WHILE I WAS BUSY WITH THE WEEKEND’S BIGGEST STORY, I FORGOT TO COVER A COUPLE OF BAD SPACE ITEMS: SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets grounded by FAA, putting Space Coast missions on indefinite hold.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet has been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration after a Thursday launch from California produced an upper-stage failure that deployed a batch of Starlink satellites into an eccentric orbit.
The FAA grounding has immediate impact on the Space Coast’s launch schedule — which is off to a record-breaking pace this year. All told, 46 of the 50 missions thus far during 2024 have been Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and adjacent NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
In a Friday statement, the FAA said, “an investigation is designed to further enhance public safety, determine the root cause of the event, and identify corrective actions to avoid it from happening again.”
“A return to flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety. In addition, SpaceX may need to request and receive approval from the FAA to modify its license that incorporates any corrective actions and meet all other licensing requirements,” the statement said.
The Starlink satellites could not be salvaged and have since burned up on reentry.
And this: NASA’s $5 billion Europa Clipper mission may not be able to handle Jupiter’s radiation.
This past May, the mission team was told that parts similar to Europa Clipper’s transistors “were failing at lower radiation doses than expected,” NASA officials wrote in the Thursday update. Transistor testing is now underway at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission, as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, both of which are in Maryland.
The results aren’t exactly promising.
“Testing data obtained so far indicates some transistors are likely to fail in the high-radiation environment near Jupiter and its moon Europa because the parts are not as radiation-resistant as expected,” NASA officials wrote.
It’s been a rough few days for space launch and exploration fans.