WASHINGTON — NASA is pushing ahead with a mid-August launch of its next Crew Dragon mission while postponing the first flight of Starliner.
During a July 26 briefing, NASA officials said they were targeting the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station no sooner than Aug. 18. That date had been thrown into doubt after an upper stage anomaly on a Falcon 9 Starlink launch that kept the rocket grounded for 15 days.
At the briefing held before the event The rocket safely resumed flight early on the morning of July 27th.NASA praised SpaceX for being “very transparent” about its investigation into the accident and for planning changes to the upper stage to prevent liquid oxygen from leaking through a crack in a sensor line that caused the anomaly.
That timeline hinges on a test firing of the upper stage that will be used on the Crew 9 mission, scheduled for around July 30, said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. The test will “validate some of the new modifications that will be made to the spacecraft as a result of the anomaly,” he said.
“We’re going to go through that rigorous certification,” he said of the upper stage modifications, which include both hardware changes and software fixes that will no longer use data from the removed sensors. “We’ll look at that and bring it to the Program Control Board and we’ll base those modifications on Crew 9.”
He added that NASA will benefit from having several Falcon 9 launches in the lead up to Crew 9. SpaceX has already successfully launched three Starlink satellites using a modified upper stage, and has other launches planned, including a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station as early as August 3.
In a separate briefing on July 26, the four-man crew of Crew 9 — NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov — said they had no reservations about launching the Falcon nine weeks after the upper stage anomaly.
“I have a lot of confidence in the team and the approach they’ve taken,” said Crew 9 pilot Abortion of Soyuz spacecraft en route to ISS in 2018“I look forward to riding the rocket once the team decides it’s time to go.”
Stich said the Crew 9 launch window will be pushed to early September because Launch Complex 39A needs to be diverted to launch the Falcon Heavy for the Europa Clipper mission, which has a three-week launch window starting on October 10.
Scheduling conflicts over the use of LC-39A were one of the factors in SpaceX’s decision to build a crew and cargo access tower near Space Launch Complex 40. But that launch pad won’t be certified for crewed missions in time for Crew 9’s launch, Stich said.
“Certification has not yet been completed. Once it is, we will consider moving to launch pad 40,” he said, predicting that the certification process would be completed in late September.
Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s Dragon mission management director, added that while it may have been possible to get SLC-40 certified in time for Crew 9, it wasn’t necessary for this mission. “39A has several weeks of runway,” she said. “We’re not saying we’re out of time or that we don’t have enough space to launch Crew 9.”
The Falcon 9 incident affected the schedule of another Crew Dragon mission. Before the anomaly, SpaceX had planned to launch Polaris Dawn at the end of July, a private astronaut mission that will carry four astronauts on the Crew Dragon for the first private spacewalk. The mission is part of the Polaris program, which is funded by Jared Isaacman, who will be the commander of Polaris Dawn.
“We are making final preparations for Polaris Dawn,” Walker said. “We have selected the Crew-9 mission as our next mission, and we are prepared to launch Polaris Dawn in late summer.” Walker said in a later briefing that SpaceX is still planning for Polaris Dawn’s August launch.
The timing of these missions also depends on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which is docked to the space station for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. To allow for what NASA calls a “direct” handover, with Crew 9 arriving before Crew 8 departs, the Starliner will need to depart to clear the docking port.
Stich said at the briefing that the first operational Starliner mission, called Starliner 1, is no longer scheduled to launch in February 2025 as previously planned. Instead, the Crew-10 mission will launch around the same time to give NASA and Boeing more time to review data from the CFT mission and make any changes to the spacecraft.
He said the launch of Starliner 1 had been rescheduled for August 2025, but added that the mission would be “double-booked” with Crew 11 in case of any further Starliner delays.
