WASHINGTON — NASA is pushing for the launch of the next Crew Dragon mission in mid-August, while postponing the first operational flight of the Starliner.
At a briefing on July 26, NASA officials said they are aiming for an August 18 launch of the Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station at the earliest. That date was called into question after an upper stage anomaly on the Falcon 9 Starlink launch 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 its “very transparent” investigation into the incident and planned changes to the upper stage to address the cause of the anomaly — a ruptured sensor line that allowed liquid oxygen to escape — to did not occur again.
That plan, said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, will depend on a test firing of the upper stage that will be used in the Crew-9 launch scheduled for July 30. This test will “verify some of the new modifications that the vehicle will have as an anomaly result,” he said.
“We’re going through rigorous certification,” he said of changes to the upper stage, including hardware changes and software modifications that will no longer use data from the removed sensor. “We’ll go over it and take it to the program control panel and line up this change for Crew-9.
He added that NASA will have the benefit of several Falcon 9 launches with the change before Crew-9. SpaceX has already conducted three launches, each carrying Starlink satellites with an upper stage modification. There’s more in the manifest, including the launch of the 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 Roskosmos cosmonaut Alexsandr Gorbunov — said they had no reservations about launching Falcon 9 weeks after the upper stage anomaly. .
“I’m extremely confident in the team and the approach they’ve taken,” said Hague, a Crew-9 pilot who also experienced an aborted flight on the Soyuz mission to the ISS in 2018. “I’m excited to strap on the rocket when the team decides that it’s time to go.”
The launch period for Crew-9 runs through early September, Stich said. This is due to the need to turn around Launch Complex 39A for the Falcon Heavy launch of the Europa Clipper mission, which has a three-week launch window that opens 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. But the pad will not be certified for manned missions in time for Crew-9, Stich said. .
“We are not completely certified. If we were, we would be entertaining a move to Pad 40,” he said, estimating that the certification work would be completed by the end of September.
Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission control at SpaceX, suggested that it might be possible to obtain SLC-40 certification in time for Crew-9, but added that it was not necessary for this mission. “We have several weeks of runway on 39A,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re running out of time or that there’s not enough space to launch Crew-9 when it needs to be launched.
The Falcon 9 incident affected the schedule for the next Crew Dragon mission. Before the anomaly, SpaceX was targeting a late July launch of Polaris Dawn, a private astronaut mission that will fly four people on a Crew Dragon and perform the first private spacewalk. This mission is part of the Polaris program funded by Jared Isaacman, who will command Polaris Dawn.
“We are in the final preparations for Polaris Dawn,” Walker said. “We have decided to fly the Crew-9 mission as our next mission and are ready to fly Polaris Dawn in late summer.” Later in the briefing, she said that SpaceX still plans to launch Polaris Dawn in August.
The timing of these missions will also depend on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft being docked to the station for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. To allow for what NASA calls a “direct” handoff, where Crew-9 arrives before Crew-8 departs, the Starliner will have to depart to clear the docking port.
At the briefing, Stich said that the first operational Starliner mission, called Starliner-1, is no longer scheduled for February 2025, as originally planned. Instead, the Crew-10 mission will launch to give NASA and Boeing more time to review data from the CFT mission and make any changes to the spacecraft.
He said Starliner-1 had been rescheduled for August 2025, but added that the mission would be “doubled” with Crew-11, presumably to guard against any further delays with Starliner.