The NASA security panel offers more details on the Dragon anomaly and calls for patience

Since issuing a brief statement Saturday after testing his Crew Dragon vehicle resulted in an "anomaly", SpaceX has not made any further comment about his ongoing investigation. NASA also did not say much in addition to helping with the investigation. and that the agency has "full confidence in SpaceX" to understand and solve the problem that seems to have destroyed the capsule of the crew.

A NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Committee meeting scheduled for Thursday, however, helped to better understand the problem with the Crew Dragon vehicle at SpaceX's Landing Zone 1 facility in Florida, near the two launch sites. the society.

"The event occurred during a static fire test conducted prior to the flight drop test," said Patricia Sanders, chair of the committee charged with ensuring that the NASA puts in place a healthy safety culture and mitigates risks as much as possible during spaceflight.

The capsule in question is the same as the one that conducted a demonstration mission to the International Space Station in March. On Saturday, the spacecraft was in preparation for a launch abandonment flight this summer. During the interrupted flight, the Dragon took off from Florida with a Falcon 9 thruster and then used its powerful SuperDraco engines to show that the Dragon could safely disengage from the rocket if there was a problem with the thruster before or during the flight. flight.

"The aim of the firing was to demonstrate the performance of SuperDraco integrated systems in a vibro-acoustic environment twice as high as the vehicle's for abandoned environments," said Sanders. Sanders explains here that the test simulated the Falcon 9 rocket below the spacecraft breaking down and causing an abortion.

"The fire of 12 Dracos service sections was successfully completed," she said, noting that the 12 smaller Draco engines used for space maneuvering were functioning normally. "The shooting of eight SuperDracos resulted in an anomaly," concluded Sanders. This suggests that the anomaly occurred during or just after the SuperDraco test. Sanders also noted that SpaceX had followed all the security protocols for the test and that no one had been hurt.

Later in the meeting, another member of the safety committee, former astronaut Sandy Magnus, said he understood the public 's desire to learn more about the accident. Some people, including the Orlando Sentinel editorial board, have asked for more information to be released immediately.

But SpaceX and NASA should have more time to investigate the accident, Magnus said. "We know that the recent SpaceX disaster is attracting a lot of interest," she said. "We are patient." At present, the investigation is still in the security of the accident site, data collection and the establishment of a time schedule for the l & # 39; An anomaly to begin to identify a root cause.

NASA and the safety committee said it was too early to assess the impact of this failure on the schedule of SpaceX's planned in-flight abandonment tests and the first crewed Dragon mission . The agency was already working on a crew flight in early October, but now it looks like it will be postponed until early 2020 at least.