Enlarge / A Crew Dragon spacecraft is seen docked with the International Space Station in 2022. The section of the spacecraft on the left is the pressurized capsule, while the aft section, on the right, is the trunk.
NASA
Next year, SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules to the Pacific Ocean and end recoveries of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida.
This will allow SpaceX to make changes to how it returns the Dragons to Earth and eliminate the risk, however small, that debris from the ship’s trunk section could fall on someone and cause damage, injury or death.
“After five years of splashdowns off the coast of Florida, we have decided to move Dragon recovery operations to the West Coast,” said Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management.
Public safety
In recent years, landowners have discovered debris from several Dragon missions on their property, and the fragments all came from the spacecraft’s trunk, an unpressurized section mounted behind the capsule as it carries astronauts or cargo on flights to and from the International Space Station.
SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded version of the Dragon for humans began flying in 2019, SpaceX moved splashdowns to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company’s refurbishment and launch facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida included faster transfer of astronauts and urgent cargo to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.
The old version of Dragon, called Dragon 1, separated its trunk after the deorbit burn, allowing it to fall back into the Pacific. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the trunk before the deorbit burn. That meant the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and has no propulsion system, typically takes a few weeks or months to fall back into the atmosphere and has no control over where or when it reenters.
Air resistance from the thin upper atmosphere gradually slows the trunk’s speed enough to knock it out of orbit, and the amount of aerodynamic drag the trunk experiences is largely determined by fluctuations in solar activity.
SpaceX and NASA, which funded much of the Dragon spacecraft’s development, had initially determined that the trunk would burn up completely upon reentry and pose no risk of reentry survival or injury or property damage. However, this turned out to be false.
In May, a 40-kilogram piece of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that had launched from the International Space Station fell onto the property of a glamping resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to come from the same Dragon mission.
The events follow the discovery in April of another nearly 40-kilogram piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined that the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC.
Pieces of a Dragon spacecraft also fell over Colorado last year, and an Australian farmer found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land in 2022.
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