The failed dea lane of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second phase late last month has a spectacular light show across the Pacific Northwest, but the incident resulted in a large portion of the rocket crashing into a farmer’s field.
The second phase was supposed to burn out across the Pacific Oceancake, far away from populated areas but a failed deorbit combustion resulted in an uncontrolled entry on March 26, 2021.
Dramatic videos taken from the ground showed bits of glowing debris sweeping through the air around 9 p.m. local time, while the upper rocket component burned and crumbled across the west coast of the United States.
The failed deorbit occurred about three weeks after the launch of the rocket, in which a Falcon 9 60 Starlink satellites successfully landed in a low-Earth orbit. The first phase managed to land on a drone shortly after launch from Kennedy Space Center on March 4th.
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SpaceX kept quiet about the whole thing. The Tri-City Herald now reports that a charred piece of the second phase crashed on a farmer’s field in Washington state. The residue appears to be a composite, overpacked pressure vessel, or COPV, designed to carry pressures, such as supercooled helium, under pressure.
Kyle Foreman of the Grant County Sheriff told the Tri-City Herald the tank left a 4 inch dip in the ground. SpaceX, after the sheriff’s deputies contacted it, arrived on the scene to pick up the garbage.
“SpaceX recovered a composite pressure vessel from the Falcon 9 entry last week,” tweeted the sheriff in Grant County. ‘It was found on private property in southwest Grant County this week. Media and treasure hunters: we do not disclose details. ”
To which the sheriff added: “The owner simply wants to be left alone.”
About what went wrong during the deorbit, ‘after this launch there was not enough propellant to ignite the Merlin engine and complete the combustion,’ so the ‘propellant was vented to space’, leading to the ‘uncontrolled ‘return to the atmosphere’, “ Eric Berger report in Ars Technica.
A similar incident occurred in 2014 when an apparent COPV of a Falcon 9 occurred landed in Brazil. It is fortunate that no one has ever been injured in these incidents, which is fortunate is Rare. To date, SpaceX has completed 111 launches of the Falcon 9, including 71 first-phase landings and 54 missions that include fly-back rockets.