The Federal Aviation Administration gave its approval for Falcon 9 launches to resume nearly two weeks later, after giving a waiver for one Falcon 9 launch, of the Hera asteroid mission, that did not include a deorbit burn. Those two incidents, as well as a failed landing of a Falcon 9 booster in August, caught the attention of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, NASA’s independent safety committee. “When you look at these recent incidents over the last handful of weeks, it does lead one say that it’s apparent that operating safely requires significant attention to detail as hardware ages and the pace of operations increases,” Kent Rominger, a former astronaut who is a member of the panel, said at an Oct. 31 committee meeting. Only the July incident caused a mission failure, with both the Crew-9 Crew Dragon spacecraft and the Starlink satellites on the Feb. 1 launch deployed before the stage deorbiting anomalies. The latest incident also did not result in an extended pause in SpaceX launches. “The teams are actively assessing root cause of the source of the leak and have already implemented mitigations for future flights,” SpaceX stated on its website, but did not provide additional details about those mitigations. Related