SpaceX’s next astronaut launch for NASA is officially on for next week.
On Friday (Feb. 6), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorized SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to return to flight, ending a four-day grounding that was spurred by an issue with the vehicle’s upper stage.
The Falcon 9 issue occurred on Monday (Feb. 2), during the launch of 25 of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites from California. The rocket’s upper stage deployed the spacecraft in low Earth orbit as planned but failed to perform its prescribed deorbit burn, which caused the rocket body to crash back to Earth uncontrolled.
It was the fourth issue with a Falcon 9 upper stage in the past 19 months. One of those incidents did not trigger an inquiry. But the other two did, and the Falcon 9 wasn’t cleared to return to normal operations for about two weeks in each case.
This latest investigation wrapped up much more quickly.
“The FAA oversaw and accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation,” the agency wrote in an update on Friday. “The final mishap report cites the probable root cause was the Falcon 9 stage 2 engine’s failure to ignite prior to the deorbit burn. SpaceX identified technical and organizational preventative measures to avoid a reoccurrence of the event. The Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to flight.”
The Crew-12 mission will send four astronauts — NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency — to the International Space Station (ISS) for a roughly nine-month stay.
If all goes to plan, their journey will begin Wednesday morning with a launch atop a Falcon 9, which will send them toward the orbiting lab aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom.”
The quartet’s arrival will take the ISS back up to its normal complement of seven crewmembers. The station has been staffed by just three astronauts — one American and two Russians — since Jan. 15, when SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission departed for Earth.
The Crew-11 quartet left a month early, in the first-ever medical evacuation from the ISS. NASA has not identified the affected astronaut or provided details about the medical issue, citing privacy concerns.