WASHINGTON — SpaceX will move its Dragon dispersal craft from the Florida coast to the West Coast starting in 2025, a move the company says is intended to reduce the risks of debris re-entering the spacecraft’s trunk section.
In a statement on July 26, SpaceX announced that it will move the drop sites for the Dragon spacecraft to locations off the coast of California as part of measures to control where the trunk section re-enters after being ejected from the Dragon capsule.
After the introduction of the Crew Dragon spacecraft and its cargo variant, the trunk section was released before the deorbit burn, passively re-entering weeks to months later. SpaceX said it chose that option after the company, working with NASA, used “industry standard models” that predicted the trunk would disintegrate completely on re-entry with no debris surviving.
This is not so. On several occasions, large pieces of dragon trunk debris have survived re-entry and landed in Australia, Saskatchewan and North Carolina, among other places. Falling debris did not cause damage or injury, but illustrates the risk it poses.
Earlier this year, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the agency was working with SpaceX on ways to better control debris created by reentry into pods. One option being studied, he said at the time, would be to eject the trunk after Dragon completes its deorbital burn, which would allow the trunk to re-enter at about the same time along the capsule’s re-entry corridor.
SpaceX said this is the approach the company is taking. “SpaceX will implement a software change that will cause Dragon to perform its de-orbit burn before ejecting the trunk, similar to our first 21 Dragon recoveries,” it said. He ruled out alternatives that included a complete redesign of the trunk or adding a propulsion system to it for controlled re-entry.
That would require landing off the coast of California, not near Florida. “The moving trunk separation after the deorbit burn puts the trunk on a known re-entry trajectory, with the trunk safely splashing up the Dragon spacecraft’s reach off the coast of California,” the company said.
Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said at a July 26 briefing on the upcoming Crew-9 Crew Dragon mission that the change will begin sometime next year. SpaceX will move a recovery ship currently based in Florida to California, operating from the Port of Long Beach.
She added that the Crew-9 mission, scheduled to launch as soon as Aug. 18, will touch down in early 2025 off Florida while the transition is underway. “Hopefully this will be over soon after Crew-9 returns.”
While the change will reduce the risk of debris, it creates new problems for Dragon’s recovery operations. “NASA gave us new requirements, starting with CRS-21, for even tighter return timelines and improved science capabilities,” she said, which was included in plans for Dragon recovery operations in Florida.
“That’s the new challenge for us now and what we’re working on here this year is how to get back to the West Coast but still keep everything we’ve learned and stood up to support the crews, not just cargo,” said it, in terms of rapid transfer of science payloads after a fall. “We’re working on all the details of that, but it’s going to be a better capability than we had with Dragon 1 by design.”
However, there are other benefits to swimming off the West Coast. “One of the advantages of the West Coast is the much better weather,” she said, based on research into the conditions and weather rules for the Dragon descent. “We’ve actually seen the West Coast sites that we’re looking at have much better weather, which allows us to have much better return availability.”
