SpaceX resumed launching Falcon 9 rockets this weekend after last week’s second stage incident. At the same time, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company has shifted its focus to “building a self-growing city on the Moon” within a decade.<\/p>\n
The second stage issue, which resulted in a failed deorbit burn and subsequent reentry over the Southern Indian Ocean, was due<\/a> to “an off-nominal condition caused by a failed ignition due to a gas bubble in the transfer tube ahead of the planned deorbit burn.”<\/p>\n Launches of the workhorse rocket were halted while an investigation took place. Shortly after, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told The Register: “The FAA will oversee every step of the investigation, approve the final report and any corrective actions.”<\/p>\n A few days later, the FAA gave SpaceX the nod to resume launches and said in a statement: “The FAA oversaw and accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation. The final mishap report cites the probable root cause as the Falcon 9 stage 2 engine’s failure to ignite before the deorbit burn.<\/p>\n “SpaceX identified technical and organizational preventative measures to avoid a reoccurrence of the event. The Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to flight.”<\/p>\n So all good? Kind of. On February 7, at 2058 UTC, SpaceX launched another 25 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg. The successful mission cleared the path for the upcoming Crew-12 mission, but far greater challenges lie ahead.<\/p>\n These were articulated in a post<\/a> on X (formerly Twitter) by Musk, who wrote: “SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.”<\/p>\n The word “potentially” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. SpaceX was awarded a contract<\/a> in 2021 to build a lunar lander variant of its Starship rocket. However, a few short years later, NASA admitted that the company was behind schedule and reopened<\/a> the competition for the landing contract, with a view to getting boots on the Moon’s surface by the end of Trump’s second term in 2029.<\/p>\n