<p>Washington: A second-stage engine on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket suffered a rare malfunction in space during a routine Starlink mission on Thursday night, imperiling the satellites in the company's first rocket failure in more than seven years.</p>.<p>Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage in space failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites into a much lower orbit than planned, where they risk burning up in Earth's atmosphere.</p>.NASA scientists calculate time difference between Earth and Moon.<p>The attempt to reignite the engine in space "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X, referring to a tongue-in-cheek industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion.</p>.<p>The botched mission of the world's most active rocket breaks an impressive launch success streak that has maintained the industry dominance of SpaceX, a privately owned company valued at roughly $200 billion, which is relied upon by many countries and space companies to send their satellites into space.</p>.Bengaluru firm making 'expandable space habitat': All you need to know.<p>Musk said SpaceX was updating the Starlink satellites' software to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric reentry, but he noted "unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it’s worth a shot."</p>.<p>"The satellite thrusters need to raise orbit faster than atmospheric drag pulls them down, or they burn up," Musk said.</p>.<p>The failed engine firing occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission and marked the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite.</p>
<p>Washington: A second-stage engine on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket suffered a rare malfunction in space during a routine Starlink mission on Thursday night, imperiling the satellites in the company's first rocket failure in more than seven years.</p>.<p>Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage in space failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites into a much lower orbit than planned, where they risk burning up in Earth's atmosphere.</p>.NASA scientists calculate time difference between Earth and Moon.<p>The attempt to reignite the engine in space "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X, referring to a tongue-in-cheek industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion.</p>.<p>The botched mission of the world's most active rocket breaks an impressive launch success streak that has maintained the industry dominance of SpaceX, a privately owned company valued at roughly $200 billion, which is relied upon by many countries and space companies to send their satellites into space.</p>.Bengaluru firm making 'expandable space habitat': All you need to know.<p>Musk said SpaceX was updating the Starlink satellites' software to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric reentry, but he noted "unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it’s worth a shot."</p>.<p>"The satellite thrusters need to raise orbit faster than atmospheric drag pulls them down, or they burn up," Musk said.</p>.<p>The failed engine firing occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission and marked the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite.</p>