Fresh off of the announced delay of the Polaris Dawn’s 3:38AM launch Wednesday morning, SpaceX made the decision to continue with the launch of Starlink mission 8-6, slated for launch at 3:48 AM. While the launch went off without a hitch, it would not prove to be a great morning for SpaceX.
In the early hours of Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched 21 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, including 13 equipped with Direct to Cell (DTC) capabilities. However, the mission many hoped would be a record breaking flight was marred when the rocket’s first-stage booster failed to land safely on the droneship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:48 a.m. from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. While the primary mission objective—to deploy the Starlink satellites—was accomplished, the attempt to recover the booster did not go as planned. As the booster descended towards the droneship, a green flash was visible near the Merlin engines, followed by the booster toppling over and catching fire.
SpaceX confirmed the incident in an update posted on the platform X (formerly Twitter), noting that the booster “tipped over following touchdown on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship.” The company’s recovery teams are now analyzing the flight data to understand what caused the landing failure.
This mission marked the 23rd flight for this particular booster, designated B1062, setting a record for the number of launches by a single Falcon 9 first-stage booster.
The loss of the storied booster came as a disappointment for both SpaceX and the company’s growing ranks of followers. The reusability of the Falcon 9 first-stage boosters is a cornerstone of the company’s business model. Wednesday’s failure ends a streak of 267 consecutive successful booster landings. The last time SpaceX experienced a similar failure was on February 16, 2021, during the Starlink 19 v1.0 mission. On that occasion, the booster B1058 failed to land on the droneship “Of Course I Still Love You.”
Following the incident, SpaceX decided to stand down from what would have been the day’s third launch attempt, another Starlink mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in order to evaluate the data from B1062. A new launch date for that mission has not yet been announced.
You can watch the full mission video here.
