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SALT LAKE CITY — The Federal Aviation Administration grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets and launched an investigation after a booster rocket tipped over and burst into flames Wednesday during a recovery procedure on an unmanned drone landing pad off the Florida coast.
It's unclear what, if any, impact the order will have on two upcoming Falcon 9-powered crewed flights, including a Dragon capsule that's slated to fly to the International Space Station next month and, after a five-month stay, bring the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts back to Earth next February.
"After a successful ascent, Falcon 9's first stage booster tipped over following touchdown on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship," SpaceX tweeted Wednesday. "Teams are assessing the booster's flight data and status."
The booster recovery failure followed a successful launch earlier Wednesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX mission to deploy 21 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit.
The mishap is a rarity for Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, and the first stage booster that was destroyed in the incident had been used on 22 previous flights. Before the accident, SpaceX was riding a streak of 267 successful Falcon 9 booster recoveries, dating back to early 2021, according to a report from Gizmodo.
SpaceX has made recovering and reusing components a hallmark of its space vehicle program and, since its debut in 2010, the Falcon 9 has emerged as a workhorse rocket package, with over 350 successful launches. This year alone, the Falcon 9 is scheduled for 148 launches, 82 of which have already been completed.
On Saturday, NASA announced that the debut crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner space capsule, launched in early June and originally planned to last about a week, would stretch to next February as the U.S. space agency decided that sending veteran astronauts and test pilots Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore back to Earth on the problem-plagued spacecraft is too risky.
Previous reports from NASA and Boeing detailed that five of 28 maneuvering thrusters failed to perform as expected during Starliner's docking at the International Space Station on June 6. Engineers also identified five small helium leaks, some of which were detected before the spacecraft launched. Helium is used in the capsule's thruster firing procedure.
Since then, engineering teams have been scrambling to identify the underlying issues with the thrusters, critical for maneuvering and positioning the spacecraft, including reviewing massive amounts of data, conducting flight and ground testing, hosting independent reviews with agency propulsion experts and developing various return contingency plans, NASA said.
But ultimately NASA decided that ongoing uncertainty and a lack of concurrence among engineers and other experts "does not meet the agency's safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight, thus prompting NASA leadership to move the astronauts to the (SpaceX Dragon) Crew-9 mission."
"Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a Aug. 24 press release. "A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine. The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring Boeing's Starliner home uncrewed is the result of our commitment to safety: our core value and our North Star. I'm grateful to both the NASA and Boeing teams for all their incredible and detailed work."
