“It was caused by an early start behaviour of two on the engines, in this case, it was the engine one and engine two… We looked at the data and saw that the two engines attempted to start earlier and the order to abort prevented… a possible hard start,” Koenigsmann said.
He added that the company deposed the engines and sent them to Texas for testing to replicate the case and perform additional inspections if needed. The company announced that it would replace the faulty engines to carry four astronauts to the ISS.
The SpaceX Merlin engines, which are mounted on Falcon 9 rockets, were first designed in 2006 and can be reused.