It’s the final countdown. Again.
SpaceX, the spacefaring company founded by billionaire Web entrepreneur Elon Musk, will try again early Tuesday morning to launch an unmanned rocket and cargo capsule into Earth’s orbit, with the goal of becoming the first-ever commercial firm to dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station. The craft will also attempt to ferry 1,014 pounds of non-critical supplies to the astronauts currently abord the space station.
SpaceX, based out of Hawthorne, California, initially attempted to launch its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule on Saturday morning, but the launch was aborted (or “scrubbed”) at literally the last-half second, due to above-normal pressure readings in one of the rocket’s nine engines.
The mission-derailing error was caused by a faulty valve on the engine, which was quickly replaced, SpaceX later explained.
“Simulations show launch ok with bad valve,” Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and the co-founder of PayPal, tweeted on Monday. “Still, better to stop & fix. Recalling rockets after launch is not an option.”
But now SpaceX and NASA, which is overseeing the launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, have said that all systems are go for a retry at 3:44 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning.
“I feel pretty calm, believe it or not,” Musk said on the eve of the launch, in an interview with Spaceflight Now.
If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9 rocket will lift-off and enter Earth’s orbit about 10 minutes later, at which point the Dragon capsule will separate from the rocket and deploy its solar array. Then it will perform “a series of carefully choreographed engine firings,” according to SpaceX, which will put it on a path to reach the International Space Station, located about 240 miles above the Earth.
The docking portion of the mission won’t be attempted until the fourth day after launch, Friday, May 25, after the Dragon has successfully demonstrated that its docking sensors and control systems are in working order. During the testing phase, scheduled to take place on Thursday, the Dragon will come close to the station, 720 feet away, but then back up, showing its ability to properly gauge distances and respond to precise directional commands. If these and other tests go well, NASA will clear the spacecraft to dock.
If all that goes off without a hitch, on Saturday, May 26, astronauts aboard the space station will enter the Dragon and begin transferring the 1,014 pounds of new supplies aboard it — food, water and clothing — over to the station. They’ll also then fill the Dragon with garbage with equipment to bring back to Earth, some 1,367 pounds. Dragon will remain docked to the station for two weeks, at which point it is supposed to disengage and head back into Earth’s atmosphere, plunging down into the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast, where it will be retrieved and re-used.
While SpaceX, NASA and others in the commercial spaceflight industry have repeatedly cautioned that the mission is just a “test flight,” for SpaceX’s ambitions to become the de-facto transport for cargo and eventually, astronauts, into low earth orbit, there is no denying that it is a hugely symbolic moment for the ambitions of private spacefaring entrepreneurs.
“This is the biggest launch since the Space Shuttle was retired,” said Alex Saltman, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, in a phone interview with TPM.
Since the Space Shuttle-era concluded with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis last July — the result of President George W. Bush’s decision to retire the program due to its costs and aging equipment — NASA has relied exclusively on the Russian Soyuz vehicles for getting cargo and American astronauts into space, an expensive endeavor at $63 million per seat.
SpaceX, which has received a $1.6 billion contract from NASA to conduct up to 12 flights to the International Space Station (of which $390 million has been paid out so far), claims it will soon be able to fly astronauts to the space station at a cost of just $20 million per seat.
But as Saltman explained to TPM, SpaceX is just one of 45 private spacefaring or companies his group represents. NASA itself is holding a contest between SpaceX and four other companies, to see who will become the preferred provider of commercial crew and cargo services to the International Space Station. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives recently released a budget proposal that would force NASA to end the contest early by choosing one company or the other at this stage, which Saltman says would be a mistake.
“NASA needs to have at least two companies working on development of commercial space services,” Saltman told TPM. “This is a staged competition, there needs to be more than one company for it to work.”
Despite that, while SpaceX’s launch will mark a historic attempt, the future of commercial spaceflight in the U.S. doesn’t hinge on whether or not it succeeds, according to Saltman.
“In the end, the commercial space industry is not going to rise or fall in reaction to this event,” Saltman told TPM. “It will rise or fall on the efforts of the engineers working on these spacecraft. If they’re successful in building good vehicles, nothing else really matters.”
