FAA Confirms Action Pending Investigation

The FAA confirmed its grounding of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, pending an investigation into why the rocket’s second stage missed its deorbit landing target following the Crew-9 launch from Cape Canaveral.

For its part, SpaceX announced it is halting launches in a social media post but the FAA did not confirm the grounding until a couple days later. The company said in its post that the second stage “was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experiences an off-nominal deorbit burn. 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 launch was the first human spaceflight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40. The Crew Dragon Freedom was sent on a trajectory to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) which it successfully completed. The first stage booster made a successful landing at Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1. However the second stage, normally deorbited without recovery into the Atlantic, missed its projected landing zone.

The grounding of Falcon 9 immediately affected a launch the next day of a OneWeb Launch 20 mission for EutelsatGroup from Vandenberg Space Force Base. It also delays several upcoming missions including a Starlink launch set for Ocober 5 and two time-sensitive launches. One is the Hera mission for the European Space Agency on October 7 and the second is the Europa Clipper for NASA to send the massive probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa on October 10. Both of those latter missions have launch windows that go further into the month.

FMI: www.spacex.com/