A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck a day late due to bad weather, and another 60 Starlink internet satellites orbited Cape Canaveral late Monday. An attempt to recover the first phase with the landing on an offshore droneship failed, ending a series of 24 successes in a row.
Another launch of Starlink, with another 60 satellites on board, is scheduled for early Wednesday from the nearby Kennedy Space Center, while SpaceX continues to develop a global constellation designed to provide Internet access to customers around the world.
What the impact of the landing accident on Wednesday’s flight is is not yet known.
SpaceX Webcast
Monday’s flight began spectacularly at 10:59 p.m. EST when the Falcon 9 rocket’s nine first-engine engines caught fire with an eruption and the 229-foot-high booster of Route 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station pushed away. .
The engines propelled the rocket away on a northeastern trajectory, yielding 1.7 million kilograms of thrust. It accelerated rapidly as they consumed propellants and the vehicle lost weight.
After climbing out of the dense lower atmosphere, the first phase, with the sixth flight, separated and landed after an offshore droneship.
As usual, the booster fired three of its engines to decelerate before plunging back into the lower atmosphere, but the shutdown, seen in a switched-off video, did not look normal. A camera on the drone later burned down the glow of a landing on one side, but the booster never appeared and presumably fell into the nearby ocean.
William Harwood / CBS News
“Unfortunately, we could not hold the landing today,” said SpaceX’s launch commentator, who described the loss as “uncomfortable”.
It was the first unsuccessful repair of SpaceX since the sixth Starlink mission in March 2020. Since then, the California rocket builder has performed 24 successful repairs in a row before Monday’s crash.
But the landing failure did not affect the outcome of Monday’s mission. The second phase of the Falcon 9, powered by a single vacuum-rated engine, fired twice as planned to reach the planned trajectory approximately 45 minutes after the lift. The 60 Starlinks were released about 20 minutes later to fly on their own.
SpaceX has now launched 1,145 Starlinks. The company has been approved by the regulatory organization to launch more than 12,000 satellites, creating a network of relay stations that provide two-way internet connectivity to customers around the world.