SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket grounded after rare in-flight failure

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is grounded pending an investigation into the incident following an in-flight failure, a rare misfire for the company's battle vehicle.

The mission, known as “Starlink Group 9-3,” launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night and was carrying 20 satellites bound for low-Earth orbit.

The rocket's lower first stage, or booster, performed as expected before returning to Earth, but the rocket's upper second stage failed to ignite its engine as planned and was destroyed, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk confirmed.

“Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in a rapid unscheduled engine disassembly for reasons currently unknown,” Musk wrote in a social media post. RUD, or “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” is a term SpaceX uses to refer to an explosive or destructive event. The company said in a later update that the engine failure occurred after a liquid oxygen leak in the second stage.

The Falcon 9 will remain grounded until the Federal Aviation Administration approves SpaceX's investigation into the incident, the federal regulator confirmed.

“The FAA will be involved in every step of the investigation process and must approve SpaceX's final report, including corrective actions,” the agency said in a statement to CNBC.

The Starlink mission was the 69th Falcon 9 launch of the year (the company is averaging a blistering pace of launches every two to three days in 2024), but the investigation will likely delay planned launches in the coming weeks, including two crewed missions: the private Polaris Dawn and NASA’s Crew-9.

SpaceX has deployed all 20 Starlink satellites, but said the second-stage engine failure means the satellites were in “a lower orbit than intended.” In an update Friday afternoon, the company said it made contact with 10 of the satellites in an effort to use the satellites’ onboard thrusters to ascend to a higher orbit.

Despite the recovery attempt, SpaceX confirmed that the “extremely draggy environment” of being in a lower, errant orbit means the satellites cannot be recovered. All 20 satellites will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

“They do not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety,” the company wrote in a statement on its website.

Falcon 9 has enjoyed an unmatched streak of success for nearly a decade, racking up more than 300 consecutive successful orbital launches since its previous in-flight failure in June 2015 during NASA's CRS-7 cargo mission.

In total, SpaceX's Falcon 9 has launched 354 missions to orbit, with more than 300 of them including successful landings and resulting in booster rockets being reused more than 280 times.