SpaceX Falcon 9 cleared for launch after failure

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the world’s most productive launch vehicle, is ready to fly again after a mission-ending failure earlier this month during a routine voyage.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches and reviews accidents, said Thursday that there were “no public safety concerns” when the Falcon 9 crashed in orbit on July 11, allowing the rocket to quickly fly again.

“This public safety decision means the Falcon 9 vehicle may return to service while the general investigation continues, provided all other licensing requirements are met,” the FAA said.

SpaceX has already announced on its website that it will put the Falcon 9 back to work starting Saturday and launch a series of Starlink internet satellites.

That would make SpaceX’s return to flight extremely fast, with only about two weeks of downtime. By comparison, the Falcon 9 has been grounded for months after previous failures or accidents, the last of which occurred in 2016.

Approval to resume Falcon 9 launches also means SpaceX is on track to return to its routine but crucial work of launching astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s 10th such voyage — flown on behalf of NASA — is scheduled to launch in August. That mission is called Crew-9, and NASA said Friday it is on track to launch “no earlier than” Aug. 18.

“We’ve followed the investigation that the FAA has done step by step,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said Friday. “SpaceX has been very transparent.”

Stich added that Crew-9 will launch after the completion of the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. That vehicle has been at the ISS for weeks longer than expected as ground teams worked to understand several issues that plagued the early part of the flight.

Four astronauts will launch in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the Crew-9 mission: NASA’s Zena Cardman, Nick Hague, Stephanie Wilson and cosmonaut Alexsandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

During a press conference on Friday, Hague said he has “extreme confidence in the team (of SpaceX and NASA).

“And I look forward to getting on the rocket when the team decides it’s time to go,” Hague said, adding that SpaceX has been transparent with the astronauts from the moment the problem arose.

SpaceX also plans to launch a historic private astronaut mission called Polaris Dawn, which would send billionaire philanthropist Jared Isaacman and three crewmates to orbit aboard a Falcon 9 to conduct the first civilian spacewalk. That mission had been set to launch as early as this month but is now on track for “late summer” or August, Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, said Friday.

What Happened to Falcon 9The Falcon 9, the smallest vehicle in SpaceX’s fleet of rockets, is the linchpin of the U.S. rocket industry. As of 2024, it will have flown more than 60 missions. No other rocket comes close to being as active.

Shortly before the accident, a Falcon 9 launched a group of Starlink satellites from California on July 11.

The first part of the mission appeared to go smoothly, with the Falcon 9 using its first-stage booster — the lower part of the rocket with nine engines that provide the initial burst of energy at launch — to propel itself toward space.

But the rocket’s second stage, designed to launch after the first stage fails and carry the satellites to their final destination in space, failed abruptly.

SpaceX later announced that there was an oxygen leak in the second stage. (Liquid oxygen, or LOX, is commonly used as an oxidizer or fuel in rockets.) That led to what SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at one point described as a “RUD” — or “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” a term SpaceX typically uses to refer to an explosion.

Despite the mishap, the satellites were deployed safely, Walker said. The rocket sensed an engine problem, she said, and deployed the satellites. But they were placed in a much lower orbit than intended, meaning they would likely be pulled out of space very quickly by Earth’s gravity.

The FAA, which routinely oversees investigations into such accidents, told CNN in an email that “all debris from the anomaly has been returned and there have been no reports of injuries to the public or damage to public property.”

SpaceX had asked the FAA on July 15 to evaluate the threat to public safety, allowing the company to resume flying even as the broader investigation — which is intended to determine the “root cause” of the accident and how to fix the problem — is still ongoing.

In a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, SpaceX indicated it already understood the cause.

Walker also explained Friday that SpaceX determined the leak was caused by a crack in a line attached to a pressure sensor, which had suffered some wear from engine vibrations and a clamp holding it in place coming loose. The oxygen leak caused “excessive cooling” of engine components, leaving the rocket without enough fuel to burn properly, Walker said.

According to Walker, the problem would not have occurred during a SpaceX mission with NASA astronauts, because those missions have a different flight profile.

But SpaceX doesn’t plan to “assume this is an isolated issue,” Walker added, noting that’s why SpaceX checked the entire system anyway.

The company cited the rocket’s extensive flight history as one of the reasons it is “able to collect unprecedented amounts of flight data and be ready to quickly get back in the air.”