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On November 19, what is arguably SpaceX’s biggest Falcon 9 booster returned to Port Canaveral with a surprise – perhaps the most dramatic skinny ever seen on any of the recovered rockets.
Tilted more than 10 degrees from vertical, the tilt was immediately visible as soon as the top of the rocket reached the tip of the horizon, and it later became clear that one of the four landing legs of the Falcon 9 Booster B1061 had no contact with the drone Just Read the instruction set (JRTI). Four days earlier, Falcon 9 (and B1061) became the first commercially developed rocket in history to be certified to launch NASA astronauts, a feat it has accomplished perfectly. Crew Dragon safely delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station on November 16, marking the culmination of more than half a decade of (mostly) uninterrupted work.
Even before the momentous launch of Crew Dragon and Falcon 9, NASA had already revealed some details that would make parts of Crew-1 even more important and the launch of Crew-2 – scheduled for March 2021 – perhaps the most important in the history of SpaceX.
In short, less than a month after SpaceX’s equally flawless Astronaut Crew Dragon Demo-2 launched, changes to NASA’s contract revealed that the agency had allowed SpaceX to reuse the two Dragon capsules. and Falcon 9 boosters on upcoming astronaut launches.
“In an entirely unexpected turn of events, a ~ $ 3.1 billion contract amendment for SpaceX’s NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) was spotted on June 3. Without leaving much room for interpretation, the contract tweak states that SpaceX is now “[allowed to reuse] the Falcon 9 launcher and the Crew Dragon spacecraft starting with “its second operational astronaut launch, known as Post Certification Mission-2 (PCM-2) or Crew-2”.
Teslarati.com – June 9, 2020
A few months after this discovery, NASA itself specifically announced that it had given SpaceX the green light to reuse the Demo-2 Crew Dragon C206 capsule and the Crew-1 Falcon 9 B1061 booster on Crew-2, the second company astronaut operational launch. Scheduled no earlier than March 31, 2021, Crew-2 will most likely be launched before The Crew-1 Crew Dragon leaves the space station and returns its four crew members to Earth, a milestone expected in April.
For almost anyone who has gone through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) and its attitude to SpaceX’s reusability efforts from the start, the space agency’s swift willingness to trust its most important cargo – humans – to dragons tried in flight. and The Falcon 9 boosters were a huge surprise. If SpaceX is able to reuse both the C206 capsule and the B1061 booster as intended, Crew-2 will undoubtedly be the most important milestone in the history of commercial spaceflight, simultaneously proving that astronauts can be launched in safe on flight-proven commercial rockets. and spatialship.
Of course, while the Demo-2 Crew Dragon C206 capsule may have already been successfully recovered, SpaceX still had to land the Falcon 9 B1061 booster and safely return it to port after Crew-1 before it could consider taking it. reuse on Crew-2. Based on the appearance of the rocket on its arrival at Port Canaveral, the B1061 had a extremely barely. With what may be intuitive from sighting alone, it appears that some time after the B1061 landed and before the drone’s tank-shaped “ Octagrabber ” robot could secure the booster, a parasitic swell or a sudden high seas explosion must have resisted. , sliding the B1061 onto the sliding bridge.
This would explain why the Falcon 9’s first stage arrived in port on one of the far corners of the JRTI drone ship – also a sign that the B1061 likely hit the yellow barrier included specifically to prevent thrusters from slipping off the drone decks. . At the same time, B1061 must have had a moderately hard landing, forcing at least one of its four legs to spend a large chunk of a single-use shock absorber called a “crash core”, leaving the booster sitting at a angle. Based on the photos of the arrival, this tilt likely left JRTI’s Octagrabber unable to lock onto the Falcon 9’s four retaining clamps, forcing recovery technicians to improvise and manually chain the rocket to the bridge where the robotic solution failed.
Fortunately, the apparent heroism and luck of the SpaceX recovery team proved sufficient, and the rugged Falcon 9 booster was returned to land with no problem, lifted off from the JRTI deck approximately 24 hours after arriving in port. Based on the photos of the crush cores at the bottom of each leg, the hard landing and eventful journey of the B1061 has been pretty smooth as far as they come and, as CEO Elon Musk notes, the core replacement crash is probably all that is needed to make the rocket good. Like new.
Had the B1061 been lost at sea, Crew-2 would almost certainly have been delayed to give SpaceX enough time to come up with a brand new Falcon 9 first stage. Fortunately for SpaceX, that did not happen and the plans for the company to launch astronauts on the proven flight booster are still in play.
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