Two hours after SpaceX launched its latest Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday evening, a message popped up from CEO Elon Musk on X: "Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown." Translation, per the New York Times: The second stage of the rocket "sustained a rare but catastrophic failure," disintegrating while in orbit with a cargo of 20 Starlink satellites aboard. Musk added that his team was "reviewing data tonight to understand [the] root cause" of the rocket's RUD, or rapid unscheduled disassembly, which came after an uneventful first launch phase from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base.
CNBC notes that the "rocket's upper second stage failed to reignite its engine as planned" before it was destroyed, and that the Falcon 9 is grounded until the FAA gives its OK, after a SpaceX investigation. It's not clear if SpaceX will be able to retrieve the lost Starlink units. The company noted that after the malfunction, the 20 satellites were dumped in a lower-than-intended orbit; SpaceX has made contact with five of them so far. The Times clarifies just how rare such an event is: It's the first Falcon 9 failure in eight years, with more than 300 thumbs-up missions since one of the rockets exploded on the launchpad in 2016, destroying an Israeli satellite.
This particular mission was SpaceX's 69th Falcon 9 launch of 2024, with one taking place every three days or so this year, per the Times' calculations. Company officials say they'd planned more than 140 launches by year's end. This incident, however, will likely slow that pace, including for two imminent manned missions set for later this month and August. The only other time a Falcon 9 has been destroyed while in flight was in 2015, during a NASA cargo mission to the International Space Station. (More SpaceX stories.)
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