SpaceX’s Falcon 9 returned to flight early Sunday morning, putting an end to its grounding that lasted a little over two weeks.
“Back in the saddle!” CEO Elon Musk shared on social media following the launch.
The mission, which launched from Florida, successfully put 23 Starlink birds into orbit. Not long after, SpaceX launched 21 Starlink sats from Vandenberg, notching back-to-back launches from opposite coasts.
How we got here: A Falcon 9 flight on July 11 suffered a second stage anomaly and didn’t put Starlink sats in the correct orbit, causing all 20 birds to rapidly fall back to Earth. SpaceX later discovered that a liquid oxygen leak caused the issue.
The company released a statement on July 25 saying it had worked with the FAA to “identify the most probable cause of the mishap and associated corrective actions.”
What’s next: With Falcon 9 back in the skies, a number of missions can move forward including:
- Transporter-11, a rideshare mission expected to launch the first sats for dozens of companies that was originally scheduled to launch earlier this month.
- Polaris Dawn, a private crewed mission that is expected to include the first private spacewalk. The launch, originally scheduled for the end of July, is now slated for no earlier than mid-August.
- Crew 9, to send a new crew of astronauts to the ISS, now expected to launch Aug. 18.
After talking through the details of the recent anomaly at length with engineers from NASA and SpaceX, the astronauts were confident the latter mission was worth the risk. “You can kind of fool yourself into thinking, well, it’s not going to happen to me… [but] the sheer significance of what we’re doing makes all that risk acceptance worth it,” Crew 9 Pilot Nick Hague told Payload.
