booster landing to date.
