California, United States

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has been grounded by the US Federal Aviation Administration. The rocket failed after it broke apart in space on Thursday night (Jul 11). This mishap was the rocket's first failure in over seven years.

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The rocket was carrying 20 Starlink satellites to deploy them into Earth's low orbit. The initial stage of the launch was successful after which the first stage was to return to a drone ship.

About an hour after its launch at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Falcon 9's second stage failed to complete its second burn and deployed the satellites into a lower orbital path than it was supposed to. Due to this, the satellites will return to Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

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SpaceX's founder and CEO Elon Musk said that the software of the satellites is being updated to fire their onboard thrusters more than usual and avoid an intense re-entry into the atmosphere. According to Musk, the problem arose in the upper stage of the rocket.

"Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said.

The Falcon 9 has been ordered to stay grounded by the FAA until SpaceX completes an investigation, fixes the rocket, and gets approval. Depending on the complexity of the problem, the process could take some weeks or months.

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According to a post on X, the space company has said that the satellites are no threat to the public. They would appear in the sky as streaks of glow, but SpaceX has not estimated the time of their re-entry.

"Shooting stars," Musk replied to the SpaceX post.

The engineers at SpaceX had detected a leak of propellant liquid oxygen, after which the second stage failed.

(With inputs from agencies)