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posted by hubie on Wednesday October 02, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

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 [the] 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.

[...] 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.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday October 02, @06:45PM

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 02, @06:45PM (#1375487) Journal

    More data: The ground track overlapped the target area, but it went long. This indicates insufficient delta-V in the deorbit burn, and the cause of that is currently not public. It could have been insufficient fuel, an engine malfunction, or something else.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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