SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endurance capsule successfully launched on Friday, March 14, and docked with the International Space Station (ISS) just over a day later.
It was the second attempt at a lift-off after the first was scrubbed due to a hydraulic issue on Wednesday, March 12. With less than a five percent chance of the weather screwing up the launch this time, the countdown went smoothly and Endurance, sitting atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.
Onboard, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov were safely strapped in. It went a little quiet in the press center at Kennedy Space Center as the point where Wednesday’s scrub was called was reached. However, no issues were reported this time; the crew access arm was retracted, and propellant loaded into the Falcon 9’s tanks.
Launch occurred at 1903 EDT from Launch Complex 39A, with the rumble from the nine Merlin engines reaching observers after several seconds. A few minutes later, the reusable Falcon 9’s first stage touched down at Landing Zone 1, replete with the usual sonic booms to alarm the unsuspecting.
The insertion into Earth’s orbit went smoothly for what has been dubbed the Crew-10 mission, although a large chunk of foam insulation material could be seen detaching from the second stage after the Crew Dragon pod separated from the rocket.
During the post-launch briefing, Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, addressed the insulation shedding directly and said, “These insulation tiles are known to sometimes liberate during this separation event; it doesn’t pose any issues for Dragon or Stage two.”
Walker later described liberation as a “known risk” of which SpaceX was aware and had analyzed. The foam was contained within the hollow “trunk” beneath the Crew Dragon spacecraft before floating away after separation. Steve Stich, manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, echoed Walker’s comments that the foam liberation was not a concern.
He said, “I’m sure it’s one of the things that SpaceX will go look at as they always do to see if they can correct it over time, but in this time frame, it’s not like some of the foam kind of scenarios we’ve had in other programs.”
Other programs being, primarily, 2003’s space shuttle Columbia disaster readers will no doubt recall.
While Crew-10 is notable for having a female commander and pilot, the political controversy surrounding the mission has attracted the most attention, with some calling Crew-10 a “rescue mission” for the two astronauts stranded on the ISS following last year’s embarrassing Boeing Starliner mission.
But Crew-10 is a relatively straightforward crew rotation mission. The two Starliner astronauts stuck on the orbiting lab became part of Crew-9 after the Starliner capsule that transported the duo to the ISS experienced several issues, including problems with its thrusters, preventing the craft from being allowed to return them home to Earth.
As such the pair will soon finally return in the Dragon crew pod that just docked up there, along with two others on the station, making way for the incoming crew of four.
Could an earlier mission to retrieve Starliner’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been undertaken? The answer, technically, is yes. However, doing so would have upended planning and scheduling. It would also have been costly.
Arguably, NASA’s approach made the best of an unfortunate situation: Two of the four people on the Crew-9 mission were dropped from the plan ahead of the September launch so that Williams and Wilmore could join that team and return using the scheduling and spacecraft prepared for that mission.
Simply put, Crew-9 sent two people up instead of four, so that Williams and Wilmore will return with their Crew-9 colleagues, NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov. The four will be replaced by the Crew-10 ‘nauts.
With the Crew-10 launch and rendezvous out of the way, and Crew-9 expected to return no earlier than Wednesday, March 19, the focus will shift to next month’s launch of a Dragon cargo freighter to the space station. The mission is critical since it will top up depleted supplies aboard the ISS.
Damage to the container of a Northrop Grumman Cygnus space station cargo spacecraft, which was sustained during shipping, means NASA is depending on the SpaceX Dragon getting to the ISS to provide needed supplies. As Dina Contella, deputy manager of the ISS program, understated, the mission is “really important to us.” ®
