NASA
Sometime next year, SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules for landing in the Pacific Ocean and will end spacecraft recovery off the coast of Florida.
This will allow SpaceX to make changes to the way it returns Dragons back to Earth and eliminate the risk, however small, that a piece of debris from the ship’s trunk could fall on someone and cause damage, injury or death.
“After five years splashing off the coast of Florida, we’ve decided to move Dragon recovery operations back to the West Coast,” said Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management.
Public safety
Over the past few years, landowners have found debris from several Dragon missions on their property, and all of the fragments come from the spacecraft’s trunk, a non-pressurized section mounted behind the capsule as it carries astronauts or cargo on flights to and from the International Space Station.
SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When a human-rated upgraded version of Dragon began flying in 2019, SpaceX moved flights to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company’s upgrade and launch facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Benefits of landing near Florida include faster handoff of astronauts and time-sensitive cargo back to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.
The old version of Dragon, known as Dragon 1, separated its trunk after burning up from orbit, allowing the trunk to fall into the Pacific Ocean. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX modified the re-entry profile to eject the trunk before the orbital burn. This meant that the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission while the capsule re-entered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and has no propulsion system, usually takes a few weeks or a few months to fall back into the atmosphere, and there is no control over where or when it will re-enter.
Air resistance from the thin upper atmosphere gradually slows the trunk enough to throw it out of orbit, and the amount of aerodynamic drag the trunk sees is largely determined by fluctuations in solar activity.
SpaceX and NASA, which funded much of the development of the Dragon spacecraft, initially determined that the trunk would burn up completely when it re-entered the atmosphere and would not pose a threat to survival on re-entry and cause injury or property damage. However, this turned out not to be the case.
In May, a piece of a 90-kilogram SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that lifted off from the International Space Station landed on the property of a glamping resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.
These developments followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-kilogram piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined that the debris had fallen from orbit in February, and earlier this month SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the debris, according to the CBC.
Parts of a Dragon spacecraft also fell over Colorado last year, and a farmer in Australia found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land in 2022.
