SpaceX Dragon

NASA and SpaceX preparing for another crewed mission to the International Space Station, but the launch scheduled for today is now delayed.

The mission, known as Crew-13, was adjusted late last month after NASA found an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of the SpaceX Dragon capsule that's set to be launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

NASA's team now working to address the issue with a new launch potentially in late September.

With a crew of four, including Americans Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, a Canadian and a Russian, all expected to spend about six months aboard the space station doing scientific research and supporting station operations.

You know, Isaacman's out there tweeting about Starliner having a life past the ISS.

Everybody's freaking out about Dragon not having a life past the ISS.

Yeah.

we're entering a log jam time period where like it's 2026 we can't be doing this we got to figure out what we're doing if we're doing any of this you know yeah and the explanation company the only one raising this amount of money

So imagine you get the Starliner money from flying these missions plus the ISS going longer.

That's got to be the bet.

And so the most helpful thing SpaceX can do to Boeing is not fly Dragon anymore.

And the second they realize that, maybe they'll keep flying Dragon.

They're running off of large generators and no backup cooling.

So Elon pulls team leads from the Falcon and Dragon rocket programs and they're taking a very different approach to the build out and the basic the tldr is is that they're just gonna go much slower so basically they hit all these milestones getting these things online at record speed and now they're saying we need to build them right we need to fix what's broken and for the larger builds down in texas We need to take our rocket science team and build those.

Just a quick interjection here.

I have no idea what went wrong at these sites.

And then the longer timeline down in Abilene and Starbase, Texas, Those are probably going to be re-approached.

So what about this Rocket team? Because these are not the same type of people.

Elon hired basically a half dozen prominent people from the Falcon and Dragon teams.

The lead of these guys is a Wesley Salandro who ran the Falcon 9 and Dragon production.

Mm.

And we, we looked at, uh, we had the, a massive trade internally, and then, then we started kind of looking at prototyping a few approaches that, based on our experience on Dragon and Falcon, what, you know, if we could just go first principles and, and dream up something.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, and those kind of started to gain momentum, and then finally we kind of got it across the kind of hump of showing it to other people and getting a lot of consensus.

Uh, and so we really wanted to try to take the best of both worlds, the best of all the approaches, and build something that would work for both.

We kind of had this objective list, uh, that we wanted, you know, if, if you could just write in like a, you know, one sheet of paper all the things that you'd like about your, your [chuckles] software, and then you take that list, and you try to map it to these different solutions, and then what we th- we thought we could build in-house.

And so you had sort of built some s- version of these systems for Falcon and, and Dragon, uh, and this was sort of like, "Hey, take these, these pieces maybe and, and maybe a different order of magnitude or a different level of depth, uh, that we can run on in a very different way."

Yep.

Who knows? We'll find out.

Dragon is leaking.

I don't remember this happening before.

What's happened?

Oh, they've had, you know, this happens once in a while, but not for a very, very long time.

When they were building the Crew Dragon capsule, they had some issues with valves leaking, but now SpaceX fixed it.

And they haven't had any real issues now for almost, what is it, six, seven years? But the next manned mission to ISS has now been delayed.

They have canceled the tentative launch date in mid-September.

European regulators are reviewing the proposed service terms ahead of commercial activation.

Two astronauts conducted the first all-female spacewalk while docked to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The crew performed external maintenance tasks on the station's exterior while the Dragon capsule remained attached as the primary return vehicle.

Live video feeds showed Earth passing below during the extravehicular activity.

It was 20 years ago that NASA signed the first space act agreement with NASA.

Falcon 9 Dragon development.

They developed the Falcon 9 and started launching not only what NASA needed, but serving other customers to such an extent that the price of launch has fallen over those 20 years.

The frequency of launch has accelerated dramatically.