SpaceX Falcon 9 lost an engine on the way up; Dragon on its way to ISS

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
Oct 8, 2012 6:20 PMNov 19, 2019 9:11 PM

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Last night (Sunday October 7), SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon capsule full of supplies on a mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon was deployed successfully (as were its solar panels to give it power) and it's on its way to ISS. However, not everything went as planned. One of the nine Merlin engines powering the Falcon 9 had a failure 90 seconds into the flight. It's not clear what happened just yet, but there is pretty dramatic footage of the engine failure; in the slow motion video below you can see some sort of flash and puff of flame at the 30 second mark (I've set the video to start 22 seconds in):

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