SpaceX shuts down launches after problem with Crew-9 mission’s second stage

SpaceX celebrated the first human spaceflight from its Cape Canaveral launch site on Saturday, and while the two humans aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom are safely on their way to the International Space Station, a problem arose with the rocket’s second stage that prompted the company to shut down future launches for now.

“After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn,” SpaceX posted on X. “As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause.”

The first victim of the shutdown was a planned launch Sunday from California of a Falcon 9 with a plan to send up the OneWeb Launch 20 mission for EutelsatGroup.

The Federal Aviation Administration still has that launch on its operations plan advisory for as early as Oct. 1, but the last two times SpaceX had an “off-nominal” issue with a Falcon 9 launch, the FAA had grounded the rocket.

The most recent was a fiery landing of a Falcon 9’s first-stage booster last month during a Starlink mission.

“The FAA investigates commercial space incidents to determine the root cause and identify corrective actions so they won’t happen again,” the FAA said in a statement after that incident.

After that launch, SpaceX led an investigation and submitted a final report to the FAA, which was approved. That turnaround was quick with the failed booster landing happening on Aug. 28, the report filed and submitted with a request to return to flight on Aug. 29 and approval on Aug. 30.

But a third incident this year in July, which also involved the second stage, took longer to investigate.

In that incident, the FAA grounded Falcon 9 for two weeks when the video feed of a launch from California on July 11 showed the second stage’s engine freezing over in space. It resulted in SpaceX not being able to put its payloads into a correct orbit.

Any significant delay in launches could affect the upcoming Falcon Heavy launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to send a massive satellite to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

That flight is slated to fly as early as Oct. 10 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39-A.

SpaceX had seen an unprecedented years-long run of launches and landings of its rockets before the July incident.

SpaceX has been forthright about issues found during its launches with seeming transparency, identifying the issues found and fixes planned while working with the FAA.

“Safety and reliability are at the core of SpaceX’s operations. It would not have been possible to achieve our current cadence without this focus, and thanks to the pace we’ve been able to launch, we’re able to gather unprecedented levels of flight data and are poised to rapidly return to flight, safely and with increased reliability,” SpaceX had posted after the first July incident.

For the year, SpaceX has launched 93 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy from its three facilities in Florida and California, just three shy of its annual record set in 2023, when it launched 91 Falcon 9 and five Falcon Heavy rockets.

Since 2010, SpaceX has launched its Falcon 9 successfully 377 times with the only in-flight explosion happening in June 2015. It launched its Falcon Heavy, first flown in 2018, 10 times with no issues.

It’s also had 351 successful booster landings that have allowed for 320 reflights of those boosters.

Before August’s failure, it had not lost a booster during a landing attempt since February 2021, although high winds caused another to topple over on its way back to Cape Canaveral in December 2023.