SpaceX launches Hera asteroid mission, but delays Europa Clipper because of Hurricane Milton

SpaceX returned to flight with its Falcon 9 rocket on Monday, sending up the Hera probe for the European Space Agency on its way to a pair of asteroids, but SpaceX and NASA have called off plans to launch the Falcon Heavy later this week on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s moon because of the approaching Hurricane Milton.

SpaceX got the OK from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch Falcon 9, which had been grounded since the late September launch of the Crew-9 mission because of an issue with the Falcon 9 second stage missing its intended reentry target.

The FAA on Sunday, though, announced it was approving just the Hera mission since its launch was not going to feature a second stage reentry.

That Falcon 9 lifted off at 10:52 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40.

The first-stage booster flew for the 23rd and final time since it needed to be expended to get the payload to an interplanetary transfer orbit. The booster had previously flown both the Crew-1 and Crew-2 human spaceflight missions.

The ESA Hera mission is a followup to NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that impacted an asteroid in 2021 as part of a planetary defense test to see if a potential Earth collision could be avoided through human intervention.

Hera will fly back to the same binary asteroid system tasked to perform a post-impact survey of the DART target, the smaller Dimorphos asteroid that orbits the larger Didymos.

“Hera will turn the grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defense technique,” reads the ESA mission website. “Demonstrating new technologies from autonomous navigation around an asteroid to low gravity proximity operations, Hera will be humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system and Europe’s flagship planetary defender.”

SpaceX and NASA had another major mission planned this week, but the threat of Hurricane Milton forced a delay from a planned launch of the Europa Clipper flight on board a Space Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A that was targeting a Thursday liftoff.

NASA also was delaying the planned return of Crew-8 on the SpaceX Crew Endeavour from the International Space Station because of Milton as Endeavour is supposed to land off the coast of Florida in either the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico. That departure is now delayed to no earlier than Thursday.

For the Europa Clipper, the massive spacecraft was secured safely inside SpaceX’s hangar at 39-A having already been attached to the Falcon Heavy as high winds and heavy rain is forecast with the center of Hurricane Milton potentially moving close to the Space Coast after traveling across the state either late Wednesday or early Thursday.

“The safety of launch team personnel is our highest priority, and all precautions will be taken to protect the Europa Clipper spacecraft,” said Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA’s Launch Services Program.

The spacecraft had made its way to the hangar on Friday from KSC’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility.

After launch on a date to be determined, it will head to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. It’s the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. The solar-powered spacecraft’s mission is to orbit Jupiter and make nearly 50 flybys of Europa, but not land on it. Its goal is to see if there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life.

The launch window extends until Nov. 6.

“Once the storm passes, recovery teams will assess the safety of the spaceport before personnel return to work. Then launch teams will assess the launch processing facilities for damage from the storm,” NASA posted on its website.

“Once we have the ‘all-clear’ followed by facility assessment and any recovery actions, we will determine the next launch opportunity for this NASA flagship mission,” Dunn said.

The Falcon Heavy launch did have approval from the FAA on its operations plan advisory this week, but it has not responded to questions as to whether Falcon Heavy was also under its grounding order related to Falcon 9.

The Falcon Heavy is essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together.

While SpaceX has submitted its request for return to flight as of Oct. 4, the FAA only approved Monday’s Hera mission, it said in a Sunday statement.

“Safety will drive the timeline for the FAA to complete its review of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mishap investigation report and when the agency will authorize Falcon 9 to return to regular operations,” the FAA stated.

The investigation report for what was deemed a mishap came after the second stage from the Crew-9 launch from Cape Canaveral on Sept. 28 landed outside of the designated hazard area. While no public injuries or public property damage was reported, the FAA required an investigation.

It marked the third time this year the FAA has grounded the Falcon 9, and the second time because of an issue with the rocket’s second stage.

SpaceX said in its social media post the second stage “was disposed of in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause.”

FAA’s last grounding of Falcon 9 came in August when a booster met a fiery end on its attempt to make a recovery landing downrange on one of SpaceX’s droneships after a Starlink launch.

“The FAA investigates commercial space incidents to determine the root cause and identify corrective actions so they won’t happen again,” the FAA said in a statement after that incident.

After that launch, SpaceX led an investigation and submitted a final report to the FAA, which was approved. That turnaround was quick with the failed booster landing happening on Aug. 28. The report was filed and submitted with a request to return to the flight on Aug. 29 and approval on Aug. 30.

But the first grounding this year, which came in July, took longer to investigate.

In that incident, the FAA grounded Falcon 9 for 15 days when the video feed of a launch from California on July 11 showed the second stage’s engine freezing over in space. It resulted in SpaceX not being able to put its payloads into a correct orbit.

2024 Orlando Sentinel. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.