With its remaining eight engines making up the lost power, the rocket successfully completed its primary mission, sending a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station. The flight was the first of 12 for NASA under a $1.6 billion contract.

To ensure the station's safety, the agreement with NASA prohibited Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX as the privately-held California-based company is known, from restarting the rocket's second stage – needed to deliver Orbcomm's satellite to its proper orbit – if there was not at least a 99 percent chance that the rocket had enough fuel to complete the burn, said SpaceX spokeswoman Katherine Nelson.

Due to the engine shutdown, the Falcon 9 used slightly more fuel and oxygen to reach Dragon's intended 202 mile- (325-km) high orbit. Over the next 2.5 days, Dragon flew itself to the station's orbit 250 miles (402 km) above Earth. It reached the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 countries, on Wednesday.

Falcon 9 had enough kerosene fuel left over to relight the engine, but the amount of liquid oxygen “was only enough to achieve a roughly 95 percent likelihood of completing the second burn, so Falcon 9 did not attempt a restart,” Nelson wrote in an email to Reuters.

“Orbcomm understood from the beginning that the orbit-raising maneuver was tentative,” Nelson wrote. “They accepted that there was a high risk of their satellite remaining at the Dragon insertion orbit. SpaceX would not have agreed to fly their satellite otherwise, since this was not part of the core mission and there was a known, material risk of no altitude raise.”

Despite declaring the satellite a loss, Orbcomm said it met several key objectives of the test flight, including deploying the spacecraft's solar array and its communications antenna. Several spacecraft systems, such as power, flight control, thermal and data management also were tested, the company said in the statement.

“Had Orbcomm been the primary payload on this mission … we believe the OG2 prototype would have reached the desired orbit,” Orbcomm said.

Orbcomm has hired SpaceX to fly eight satellites for its new communications network on a Falcon 9 rocket launching in 2013 and the remaining nine satellites on another Falcon 9 in 2014.