SpaceX's primary Falcon 9 rocket faced grounding for the second time this year due to intervention by federal regulators, following an unsuccessful landing attempt after a standard satellite launch. According to Bloomberg, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Wednesday that it is mandating an investigation into the incident.
"The incident involved the malfunction of the Falcon 9 booster rocket during its landing attempt on a drone ship at sea," the FAA stated. "No public injuries or damage to public property have been reported." This unusual landing failure happened early Wednesday morning, after SpaceX had successfully launched another set of 21 Starlink internet satellites into orbit from Florida. Although the satellites were deployed without issue, the Falcon 9 booster seemed to catch fire and topple over during its landing attempt on one of SpaceX's drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean, as seen in footage from a SpaceX livestream of the launch.
This marked the first unsuccessful rocket landing attempt for SpaceX in over three years. The company noted that this specific booster was on its 23rd launch. This new investigation follows just over a month after the FAA had previously grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9, one of the world's most frequently launched rockets, due to a midflight failure on July 11. The FAA allowed the rocket to resume flights just two weeks later after SpaceX swiftly identified the root cause of the failure.
