SpaceX has completed a test launch of its all-new Falcon 9 rocket that will eventually carry the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station. The static launch test and “test drive” mission of the booster was called after it experienced a moisture leak en route from SpaceX’s McGregor Test Facility in Texas to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If all goes according to plan, the rocket won’t launch until Tuesday morning on the Starlink 10-5 mission, and then it will begin preparations for the Crew 9 mission, which is currently scheduled to launch no later than September 24.
The booster, which has tail number B1085 in SpaceX’s fleet, was first mentioned as a monitoring element during a briefing on the Crew-9 mission in late July.
“We had to work around a few challenges with moisture leakage during the transfer from MacGregor to Kennedy Space Center,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager.
He added during a press briefing on Aug. 7 that the booster rocket needed to undergo additional testing due to “water leaks,” saying that would improve confidence that SpaceX would “do a little test of this booster rocket” with the Starlink mission before it launches four members of the Crew 9 mission.
There was some moisture that got into the fuel in [liquid oxygen] “The fuel tank was in the booster vehicle while it was being transported from MacGregor to Cape Town. The drying system wasn’t working the way it was supposed to,” Stitch said. “That drying system is supposed to keep the air dry, and so it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. So we had to dry those tanks and then replace some components in the vehicle.”
The short ignition of the rocket’s nine first-stage engines was scheduled for Monday evening at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Station.
B1085 is scheduled to launch for the first time during the Starlink 10-5 mission, which will take off during a four-hour launch window that opens at 5:20 a.m. EST (0920 UTC), adding another batch of Starlink satellites to SpaceX’s massive constellation of more than 6,000 satellites in low Earth orbit.
The B1085 launch comes just over a month before SpaceX and NASA are set to launch Crew-9. As with the Starlink 10-5 mission, Crew-9 will launch from SLC-40. This will be the first crewed launch from that platform in its history.
However, the size and configuration of the Crew-9 mission are somewhat uncertain. The agency is currently determining whether the Crew Dragon spacecraft will eventually be used to return NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Sunni” Williams to Earth after they launch on Boeing’s Starliner.
NASA is preparing to decide whether it will be comfortable returning Wilmore and Williams on the Starliner given its engine and helium issues. If they choose to return the duo on SpaceX, the Crew-9 mission will launch with just two people on board and land on the Florida coast in February 2025 with the original two Crew-9 members and the Starliner crew still on board.
During the most recent briefing, NASA officials declined to say who would fly on the Crew-9 mission in a modified scenario. Russia is likely to insist on Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov as part of a seat swap agreement between NASA and Roscosmos, but that has not yet been confirmed.
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