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NEW YORK, Aug 29 (Bernama-dpa) - The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday said it would investigate an "anomaly" which occurred during the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral's space centre in the US state of Florida, reported the German news agency (dpa).
The incident occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 8-6 mission in the early hours of Wednesday.
"The incident involved the failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket while landing on a droneship at sea," the FAA said, adding that there were initially no reports of injuries nor public property damage.
"The FAA is requiring an investigation," it added.
As a result, further missions may be delayed.
Falcon 9 launched 21 Starlink satellites at 3.48 am (0748 GMT) to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX said, adding that this was the 23rd flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission.
The company said that a second planned launch would be postponed "to give the team time to review booster landing data from the previous launch."
"A new target launch date will be shared once available," the company said in a social media post.
This was the second mishap for SpaceX in less than two months. Problems with the ignition of a second propulsion stage of a Falcon 9 rocket in July resulted in the grounding of the rockets for two weeks.
Wednesday's issue could affect the historic launch of SpaceX's private mission Polaris Dawn, which was slated to take place as soon as this week.
The mission, a joint project between billionaire US entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and Elon Musk's SpaceX, features a four-member all-civilian crew performing a daring spacewalk.
It is planned to last a maximum of five days and will see the crew travel as far as 1,400 kilometres from Earth in a SpaceX Dragon capsule after launching atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.
According to SpaceX, this marks the greatest distance humans have been from Earth since the last Apollo missions to the moon in the early 1970s.
-- BERNAMA-dpa
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