Nearly 12 hours after the successful Falcon 9 launch of a Crew Dragon mission on Sept. 28, SpaceX announced there had been “an off-nominal deorbit burn” by the upper stage after deploying the Crew Dragon, which caused the stage to reenter outside the designated zone in the South Pacific. That grounded the rocket through at least Oct. 4, just as the company was preparing to launch time-critical missions like ESA’s Hera asteroid probe and NASA’s Europa Clipper.
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