One official familiar with deliberations at Johnson Space Center told Ars, “Prelaunch is a phase of flight that is scrutinized as much as any other with safety being our top priority. There is some evidence NASA’s commercial crew program managers are doing just that. The ASAP panel urged NASA to weigh the benefits of load and go with the “large” uncertainties and additional risk it entails. Advertisementįurther Reading NASA officials mulling the possibility of purchasing Soyuz seats for 2019 “There is a unanimous, and strong, feeling by the committee that scheduling the crew to be on board Dragon spacecraft prior to loading oxidizer into the rocket is contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years, both in this country and internationally,” Stafford wrote. Thomas Stafford, expressed his panel’s fears about the safety of load and go to the agency’s senior management.
In December the chairman of NASA’s advisory committee on the space station, Gen. (SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the Dragon's launch abort system would have saved the astronauts, had this happened during a crewed mission). These concerns were magnified after the September 1 accident when, during fueling of the Falcon 9’s second stage for a prelaunch test, both the rocket and its satellite were lost in an explosion. After implementing the new fueling process in December, 2015, SpaceX had been working toward using the same fueling methods when beginning crew flights to the International Space Station next year.ĭespite SpaceX’s early success with this fueling process, however, NASA had retained concerns about it, as historically neither the crew nor any other personnel have been allowed in or near a booster during fueling operations. The additional fuel has provided SpaceX the margin needed to fly its boosters back to Earth after they delivered their payloads into space, especially those bound for geostationary orbit.įurther Reading Four things SpaceX can do in 2017 to get its groove backīecause this super-chilled oxygen can warm quickly after it is loaded onto the rocket, SpaceX has adopted the “load and go” strategy. One critical component to this success has been the use of a new fueling process that chills liquid oxygen to below -200 degrees Celsius, allowing more of this denser oxidizer to fit within the rocket’s fuel tanks. SpaceX has gained notoriety during the last 13 months for landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on land, and at sea aboard an autonomous drone ship. This week the agency’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel strongly encouraged NASA top management to “scrutinize” this issue as part of an annual report on safety concerns in US spaceflight, which could have significant implications for the commercial crew program. NASA advisers are continuing to express concerns about a SpaceX fueling process known as “load and go,” in which chilled fuel is loaded onto the rocket just 30 minutes before a scheduled launch.
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