Neither craft has flown since, and the company is subjecting both to a thorough inspection and refurbishment process.įollowing the February booster loss, NASA has been tracking SpaceX's internal investigation into the premature engine shutdown, NASA personnel said during the March 1 news conference. The rocket flew last November, ferrying the Crew-1 astronauts - NASA's Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi - to the space station, while the Dragon flew in May, toting NASA's Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbital outpost on a test flight. In fact, the upcoming Crew-2 mission will be the first astronaut mission to fly both a reused Falcon 9 rocket and a reused Crew Dragon spacecraft. "We get to fly our higher-count flight-proven vehicles to take the Starlink satellites to orbit," Reed said.Ī thorough grasp on booster life expectancy is crucial for the company as it recently received the green light from both NASA and the Space Force to use previously flown boosters on their missions. Reed said that practice will continue as the company learns more about how Falcon 9 handles higher launch numbers, helping SpaceX track vehicle wear and tear and anticipate which parts may need replacement between flights. Historically, SpaceX has saved its most veteran boosters - those with more than three or four flights - for its own internal launches, like Starlink. SpaceX successfully recovered that booster and plans to fly it for a 10th time in the near future. Sunday's flight even set a new record, as booster B1051 became the first to fly nine times. All three flights flights used a booster with five or more flights under its belt. While this particular booster was on its sixth flight, which is not a record as two other boosters have more than eight flights on their record, Reed said that some of its components were so-called "life leaders." "This was the highest number of flights that this particular boot design had seen," he said.įalcon 9 has since made three successful landings: the company's 77th recovery to date, on a March 4 Starlink launch, an additional touchdown on another Starlink mission a week later and a third on Sunday morning (March 14). Reed said that the company has learned a lot about reusability, but is still trying to determine the life expectancy of its fleet and which parts are most susceptible to the wear and tear of multiple launches. Those anomalies were triggered by an early engine shutdown with unknown cause and by higher-than-predicted wind shear. The mishap ended a landing streak of two dozen consecutive booster recoveries the company established last year, following back-to-back losses of two other boosters in February and March 2020. "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," he said. The shutdown caused the booster to miss its targeted landing spot on the drone ship, Reed added. And while the Falcon 9 can carry out that primary mission down one engine, the same isn't true of booster landings. SpaceX has always said that its primary objective each launch is to deliver whatever payload it's carrying to space recovering boosters is a bonus.
"The vehicle got to orbit and put the satellites where they needed to be." "A great thing about Falcon 9 is that we have engine out capability," Reed said, referring to the rocket's ability to deliver a payload to orbit even if it loses one of its nine engines.
Reed did not say at what point in the mission the engine shut down, but implied that it was during the rocket's 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.
0 kommentar(er)
