AUSTIN, Texas — A Falcon 9 booster was lost after making a droneship landing March 2, the latest incident involving the rocket that has raised reliability concerns.
A Falcon 9 lifted off at 9:24 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying 21 Starlink satellites. The webcast of the launch showed the booster touching down on its droneship, Just Read the Instructions, about 8 minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff. The company later reported a successful deployment of the Starlink satellites.
However, in a statement early March 3, the company said the booster, designated B1086, was lost after landing. “Following the successful landing, an off-nominal fire in the aft end of the rocket damaged one of the booster’s landing legs which resulted in it tipping over,” the company stated. “While disappointing to lose a rocket after a successful mission, the team will use the data to make Falcon even more reliable on ascent and landing.”
“Booster 1086 was unfortunately lost last night after a successful landing,” posted Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch at SpaceX. “Every failure is an opportunity to learn. This setback will not only improve the reliability of Falcon 9, but of all vehicles @SpaceX.”
This was only the fifth flight of B1086, a modest number given that the current record for flights by a Falcon 9 booster is 26. The booster was originally built as a Falcon Heavy side booster and used on the June 2024 launch of the GOES-U weather satellite. It was then converted into a Falcon 9 booster, launching two Starlink missions and another carrying a pair of Maxar’s WorldView Legion satellites before this mission.
The landing failure is the latest in a series of incidents involving the Falcon 9, which has become a workhorse for SpaceX and much of the rest of the space industry. Another Falcon 9 booster crashed while landing on a droneship in August 2024, briefly pausing launches.
There have been several incidents involving Falcon 9 upper stages, including one in July 2024 that resulted in the loss of its payload of Starlink satellites. That incident halted Falcon 9 launches for about two weeks.
Two other Falcon 9 launches suffered problems with deorbit burns after payload deployment. The first, on the Crew-9 launch in September 2024, paused Falcon 9 launches again for about two weeks, with the exception of one mission to interplanetary space that did not require a deorbit burn. Another, on a Feb. 1 launch of Starlink satellites, resulted in the upper stage reentering over Europe Feb. 19, with debris landing in western Poland. That incident did not result in any halt in Falcon 9 launches mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
At a Feb. 26 NASA briefing hours before the successful Falcon 9 launch of the IM-2 lunar lander for Intuitive Machines, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president for build and flight reliability, said the company had been looking into an issue with the nozzle of the Merlin engine used in the Falcon 9 upper stage.
“We saw potentially a manufacturing defect that could have showed up in the nozzle,” he said of an upper stage being produced at the company’s Hawthorne, California, factory. “That kind of makes us question all the nozzles and make sure they’re cleared.”
That issue, he said, turned out to be isolated to the one nozzle in the factory, something the company confirmed through checks of paperwork tracking the manufacturing and testing of other nozzles. “Whenever we discover something here that looks a little strange, we’ll pause a little bit, take a look, dig into the data, and make sure we really have solid flight rationale.”
Meanwhile, issues with a Falcon 9 have delayed another NASA mission, carrying the SPHEREx astronomy spacecraft and four PUNCH space science satellites. That launch, once scheduled for Feb. 27, has slipped to no earlier than March 4. NASA has cited work on the Falcon 9, including the need for “additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data,” as reasons for the launch slips.
NASA had rescheduled a prelaunch briefing for the mission for the afternoon of March 3, but in a statement late March 2, before the Starlink launch, announced that the briefing would not take place as planned. “The agency will share more information as soon as possible,” the agency stated. As of early afternoon March 3, NASA has not shared additional information or confirmed that the launch will continue as planned March 4.