Months after the episode, SpaceX finally has a clarification for why its Crew Dragon capsule was wrecked during a test. The private spaceflight firm has discovered that a “spilling part” permitted fluid oxidizer (explicitly nitrogen tetroxide) to enter high-weight helium tubes during ground preparing. At the point when a portion of this oxidizer was sent through a helium check valve during the dispatch escape framework startup, it responded with the valve’s titanium and set off a blast.
SpaceX engineering leader Hans Koenigsmann said it was now “increasingly difficult” for SpaceX to expect a crewed launch of its new spacecraft in 2019, another delay for an operation originally planned for 2017.
“In a lot of ways, this was a gift for us,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s manager for the commercial crew program, said. “It was a test on the ground, we had a lot of instrumentation on the vehicle, we had high speed cameras, we were able to get the hardware and the data…through this process, we will continue to learn things that will help us fly safer.”
The company has a few Dragon capsules underway, and once ground tests are finished the following stage will be to play out an in-flight prematurely abort test. This will include casting off the case from a Falcon 9 rocket during flight. Koenigsmann didn’t state when he anticipated that this test should happen, however on the off chance that it goes well, SpaceX will hope to dispatch two NASA space travelers to the ISS as ahead of schedule as mid-November. Koenigsmann says he’s “entirely hopeful” that the organization will most likely dispatch before the year’s end, yet that hitting this objective has progressed toward becoming “progressively troublesome.”
SpaceX and Boeing are both building commercial crew ships to ferry astronauts to and from the space station, ending NASA’s sole reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Both crew ships feature powerful rocket motors designed to quickly push a vehicle to safety in the event of an impending booster failure.