2024-07-12 14:46:13
A sudden failure in one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket engines jeopardized the Starlink mission by dropping the satellites on board outside of the programmed orbit and potentially decaying as they wander near the Earth’s atmosphere.
A second stage engine on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered a rare failure in space during a routine Starlink mission Thursday night, putting satellites at risk in the company’s first rocket failure in more than seven years.
About an hour after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Base in California, the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket failed to re-ignite in space and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites into a much lower orbit than planned, where there is a risk of him burning up in Earth’s orbit. atmosphere.
The attempt to restart the engine in space “resulted in SOMETHING of the engine for currently unknown reasons,” wrote SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on his social network X, referring to an industry acronym in a tongue-in-cheek tone for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly which usually means explosion.
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The failed mission of the world’s most active rocket breaks a remarkable streak of launch success that has kept SpaceX, a private company valued at about $200 billion, that many countries and space companies rely on to launch their satellites, the industry leader in space.
Musk said that SpaceX was updating the Starlink satellites’ software to force their thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a hard atmospheric re-entry, but noted that “unlike an episode of Star Trek, it’s This probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try.”
“The satellite’s thrusters have to raise the orbit faster than the drag of the atmosphere pulls them down, or they burn up,” Musk said.
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The failure occurred on the 354th Falcon 9 mission and is the first since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed the payload of its client, an Israeli communications satellite.
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