SpaceX wants the FAA to allow the Falcon 9 to fly again as part of the accident investigation

SpaceX wants the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to return its idle Falcon 9 rocket fleet to flight during an ongoing public safety investigation, allowing the company to resume its series of unmanned commercial missions while engineers investigate what happened during Thursday’s upper stage malfunction.

But what about Falcon 9 missions with humans on board?

Polaris Dawn, a mission carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman and three other commercial astronauts in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, was scheduled to lift off from the Cape Canaveral space station on July 31. NASA’s Crew-9 was scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in August.

More:FAA bans SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, Space Coast missions on hold indefinitely

“I would imagine the prerequisite will be that they understand what happened. They have a plan to fix the problem. And they fly at least one unmanned Falcon 9 to verify the fixes before Polaris Dawn gets the go-ahead for launch,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“And that’s not really going to be a problem because they have plenty of Falcon 9s in reserve that are ready to launch,” McDowell said.

Assuming SpaceX attaches instruments to the rocket after resuming flight to collect additional diagnostic data for investigators, “the question is whether it will be weeks or months” before the FAA grants permission to resume manned missions, McDowell said.

On Monday, SpaceX asked the FAA to confirm that last week’s anomaly did not pose a threat to public safety and to return the Falcon 9s to flight operations while the investigation is ongoing. The ill-fated rocket, carrying a payload of 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, had developed a liquid oxygen leak in its second, upper stage, unexpectedly forcing the satellites into too low an orbit.

“The FAA is reviewing the request and will be guided by data and safety at every step of the process,” the agency said in a statement on SpaceX’s request on Monday. Further details are not yet known.

“This will impact crewed launches more than (normal) launches because they need to make sure everything is absolutely clear and safe before another crew comes on board,” said Laura Forczyk, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based space consulting firm Astralytical.

Falcon 9 launched 46 of 50 Florida missions

Meanwhile, the Space Coast’s launch schedule – which moved forward at a record pace this year – is largely on hold indefinitely. Falcon 9 rockets are responsible for 46 of the 50 missions scheduled to launch in 2024 from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and neighboring Kennedy Space Center.

In a statement, SpaceX promised to “conduct a comprehensive investigation in coordination with the FAA, determine the root cause, and take corrective actions to ensure the success of future missions.” According to the federal agency, “flight operations will only resume if the FAA determines that any systems, processes, or procedures related to the accident do not affect public safety.”

FLORIDA TODAY reached out to NASA, which emailed the following statement:

“Although the SpaceX Starlink launch was a purely commercial mission, NASA receives insight from SpaceX into all aspects of interest related to the Falcon 9 rocket as part of the agency’s standard fleet tracking activities. Crew safety and mission assurance are NASA’s highest priorities,” the statement said.

“SpaceX has been open-minded with information and is engaging NASA in the company’s ongoing anomaly investigation to understand the issue and how to proceed. NASA will provide updates on the agency’s missions, including potential schedule impacts, if any, as more information becomes available,” the statement said.

John Holst, a Florida-based space consultant and author of the blog Ill-Defined Space, said SpaceX has always been open about problems in the past.

“This is a rare occurrence for SpaceX. I’m sure SpaceX will try to get this done quickly, but at the same time, the FAA and NASA have their mission assurance process that they want to go through to understand exactly what happened,” Holst said.

“Because they don’t want the second stage to fail – a rapid, unplanned disassembly (RUD) – while the astronauts are trying to get into orbit,” he said.

What FAA and SpaceX could find out during the investigation

McDowell said SpaceX operates on the philosophy “good enough is never good enough.”

“You’re constantly tinkering with the design, improving it and changing it, right? You’re in Silicon Valley mode, not the old NASA mode that says, ‘Yeah, once it works, don’t change anything,'” he said.

“Was this (anomaly) the result of a design change? It won’t be a fundamental flaw in the existing design because there have been so many launches. The other possibility is that it was a manufacturing or assembly error. And that’s what investigators need to look into,” he said.

McDowell said SpaceX and the FAA need to make sure a potential problem would not impact the Polaris Dawn mission. If a similar accident involving an oxygen leak in the upper stage were to occur during Polaris Dawn, SpaceX would lose the mission but not the crew that could maneuver the Dragon to an emergency return to Earth.

He said he would be surprised if SpaceX engineers took more than a month to find the root cause and solution for unmanned Starlink missions – but “then the question is how long it will take to satisfy the FAA.”

What happened to the Falcon 9 upper stage?

During Thursday’s launch in California, SpaceX reported that the Falcon 9’s first stage functioned flawlessly, carrying the second stage and Starlink satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a successful drone landing.

“The second stage will go into a very low Earth orbit, then glide to the top of that orbit for about 40 minutes, and then restart (its engine) to get into the orbit where all the Starlink satellites will be deployed. And this time, that restart didn’t happen,” McDowell said.

SpaceX reported that the satellites were in an eccentric orbit just 135 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, less than half the expected perigee altitude.

“The density of the atmosphere is quite high and the drag the satellites will experience as they plow through the upper atmosphere will bring them down pretty quickly. And worse, the satellites’ small electric argon rocket engines are not powerful enough to overcome that drag,” McDowell said.

“Although SpaceX attempted to fire the rocket engines to rescue the satellites and put them into a higher orbit, they simply lacked the power to overcome the atmospheric drag at that low altitude,” he said.

“And within – I would guess a few hours to a day – all these things were down – burned up in the atmosphere,” he said.

Companies are waiting for flight operations to resume

Beyond satellites, the Falcon 9 has launched a diverse range of missions into orbit from the Space Coast this year, including:

One day after the Crew-8 launch in March, Cape Canaveral-based Sidus Space achieved a critical corporate milestone by launching its first satellite, LizzieSat-1, aboard a Falcon 9 on SpaceX’s Transporter 10 rideshare mission from Vandenberg.

“I’m shocked. They were pretty successful,” Mark Lee, a quality control engineer at Sidus Space, said of Thursday’s mishap. He said his company plans another launch later in the year and he hopes the FAA’s groundings won’t significantly affect that timing.

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