NASA, SpaceX say Crew-10 launch on track for Wednesday despite “late breaking issues”

Spokesman-Review reporter Nick Gibson is in Florida this week to report on Anne McClain’s and NASA’s SpaceX launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Follow along in print and online at spokesman.com/sections/return-to-space.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The rocket launch taking Spokane astronaut Anne McClain and her fellow crew members to the International Space Station is moving forward as scheduled, pending the resolution of some technical issues, officials say.

NASA and SpaceX officials convened Friday for a pre-launch debriefing to share some insight into the planning and preparation for the mission, while also touching on some “late breaking issues,” as Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for the space operations mission directorate, put it.

The two entities are working together to quickly address those issues, Bowersox said, before tipping his cap to the SpaceX team. It’s been challenging but a growing experience for the space agency to keep up with their partners, he said.

“They’ve been very flexible with us over the last couple years, coming up with new ways to handle almost anything that comes our way on the International Space Station,” Bowersox said.

McClain and her crewmates are expected to take off Wednesday at 4:48 p.m. PT, from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center. The mission is the 10th crew exchange with SpaceX through the space agency’s commercial crew program, in which the space agency partners with corporations in order to make the staffing of the space lab safer and more reliable and cost efficient, the agency states.

The mission will be the 10th crew to use SpaceX to get to the ISS. NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Takuya Onishi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will join McClain on the mission. The space explorers will be riding in the SpaceX Dragon capsule “Endurance” previously used by Crew-3, Crew-5 and Crew-7.

The capsule will be affixed to and propelled by a SpaceX Falcon 9, a semi-reusable two-stage rocket designed to lift off from the launching pad and return to earth to be reused. The Falcon is expected to return around 3 a.m. PT.

Bowersox said the partnership with SpaceX has changed how the space agency views what may be a safe vehicle to transport their astronauts. Just 10 years ago, NASA was still of the perspective that each rig should be built from scratch.

“We’ve all gotten to the point where we’ll say, ‘Oh, brand new vehicle? I’m a little bit nervous,’” Bowersox said. “Were they able to do everything right in production? How about giving us one of those flight-proven vehicles?”

Steve Stitch, manager of the commercial crew program, said there were two issues discussed during Friday’s flight readiness review. The coating on one of the thrusters for the latter stage of propulsion has degraded over repeated use, and both the agency and SpaceX are hoping to have a better understanding of an engine fire that broke out within a Falcon 9 rocket that launched 21 Starlink satellites in early March.

The mission’s team were polled on whether to stick with Wednesday’s launch , and they unanimously decided to do so, he added.

Stitch said every preparation for launch “is a bit like this, where we have a couple late-breaking issues that we got to work through,” Stitch said.

Stitch said the thruster coating protects them from becoming oxidized by the intense heat generated when they’re fired. NASA and SpaceX are “hot firing” a replacement, in which the thruster is stress tested by being put through four normal mission cycles, “plus a couple extra contingency cycles,” Stitch said.

The engine fire appears to have been caused by a fuel leak that started 85 seconds into the Falcon 9’s ascent, said Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability for SpaceX. Rocket grade kerosene hit the hot engine, but didn’t ignite until 45 seconds after it returned to the landing pad, when enough oxygen was able to enter into the engine chamber, react with the kerosene and spark a fire.

While the fire was contained to one engine barrel, as it was designed to do, Gerstenmaier said a landing leg was damaged by the blaze. The rocket tipped over, leading to a complete loss.

‘While it’s disappointing to lose a rocket after a successful mission, the team will use this data to make sure that every Falcon is more reliable on ascent and landing for this mission and for every other mission going forward,” Gerstenmaier said. “Ultimately, we’ll be safer because of what occurred on this flight.”

That incident came before the failure of a SpaceX Starship launch from their Texas base last Thursday. That craft, which company founder Elon Musk says will transport people to Mars one day, broke up and rained debris off the coast of Florida after the upper stage malfunctioned. It’s much larger than the tech used for ISS transport and still in the testing phase.

If the Crew-10 launch is delayed, Stitch said the agency has identified two alternatives: Thursday at 4:25 p.m. and Friday at 4:04 p.m. PT.

“We’re not going to launch before we’re ready,” Bowersox said. “We’re always analyzing the data and making sure that the rocket is ready to go before we let the SpaceX team hit the button with our crew on board.”