WASHINGTON — NASA is moving forward with launching the next Crew Dragon mission in mid-August, while delaying the first operational flight of Starliner.
At a briefing on July 26, NASA officials said they do not plan to launch the Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station until August 18. That date had been in doubt after an upper-stage anomaly on a Falcon 9 Starlink launch grounded the rocket for 15 days.
At the briefing, held ahead of the rocket’s successful return to flight in early July, NASA praised SpaceX for being “very transparent” about the investigation into the incident and the modifications planned to the upper stage to prevent the cause of the anomaly – a crack in a sensor line that allowed liquid oxygen to leak – from happening again.
That timeline, said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, will hinge on a test firing of the upper stage that will be used in the Crew-9 launch scheduled for around July 30. That test will “verify some of the new modifications that the vehicle will undergo because of the anomaly,” he said.
“We’re going to do a rigorous certification of that,” he said of the changes to the upper stage, including hardware and software changes that will no longer use data from the removed sensor. “We’re going to look at all of that and take it to the program control board, and then we’ll establish a baseline for Crew-9.”
He added that NASA would benefit from several Falcon 9 launches with the change before Crew-9. SpaceX has already conducted three launches, each carrying Starlink satellites, with the upper stage modification. More launches are planned, including a Cygnus cargo ship to the ISS as early as August 3.
In a separate briefing on July 26, the four-person Crew-9 crew — NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexsandr Gorbunov — said they had no reservations about launching on a Falcon 9 a few weeks after the upper stage anomaly.
“I have absolute confidence in the team and the approach they’ve taken,” said Hague, the Crew-9 pilot who also experienced a mid-air abort on a Soyuz mission to the ISS in 2018. “I look forward to getting on the rocket when the team decides it’s time to go.”
The Crew-9 launch window extends through early September, Stich said. That’s driven by the need to keep Launch Complex 39A running for a Falcon Heavy launch of the Europa Clipper mission, which has a three-week launch window that opens Oct. 10.
Scheduling conflicts over the use of LC-39A were one factor in SpaceX’s decision to build a crew and cargo access tower near Space Launch Complex 40. However, the platform will not be certified for crewed missions in time for Crew-9, Stich said.
“We haven’t quite finished the certification yet. If we did, we would consider moving to Platform 40,” he said, estimating that the certification work would be completed by the end of September.
Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, suggested it would have been possible to get SLC-40 certified in time for Crew-9, but added that it wasn’t necessary for this mission. “We have several weeks of runway on 39A,” she said. “I wouldn’t say we’re running out of time or there’s not enough room to launch Crew-9 when it’s needed.”
The Falcon 9 incident has impacted the schedule of another Crew Dragon mission. Before the anomaly, SpaceX had scheduled the launch of Polaris Dawn, a private astronaut mission that will carry four people aboard a Crew Dragon and perform the first private spacewalk, for late July. The mission is part of the Polaris program funded by Jared Isaacman, who will command Polaris Dawn.
“We are in the final stages of preparation for Polaris Dawn,” Walker said. “We have selected Crew-9 as our next mission and are prepared to launch Polaris Dawn in late summer.” She said later at the briefing that SpaceX was still planning an August launch of Polaris Dawn.
The timing of these missions will also depend on the docking of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft with the station as part of the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. To enable what NASA calls a “direct” transfer, with Crew-9 arriving before Crew-8 departs, Starliner will have to depart to free up a docking port.
At the press conference, Stich said that the first operational Starliner mission, called Starliner-1, is no longer scheduled to launch in February 2025 as previously planned. The Crew-10 mission will launch at that date, to give NASA and Boeing more time to review data from the CFT mission and make any necessary modifications to the spacecraft.
He said Starliner-1 had been rescheduled for August 2025, but added that the mission would be “double-booked” with Crew-11, likely to protect against any further delays with Starliner.
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