SpaceX has temporarily grounded its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which is slated to launch four astronauts just eight days from now.<\/p>\n
A Falcon 9<\/a> delivered 25 of SpaceX’s Starlink<\/a> satellites into low Earth orbit<\/a> (LEO) as planned on Monday<\/a> (Feb. 2). But, after deploying the payloads, the rocket’s upper stage failed to perform its deorbit burn, which was designed to bring it down for controlled destruction in Earth’s atmosphere<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “Teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight,” SpaceX said via X<\/a> on Monday evening, in a post that announced the rocket’s grounding.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n The Falcon 9 is the world’s busiest rocket by far. It launched a record-breaking 165 times in 2025<\/a> and already has 14 liftoffs until its belt this year.<\/p>\n The rocket is incredibly reliable, too. All of last year’s missions were successful, and just a single one \u2014 a Starlink launch on March 3 \u2014 experienced a significant anomaly. On that flight, a Falcon 9 first stage toppled shortly after landing on a ship at sea and was destroyed<\/a>. (The booster did its job in the upward direction, and the 21 Starlink satellites were deployed into LEO as planned.)<\/p>\n SpaceX<\/a> halted Falcon 9 launches for a week while it investigated that issue, which was traced to a fuel leak in one of the booster’s nine Merlin engines. This leak led to a fire shortly after touchdown, which weakened a landing leg and caused the vehicle to tip over.<\/p>\n It’s unclear how long this new launch hiatus will last. But both SpaceX and NASA doubtless hope the issue is resolved soon, for a very high-profile Falcon 9 launch is coming up \u2014 that of the Crew-12 astronaut mission to the International Space Station<\/a> (ISS).<\/p>\n Crew-12 is currently scheduled to launch on Feb. 11 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station<\/a> in Florida. That’s four days earlier than originally planned: SpaceX and NASA fast-tracked Crew-12, because it will get the ISS back to its normal complement of seven crewmembers.<\/p>\n The orbiting lab has been staffed by a skeleton crew of three<\/a> since Jan. 15, when the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-11 left (a month earlier than planned) in the first-ever medical evacuation from the ISS<\/a>.<\/p>\n NASA is keeping a close eye on the Falcon 9 investigation, which SpaceX is conducting along with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “We do have our teams with Commercial Crew embedded in that investigation,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said on Tuesday, during a press conference that discussed Monday’s fueling test of the agency’s Artemis 2<\/a> moon rocket, which ended early due to a propellant leak<\/a>.<\/p>\n “We’re pressing towards our Crew-12 window,” he added. “We’re planning towards, you know, just a week, a little bit more than a week from now, to start that preparation. But again, that’s going to be contingent on the return-to-flight rationale, [on] which we’re heavily partnered with both the FAA and SpaceX.”<\/p>\n And about that wayward Falcon 9 upper stage: Though it did not come back to Earth in a controlled fashion as planned on Monday, it did manage to “passivate” itself by venting propellant, according to SpaceX.<\/p>\n This maneuver lowered its perigee, or closest point to Earth, to 68.4 miles (110 kilometers), according to<\/a> satellite tracker and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.<\/p>\n