Twenty SpaceX Satellites Fall From Space After Falcon 9 Explodes

"We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point, but 344 flights in a row is amazing."

Sinking Feeling

Last week, the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket started unexpectedly accumulating substantial amounts of ice before experiencing what CEO Elon Musk later referred to as a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," a tongue-in-cheek term for a mid-flight explosion.

It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, following a string of 344 successful consecutive launches.

And the 20 Starlink broadband internet satellites it was meant to carry into orbit have since met their fiery demise, as Harvard astrophysicist and space tracker extraordinaire Jonathan McDowell later confirmed.

That's despite SpaceX trying its best to salvage the satellites.

"The team made contact with 10 of the satellites and attempted to have them raise orbit using their ion thrusters, but they are in an enormously high-drag environment with their perigee, or lowest point of their elliptical orbit, only 135 km above the Earth," SpaceX wrote in a July 12 update. "As such, the satellites will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise."

"They do not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety," the company added.

Crash and Burn

Over the weekend, McDowell confirmed that several of the Starlink satellites had already reentered the Earth's atmosphere, where they almost certainly burned up. Footage showed already-familiar streaks of light in the night sky.

It's an exceedingly rare event given SpaceX's unprecedented track record. The last Falcon 9 launch failure in 2016 saw an Israeli communications satellite destroyed when the rocket exploded on the launch pad.

"We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point," SpaceX's former vice president of propulsion Tom Mueller, who was instrumental in the development of the rocket, tweeted after last week's accident, "but 344 flights in a row is amazing. The team will fix the problem and start the cycle again."

For now, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all Falcon 9 rocket launches pending a joint investigation, which could force the company to delay its Polaris Dawn mission, which will see billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman attempt to perform the first-ever private spacewalk.

The mission is tentatively scheduled for July 31, but given the latest news, we should expect delays.

More on the failure: All SpaceX's Falcon 9 Rockets Grounded After One of Them Explodes