A day after launching from the Kennedy Space Center, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft caught up with the International Space Station and docked Sunday, bringing a NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the outpost to join two astronauts Starliner for five months. tour of duty.
The meeting came as SpaceX announced it was suspending Falcon 9 launches while engineers worked to figure out what caused the crew’s Falcon 9 upper stage to misfire on Saturday, after the Crew Dragon was released to fly alone, resulting in an off-target shot. -entrance to the Pacific Ocean.
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SpaceX said in a post on social media platform We will resume launching after we better understand the root cause.
This is the second anomaly of the Falcon 9 upper stage in less than three months and the third failure including a first stage landing accident. It’s not yet clear what impact, if any, the latest glitch might have on downstream flights, including two high-priority launches in October to send NASA and European Space Agency probes to Jupiter and an asteroid .
But the anomaly had no impact on the Crew Dragon’s 28-hour rendezvous with the space station, and the ferry, carrying Commander Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, docked at the laboratory’s forward port at 5:30 p.m. EDT as the two spacecraft cruised. 265 miles above southern Africa.
Starliner Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams, currently the space station commander, were ready to welcome Hague and Gorbunov on board, along with Soyuz MS-26/72S Commander Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and the NASA astronaut Don Pettit.
Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams will replace Crew 8 Commander Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin when they return to Earth around October 7 to conclude a 217-day stay in space.
Wilmore and Williams took off for the first piloted test flight of the Starliner, a mission which should last a little over a week, on June 5. During the rendezvous with the space station the day after launch, multiple helium leaks in the ship’s propulsion system were detected and five maneuvering jets failed to operate properly.
SpaceX/NASA
NASA and Boeing spent the next three months conducting tests and analyzes to determine whether the Starliner could return its crew safely to Earth. Ultimately, NASA officials decided to keep Wilmore and Williams on board the station and bring down the Starliner without its crew.
They made this decision knowing that the two astronauts would be able to return home aboard the Crew Dragon launched on Saturday. Two astronauts from Crew 9 – Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson – were removed from the crew to provide seats for Wilmore and Williams when Hague and Gorbunov return to Earth in February.
When they finally return home, Wilmore and Williams will have spent 262 days in space, compared to five months for Hague and Gorbunov.
The Crew 9 flight was SpaceX’s 95th launch so far this year. And it was the company’s third flight in less than three months to encounter problems.
NASA
SpaceX recovers, refurbishes and relaunches the Falcon 9’s first stage boosters, which can land in California, Florida or aboard offshore droneships. The second floors are not recovered.
Instead, SpaceX commands the ignition of the upper stage’s engines to bring the stages back into the atmosphere for a destructive breakup, ensuring that any debris falls into an ocean well away from shipping lanes or populated areas.
By removing the Falcon 9 upper stages from orbit after their missions, SpaceX ensures that they will never pose a collision risk with other spacecraft or add to the space debris already in low Earth orbit.
During the launch of 20 Starlink Internet satellites on July 11, the Falcon 9 defective second stage and failed to perform a necessary “burn” to reach the correct orbit. Stuck in a lower orbit than expected, the 20 satellites fell back into the atmosphere and burned.
SpaceX briefly suspended flights at the direction of the Federal Aviation Administration, but the problem was quickly identified and resolved, and the company was allowed to resume flights while the investigation continued.
SO, during another Starlink launch on August 28a Falcon 9 first stage descending for landing crashed into the deck of an offshore drone. SpaceX did not provide any information on what went wrong or what corrective action, if any, was needed, but flights resumed three days later.
SpaceX has not provided any details about the off-target reentry of the Crew Dragon upper stage, except for the message published Saturday evening on X.
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Before Saturday’s launch, SpaceX planned to launch 20 OneWeb broadband satellites from Vandenberg Space Station in California this week, followed by a Starlink launch from Cape Canaveral. Both flights are now suspended.
Most importantly, a Falcon 9 will be used to launch the European Space Agency’s $390 million Hera asteroid probe from the Cape Canaveral space station around October 7, followed by the probe’s launch NASA’s $5.2 billion Europa Clipper Jupiter from the Kennedy Space Center on October 7. 10.
Hera is heading toward the asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos, a small body that NASA’s DART probe crashed into in 2022. Hera will study the system in detail to determine how the moon’s structure and orbit have been modified by the impact. One of the main goals is to learn more about how an Earth-threatening asteroid could one day be safely diverted.
The Europa Clipper is a “flagship” mission to explore Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa and determine the habitability of a vast subterranean ocean. It is the largest planetary probe ever built, requiring a powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, consisting of three Falcon 9 first stages strapped together and a single upper stage, to launch it.
Both missions are scheduled to take off during relatively short “planetary” launch windows defined by the positions of Earth, Mars, Jupiter and asteroids. The Hera window opens on October 7 and closes on October 25. The Europa Clipper launch window opens on October 10 and closes on November 6.
Missing a planetary window can result in long and costly delays while Earth, Jupiter, asteroids and Mars, needed for gravity-assisted flybys, return to favorable orbital positions allowing launch.
Armando Piloto, senior launch services program manager at Kennedy Space Center, said the Falcon Heavy stages used for the Europa Clipper mission would not be recovered. Instead, they will consume all their propellants to reach the speed needed to send the probe on a five-year journey to Jupiter.
“I would like to point out that during the second stage ignition, the vehicle with the spacecraft will travel approximately 25,000 miles per hour, which will be the fastest speed ever achieved for a Falcon second stage for Europa Clipper,” a- he declared during the press conference. a recent briefing.
Given SpaceX’s rapid recovery from the July and August malfunctions, the upper stage re-entry anomaly on Saturday will likely be resolved in time to allow the Europa Clipper and Hera missions to lift off within their launch windows. But that will depend on the results of the latest failure survey.
