The crew of astronauts on the next space station may be the last to descend into the ocean near the US East Coast.
The Crew Dragon Crew-9 mission with astronauts is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station no earlier than August 18, possibly becoming the last NASA-led ISS mission to reach the Atlantic Ocean aboard Crew Dragon.
Repeated problems with large pieces of debris from the Dragon – “trunks” where the fuel and electrical supplies are stored – have repeatedly crashed in areas ranging from Australia to North Carolina. One remedial measure will be to load future spacecraft after Crew-9, perhaps as soon as Crew-10, land on the US Pacific coast, SpaceX said during a news conference today (July 26).
“What we’re going to do is implement a software change to complete the burn from orbit before we eject the boot, like we did with Dragon-1, and then the boot will land intentionally […] in an uninhabited area of the ocean,” Sarah Walker, director of SpaceX’s Dragon mission management, said in a live briefing. So to make this change possible, we’ll be moving a Dragon recovery ship into the Pacific Ocean sometime next year year.”
Connected: SpaceX’s launches to the ISS are under independent review by NASA after a rare failure of a Falcon 9 rocket
In addition to less space debris, the Pacific coast tends to be subject to fewer extreme weather events and hurricanes, potentially adding more predictability to the timing of the end of crewed missions, Walker noted.
The four astronauts aboard Crew-9 include Commander Zena Cardman (NASA), Pilot Nick Haig (NASA), Mission Specialist Stephanie Wilson (NASA), and Mission Specialist Alexander Gorbunov (Roscosmos).
Crew-9 will fly to space only after NASA approves the Falcon 9 for relaunch to the ISS, but for now, everything is on track for an August 18 liftoff. The second stage of the Falcon 9 suffered a failure on July 11 due to an oxygen leak during the launch of a Starlink satellite. SpaceX says it has resolved the matter with the Federal Aviation Administration and plans to start other missions again as soon as Saturday (July 27).
NASA said the FAA-approved fixes would go before the space agency’s program control board for Crew-9, but the agency has been involved in the SpaceX investigation all along and is confident in the work so far. “We understand exactly what they have [SpaceX] they did,” NASA’s Steve Stich, program manager for the commercial team, told the briefing.
It’s been a busy month for the ISS as Boeing Starliner engineers continue to investigate problems during the astronauts’ first test mission docking on June 5. Ground tests showed problems with the isolation of the thrusters and the propellant flow, which likely affected the approach to the ISS, a press conference yesterday (July 25).
The two Starliner astronauts, NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams, are more than 50 days into what was supposed to be a 10-day mission and no landing date has yet been set as Boeing and NASA continue to investigate problems with thrusters and helium leakage into the propulsion system. These will need to be addressed before operational, six-month Starliner missions to the ISS begin as soon as 2025.
Wilmore and Williams are living off a four-month supply of ISS supplies before their return, which will be sometime before Crew-9 arrives at the ISS. They will finally get their personal belongings on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS aboard Falcon 9, set for no earlier than August 3, as their suitcases had to be retrieved at the last minute from the CFT’s Starliner. to send a critical part of its water system to the ISS.
“There are many challenges we can face that lead to shortages of supplies on board, for example if you have a cargo flight that slips [delays]ISS Program Manager Dana Weigel told Space.com at the press conference, explaining why the preserve exists.
The reserve includes clothing, food, water, oxygen, nitrogen and other critical items. “We had a lot of generic supplies on board,” Weigel noted. “So we just had Butch and Sunny use them.”
