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Since Shuttle program ended in 2011, US astronauts departing for the International Space Station had to hitchhike with the Russians. It is an expensive arrangement – $ 75 million per seat – that depends on the cordial relations between Moscow and Washington. This is why the priority of the US space program is to return crew launches to US soil. NASA has used SpaceX and Boeing to lead this initiative, and both companies hope to be able to fly crewed missions to the ISS by the end of the year.
But SpaceX's ambitions appeared to suffer a major setback in April when its Crew Dragon spacecraft exploded during the tests. NASA and SpaceX have spent the last three months investigating "the anomaly"; Although the investigation is ongoing, the company announced earlier today that it has identified the cause of the incident.
According to Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of construction and flight reliability at SpaceX, the explosion was probably due to a leaking component. During the test, a portion of the oxidant that contributes to the combustion of the rocket fuel spilled at high speed into a pressurized tube, resulting in an explosion. To prevent this from happening in the future, SpaceX has isolated these systems and modified the types of valves controlling the oxidizer flow. The company says this will "fully mitigate the risk".
Before today, SpaceX and NASA had kept control of the investigation. In fact, the only reason the explosion happened was that Craig Bailey, photographer for Florida today, happened to be shooting a surf competition near the SpaceX test center. Bailey captured a large plume of bright orange smoke coming out of the facility. A video later released by an employee confirmed a catastrophic explosion.
According to Koenigsmann, the explosion occurred during the test of the Crew Dragon flight dropping system, which is used to drop the capsule of the rocket if there is a problem during launch. The Crew Dragon capsule includes 20 small rocket engines: 12 to maneuver the craft in space and eight for emergencies on the launch pad. The Dragon capsule exploded just half a second before the launch of the thrusters.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said last week that his agency and SpaceX could have been more open to the disaster. "Communication with NASA was good," said Bridenstine. tweeted the Saturday. "Communication with the public (the taxpayers) was not." He said that a new process is in place to "disseminate as much information as possible to the public as quickly as possible" within a "few hours" of any future anomalies.
All in all, the explosion was a relatively minor setback for SpaceX's commercial team program. Obtaining certification for the launch of NASA astronauts is a long process that SpaceX has been pursuing for years. In March, the company made one of its last important milestones by launching an unprepared capsular capsule at the ISS in order to demonstrate its ability to dock autonomously with the station and return to Earth in totality. security. It was the same capsule that had been destroyed during the explosion the following month.
The company owns several Dragon capsules in production and, once the ground tests are complete, the next step will be to conduct in-flight abandonment tests. This will involve dropping the capsule of a Falcon 9 rocket into flight. Koenigsmann did not say when he expected the test to take place, but if all goes well, SpaceX will expect to send two NASA astronauts to the ISS by mid-November. Koenigsmann says he is "rather optimistic" that the company will be able to launch its business by the end of the year, but that it has become "more and more difficult to achieve this goal".
SpaceX is now neck and neck with Boeing, which plans to make the first unarmed launch of its Starliner spacecraft on the ISS in September and a crew launch to the space station by the end of November. NASA has already selected the first four astronauts to participate in these crewed missions, and future private astronauts are beginning to realize this. Last month, billionaire hotelier Robert Bigelow announced that his space company had bought four flights to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon and was selling tickets at $ 52 million. But as long as SpaceX can not convince NASA that its craft is safe for astronauts, it will only be left to launch cargo space.
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