“After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn,” the company shared in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area.” SpaceX indicated it would pause flights using Falcon 9 — the world’s most frequently launched rocket — as it explored the anomaly. “We will resume launching after we better understand root cause,” the company said in the X post. CNN has reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration for comment. Meanwhile, Crew-9’s SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule spent about one day traveling through orbit before docking with the International Space Station. Once safely attached to one of the station’s docking ports, the spacecraft will open its hatch, allowing Hague and Gorbunov to join the other astronauts already on board the orbiting laboratory. Months in space The original crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station — including (from left), Stephanie Wilson, Nick Hague, Aleksandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos and Zena Cardman — poses for a group photo in their flight suits at SpaceX’s new Dragon refurbishing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Cardman and Wilson lost their spots on the mission to make room for Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. SpaceX/NASA Together, Hague, Williams, Wilmore and Gorbunov will complete SpaceX’s Crew-9 team. The group will spend about five months on board the space station before returning home no earlier than February. Williams and Wilmore first traveled to the International Space Station in early June aboard a Boeing Starliner spacecraft for what was expected to be a weeklong test mission. But issues with helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters left engineers scrambling to figure out what went wrong — and NASA ultimately decided the Starliner’s problems were not well enough understood for the space agency to allow Williams and Wilmore back on board. The Starliner instead flew home empty on September 6. After deciding not to return Williams and Wilmore to Earth on the Starliner, NASA opted instead to rearrange SpaceX’s flight plans, booting two other astronauts — spaceflight veteran Stephanie Wilson and Zena Cardman, who was set to make her first trip to space — off the Crew-9 mission to make room for the Starliner team. But that meant Williams and Wilmore would have to fulfill the duties of the original Crew-9 staff, taking up months’ worth of routine work on the space station before their return trip. Space agency officials said spacecraft availability and ISS needs played a role in the decision to keep Williams and Wilmore in space for a full crew rotation rather than bringing them back to Earth sooner. This artist's concept depicts NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space, or the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by the plasma, or ionized gas, that was ejected by the death of nearby giant stars millions of years ago. The environment inside our solar bubble is dominated by the plasma exhausted by our sun, known as the solar wind. NASA/JPL-Caltech