Falcon 9 launch up close11/10/2023 Also flying will be another human remains payload for Celestis Inc., this time brining the ashes of more than 150 people to space including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and actor James Doohan who played “Scotty” on the TV series. “It’s just been a few little things on a few of these rockets.” He didn’t elaborate on what those “few little things” are.TBD, 4th quarter of 2023 (Delayed from May 4): First-ever launch of United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur on Certification-1 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41: Slated to carry commercial company Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander to the moon, and the first two test satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet constellation. “We’ve been briefed about every month on the updates of our spacecraft as well as the rocket, so we’re very confident that they’re going to figure out what’s going wrong.” said Shane Kimbrough, the NASA astronaut who will command Crew-2. The astronauts who will fly on Crew-2 have also been keeping track of this and potentially other Falcon 9 issues. “SpaceX Starlink flights are pretty far out there” in terms of number of reuses of the boosters, he noted. The Falcon 9 booster that will launch Crew-2 previously launched the Crew-1 mission in November 2020, but with no flights in between. “We’re about to embark on our first reuse here for a crewed vehicle,” he said. “We will follow along with SpaceX’s investigation,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said at the briefing, including making sure they understand the problem before giving approval to launch the mission.Ī big difference between the Starlink missions and Crew-2 is the number of flights. NASA has been following the investigation to understand if there are any problems that may pose safety issues to the Falcon 9 that will launch the Crew-2 mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than April 20. The company is also working to upgrade control systems on the vehicle “to even further detect and control what the vehicle needs to do” in circumstances like that. Reed said the engine problem was “a great lesson that we learned” as the company works to better understand the lifetime of Falcon 9 boosters and which components are most susceptible to wear and tear. However, they noted that there would be no video from the first stage on that launch, a break with the company’s standard practices. Eastern liftoff, and the company has not provided more information about the cause of the scrub.ĭuring the webcast of that launch attempt, the SpaceX hosts did not discuss the failed landing. The launch was scrubbed 84 seconds before the scheduled 8:37 p.m. 28 of another set of Starlink satellites. 15 mission, although the company attempted a launch Feb. The Falcon 9 has not launched since that Feb. 23 that “heat damage” was to blame, but didn’t go into more details. Hans Koenigsmann, a longtime SpaceX executive who is currently a senior adviser for build and flight reliability at the company, said Feb. Reed’s comments offered the most details to date on why the booster failed to land, breaking a streak of two dozen consecutive landings dating back nearly a year. “When that booster came to return home, because of the problem with that particular engine, we didn’t have enough thrust to get back to where we needed to be, and didn’t land where we wanted to be,” he said. ![]() The shutdown of the engine, though, kept the first stage from landing. “The vehicle got to orbit and put the satellites exactly where they want to be. “A great thing about Falcon 9 is that we have engine-out capability,” he said, meaning that one of the first stage’s nine engines can shut down without jeopardizing the mission. ![]() Reed didn’t mention at what point in the launch the engine shut down, but he suggested it took place during ascent. “A little bit of hot gas got to where it’s not supposed to be, and it caused that engine to shut down,” he said. However, one of those boots had a “little bit of a hole” that allowed hot gas to get into parts of the engine during flight, he said. “This was the highest count number of flights that this particular boot design had seen,” he said. That included “boots,” or covers around parts of the Merlin engines in the first stage. 15 launch was making its sixth flight, some components on it were “life leaders” that had flown more often than any other in the Falcon 9 fleet. WASHINGTON - A Falcon 9 first stage failed to land after a launch last month because one of its engines shut down during flight after hot gas breached a worn-out cover.ĭuring a NASA press conference March 1 about the upcoming Crew-2 commercial crew flight, Benji Reed, senior director for human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said that while the booster used on that Feb.
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