By Joey Roulette<\/p>\n
Feb 3 (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s SpaceX has paused flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket over an unspecified \u200bissue that its second stage experienced after successfully deploying Starlink \u200csatellites into orbit on Monday, the company said. After the two-stage Falcon 9 delivered \u200c25 Starlink satellites to space in a routine mission from southern California, the rocket’s second stage “experienced an off-nominal condition” as it prepared to deorbit itself as planned, SpaceX wrote on X, adding the rocket stage emptied \u2060all its remaining fuel \u200cas designed following a mishap. “Teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to \u200dflight,” SpaceX said. Falcon 9 is the world’s most active rocket – it launched 165 times in 2025, most of them in-house SpaceX missions to expand its \u200bStarlink constellation. A mission failure in 2024 that doomed a batch \u200cof Starlink satellites was SpaceX’s first such failure with the rocket since 2016. Monday’s mission was not a mission failure. But a problem with the rocket’s second stage, if unchecked, could risk future satellite deliveries to orbit or endanger populated areas if the vehicle fails to \u2060properly dispose of itself. Falcon 9’s second \u200bstage body is designed to reenter Earth’s \u200batmosphere after boosting payloads into orbit, using its engines to target a reentry zone away from populated areas should \u200dany components survive \u2060deorbit. SpaceX did not indicate how long its mishap investigation will take. A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees rocket \u2060launch activities and their impact on public safety, was furloughed amid the government \u200cshutdown and did not return a request for comment.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200cJoey Roulette; Editing by Andrea Ricci)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Joey Roulette Feb 3 (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s SpaceX has paused flights of its workhorse Falcon 9…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,250,22543,185741,66,306,6888,9126],"class_list":{"0":"post-451547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-elon-musk","11":"tag-falcon-9-rocket","12":"tag-mission-failure","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-spacex","16":"tag-starlink-satellites"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}