WASHINGTON — SpaceX will move its Dragon spacecraft from the coast of Florida to the West Coast starting in 2025, a move the company says is aimed at reducing the risk of reintroducing debris from the spacecraft’s trunk section.
In a July 26 statement, SpaceX announced that it would move the Dragon spacecraft’s splashdown sites to locations off the California coast as part of measures to control where the trunk section lands after being released from the Dragon capsule.
Since the introduction of the Crew Dragon spacecraft and its cargo variant, the trunk section has been released before the deorbit burn, and re-entered passively weeks or months later. SpaceX said it chose this option after the company, in collaboration with NASA, used “industry-standard models” that predicted the trunk would completely break apart upon re-entry, with no debris surviving.
This is not the case. On several occasions, large pieces of debris from Dragon trunks have survived reentry and landed in Australia, Saskatchewan, and North Carolina, among other places. The falling debris did not cause any damage or injuries, but illustrated the risk they posed.
Earlier this year, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the agency was working with SpaceX on ways to better control debris created by the reentry of the trunks. One option being explored, he said then, would be to jettison the trunk after Dragon performs its deorbit burn, which would allow the trunk to reenter the capsule at about the same time along the reentry corridor.
SpaceX said that’s the approach the company is taking. “SpaceX will implement a software change that will allow Dragon to perform its deorbit burn before jettisoning the trunk, similar to our first 21 Dragon recoveries,” it said. It ruled out alternatives that included a complete redesign of the trunk or adding a propulsion system for a controlled reentry.
This will require splashdown off the California coast, rather than near Florida. “Moving the trunk separation after the deorbit burn places the trunk on a known reentry trajectory, with the trunk splashdown safely ahead of the Dragon spacecraft off the California coast,” the company said.
Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, said during a July 26 briefing on the upcoming Crew-9 Crew Dragon mission that the changeover would begin next year. SpaceX will move a recovery ship currently in Florida to California, operating out of the Port of Long Beach.
She added that the Crew-9 mission, scheduled to launch as early as Aug. 18, will land off the coast of Florida in early 2025 during the transition. “We hope to have everything completed shortly after Crew-9 returns.”
While the change reduces the risk of debris, it poses new challenges for Dragon recovery operations. “NASA has given us new requirements, starting with CRS-21, for even tighter return times and enhanced science capabilities,” she said, which has been factored into plans for Dragon recovery operations in Florida.
“That’s the new challenge that’s before us now, and we’ve been working this year on how to get back to the West Coast while maintaining everything we’ve learned and what we’ve done to support crews, not just cargo,” she said, regarding the rapid transfer of scientific payloads after splashdown. “We’re working through all the details of that, but it’s going to be a better capability than we had with Dragon 1 by design.”
But there are other advantages to landing on the West Coast. “One of the advantages of the West Coast is the much better weather,” she said, based on a study of weather conditions and rules for landing the Dragon. “We actually found that the West Coast sites that we’re looking at have much better weather, which allows us to have much better return availability.”
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