WASHINGTON — NASA is moving forward with a mid-August launch of the next Crew Dragon mission, while delaying the first operational flight of the Starliner.
At a July 26 briefing, NASA officials said they are targeting no earlier than August 18 for the launch of the Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. That date was in question after an anomaly in the Falcon 9 Starlink’s upper launch stage grounded the rocket for 15 days.
In a briefing held before the rocket’s successful return to flight early on July 27, NASA praised SpaceX for being “very transparent” about its investigation into the incident and planning changes to the upper stage to prevent the cause of the anomaly – a crack in a sensing line that allows liquid oxygen to escape — not to reappear.
That schedule, said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, will depend on a test launch of the upper stage that will be used in the Crew-9 launch scheduled for about July 30. That test will “verify some of the new modifications that the vehicle will have as a result of the anomaly,” he said.
“We’re going to go through rigorous certification on that,” he said of the upstream changes, including both hardware changes and software modifications that will no longer use data from the removed sensor. “We’re going to go through that and take it to the program control panel and make the baseline of that change for Crew-9.”
He added that NASA will benefit from several Falcon 9 launches with the change before Crew-9. SpaceX has already performed three launches, each carrying Starlink satellites, with the upper stage modification. There’s more on the manifest, including the launch of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS as soon as August 3.
In a separate briefing on July 26, the four-member Crew-9 crew — NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov — said they had no reservations about launching the Falcon 9 weeks after the upper stage anomaly.
“I’m extremely confident in the team and the approach they’ve taken,” said Haig, the Crew-9 pilot who also suffered a disruption during a Soyuz mission flight to the ISS in 2018. “I’m excited to get attached to the rocket, when the team decides it’s time to go.
Crew-9’s launch period runs through early September, Stich said. This is due to the need to turn over Launch Complex 39A for the Falcon Heavy launch of the Europa Clipper mission, which has a three-week launch window starting on October 10.
Scheduling conflicts over the use of the LC-39A were one factor in SpaceX’s decision to build a crew and cargo access tower near Space Launch Complex 40. However, the pad will not be certified for crewed missions in time for Crew-9, it said Stitch.
“We are not completely done with the certification. If we were, we would have fun moving to Pad 40,” he said, estimating that the certification work would be completed by the end of September.
Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, suggested that it might have been possible to have SLC-40 certified in time for Crew-9, but added that it wasn’t necessary for this mission. “We have a few weeks of track on 39A,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re running out of time or that there isn’t enough room to launch Crew-9 when it needs to be launched.”
The Falcon 9 incident did affect the schedule for another Crew Dragon mission. Before the anomaly, SpaceX had planned for a late July launch of Polaris Dawn, a private astronaut mission that would fly a four-person Crew Dragon and conduct the first private spacewalk. This mission is part of the Polaris program, funded by Jared Isaacman, who will command Polaris Dawn.
“We are in final preparations for Polaris Dawn,” Walker said. “We have chosen to fly the Crew-9 mission as our next mission and are ready to fly Polaris Dawn in late summer.” She said later in the briefing that SpaceX still plans to launch Polaris Dawn in August.
The timing of these missions will also depend on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft docked to the station on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. To allow what NASA calls a “direct” handoff, with Crew-9 arriving before Crew-8, the Starliner will have to leave to clear a docking port.
At the briefing, Stich said the first operational Starliner mission, called Starliner-1, is no longer scheduled to launch in February 2025 as previously planned. Instead, the Crew-10 mission will launch then to give NASA and Boeing more time to review data from the CFT mission and make changes to the spacecraft.
He said Starliner-1 has been rescheduled for August 2025, but added that the mission will be “double-booked” with Crew-11, presumably to guard against any further delays with Starliner.
