SpaceX & NASA Clear Spaceship For Crew Launch After ‘AC Duct’ Cracks

Officials from NASA and SpaceX gave the go ahead for their upcoming crewed launch to the International Space Station (ISS) set to take place early morning on Monday. The Crew-6 mission will launch four astronauts to the ISS, and NASA and SpaceX finished the mission's launch readiness review late night yesterday. Heading into the review, the teams had several items on their checklist, including evaluating the Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon spacecraft for problems surfacing on other vehicles. This also led to the post review teleconference being delayed, but NASA and SpaceX gave the mission the go ahead and are ready to launch.

Inlet Pipe Problems On Dragon Resilience Make NASA & SpaceX Check New Ship Once Again

Prior to yesterday, NASA and SpaceX shared details of the work that was performed on the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spaceship that will launch their seventh crewed mission to the space station tomorrow. After the flight readiness review (FRR) earlier this week, NASA's manager of the commercial crew program, Mr. Steve Stich, shared that a 'combustion event' (fancy NASA term for a potential fire) on a recent Falcon 9 booster that flew 12 times was worrying officials. At the same time, he also outlined that teams were evaluating exterior panels on the Crew Dragon spacecraft but did not elaborate on the reasons behind the concern.

At the teleconference yesterday, Mr. Stich and SpaceX's senior director for human spaceflight, Mr. Benji Reed, explained their activities after the FRR. As part of his opening remarks, the NASA official outlined that:

As we talked a little bit at the agency FRR on Tuesday, we had a few items to close out. And we have closed all those for flight. The first one was, on the structure, there are some composite panels. We call them pod panels that needed a little bit more analysis to close out. Some thermal analysis, and also some structural analysis, and that's closed out for flight. On the Falcon 9, SpaceX did a great job of running some additional testing on compositive overwrap pressure vessel, one bottle in the LOX tank in particular that had a little bit of blending on the linder. SpaceX ran a comprehensive test program on the bottle that repilcated the blending that occurred on the bottle, and that's closed for flight as well.

As part of static fire we were able to look at our 1078 booster and compare it to a twelve flight Starlink booster that had some evidence of combustion in one of the engine bays. And we feel like we've got good separation from that event on that flight. The static fire showed that the engine bays were very nominal, all the engines performed very well. No signs of any off nominal performance or anything from the static fire so we cleared that for flight as well.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Image: SpaceX, changes made by us.

SpaceX's Reed further elaborated on the issue by explaining that SpaceX did extensive testing and compared the two boosters to confirm that the problem itself was not replicated on the rocket that will fly the astronauts. The most likely cause of the combustion even was an engine boot, which is the covering around the Merlin 9 engine on its connection to the rocket. These are learning opportunities for SpaceX, as it aims for 100 flights this year according to Mr. Reed.

Mr. Stich added that the issue was related to Engine 9 in the Starlink mission:

Benji I'd like to add a couple of things on the engine nine event on the Starlink flight where SpaceX went in and did a lot of inspections on that vehicle. We did see some flash, SpaceX has great imagery inside the bays, and so we went and looked at that vehicle, SpaceX team leaked checked multiple joints looking for evidence of some kind of oxygen leak which could have provided some event in that engine bay. There's also a 12 flight booster so that boot that's around the engine nine area had been flying for all those flights so it could have a little leakage of combustion products back into the bay. And so we did to have separation from our vehicle is we went in, we have a brand new engine boot, first flight, on our vehicle. We confirmed during the static fire operation that we didn't have any leaks. We monitor the oxygen levels in each of the engine bays in the octaweb so that why convinced ourselves. Then we went and did insepections afterwards, didn't see any evidence of anything nominal static fire.

The engine boot is one of the more problematic areas on the Falcon 9 rocket, and caused a failed Falcon 9 landing in 2021. According to Mr. Stich, NASA is certified to flying on rockets that have reflown only four times, which further separated the crewed missions from any potential anomalies arising from rocket reuse. Boosters for crewed missions have additional checkouts for the engine boots as opposed to those that are used for Starlink launches.

SpaceX also discovered some problems with the Crew Dragon C207 ship that flew astronauts to the ISS in 2020 and tested the Dragon that will fly Crew-6 to ensure that the problems were not replicated.

Accoring to Mr. Stich:

We did take a little extra time I would say on one of the vehicles, on Capsule 207. In the ecosystem, there was a crack discovered around some ducting, on that vehicle. This is kind of, think of its an inlet duct on your air conditioner. And so in the ecosystem there was a tiny set of cracks, and we wanted to take a little extra time to go through that. We've done the borescopes, or put a camera in and looked at the Capsule 206 which the Endeavor which we're flying for Crew-6 and we didn't see any that kind of evidence of cracking. And the we reviewed some analysis just to make sure we were good to go fly. One of the benefits that we get with SpaceX is that they're flying lots of vehicles, and they're prepping lots of vehicles. And for my experience it really helps make all of our flights a lot more safe because we get benefit of all the Falcon 9 flights and all the Dragon flights. And we look at all the vehicles and then we can make sure that we're really ready to go fly.

The NASA-SpaceX Crew-6 is scheduled for liftoff at 1:45 a.m. EST tomorrow, and for docking with the space station a little over a day later. Four astronauts will fly to the ISS where they will spend six months for a full duration mission.

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