A SpaceX rocket has met its first failure in around a decade which left the Starlink satellites in a low orbit making them destined to fall through the atmosphere. On Thursday night, the Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California, carrying 20 Starlink satellites. About an hour into the flight, the upper stage engine experienced a malfunction due to a liquid oxygen leak, according to SpaceX.
On Friday, the company reported that flight controllers successfully established contact with half of the satellites. Efforts were then made to elevate these satellites to a higher orbit using their onboard ion thrusters.
SpaceX explained the whole event in a series of tweets. The first tweet said, "During tonight’s Falcon 9 launch of Starlink, the second stage engine did not complete its second burn. As a result, the Starlink satellites were deployed into a lower than intended orbit. SpaceX has made contact with 5 of the satellites so far and is attempting to have them raise orbit using their ion thrusters."
The next tweet in the thread read, "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."
The third tweet stated, "Each pass through perigee removes 5+ km of altitude from the highest point in the satellite orbit. At this level of drag, our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites."
The tweet concluded by saying, "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."
Elon Musk's Take
Elon Musk while talking about this failure said, "We’re updating satellite software to run the ion thrusters at their equivalent of warp 9. Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it’s worth a shot."
He added, "The satellite thrusters need to raise orbit faster than atmospheric drag pulls them down or they burn up."