SpaceX Crew Dragon brings 2-man crew to space station amid probe of upper stage anomaly | Space

A day after launching from the Kennedy Space Center, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft caught up with the International Space Station and moved in for docking Sunday, bringing a NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the outpost to join two Starliner astronauts for a five-month tour of duty.

The rendezvous came amid word from SpaceX that it’s suspending Falcon 9 launches while engineers work to figure out what caused the crew’s Falcon 9 upper stage to misfire Saturday, after the Crew Dragon was released to fly on its own, resulting in an off-target re-entry over the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX said in a post on the social media platform X that the second stage “experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause.”

It was the second Falcon 9 upper stage anomaly in less than three months and the third failure counting a first stage landing mishap. It’s not yet…