SpaceX will not return to flight before September after an initial investigation blamed its Falcon 9 crash last month on a faulty strut in the rocket’s second stage. Preliminary analysis suggests the steel strut snapped at a fifth of the weight it was…
SpaceX will not return to flight before September after an initial investigation blamed its Falcon 9 crash last month on a faulty strut in the rocket’s second stage.
Preliminary analysis suggests the steel strut snapped at a fifth of the weight it was certified to handle, releasing helium that led to an “overpressure event” and the failure of the International Space Station cargo mission.
SpaceX said it will no longer use this piece of hardware, which is built by a third party, despite using it successfully in all previous Falcon 9 flights.
“Our investigation is ongoing until we exonerate all other aspects of the vehicle, but at this time, we expect to return to flight this fall and fly all the customers we intended to fly in 2015 by end of year,” it said.
It has not decided which payload will be the first of these to fly. Israel’s Spacecom and Luxembourg-based SES were thought to be on its near-term manifest before the crash. Other operators awaiting launches this year included Eutelsat, ABS, Iridium and Sky Perfect JSAT.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was cited saying the launch failure had cost the group hundreds of millions of dollars in meaningful revenue. It has pushed back the first launch of the larger Falcon Heavy it has been developing from the end of this year to next spring at the earliest.
The Californian launcher is also developing a manned version of the Dragon cargo capsule it had tried to send to the ISS. The group said its review process will ensure the vehicle is even safer as it looks to start carrying US astronauts to the station in 2017.
Dragon was able to survive the upper stage failure on 28 June and continued to communicate until it dropped out of range, and Musk believes it would have deployed parachutes if it had added new software.
SpaceX is able to work relatively quickly though its failure investigation because most of the system is developed in-house.
Operators including Britain’s Inmarsat are still waiting on a return to flight date for Russia’s Proton rocket, which destroyed the Mexican government’s Centenario satellite when it blew up in May.
For the ISS, the Falcon 9 failure marked the third time a cargo run had failed to reach it in eight months.
A Progress resupply spacecraft never made it to the station in April after suffering an anomaly when it separated from a Russian Soyuz rocket.
Orbital Sciences (now part of Orbital ATK), the other private US company competing with SpaceX for NASA’s resupply flights, was hit with a rocket explosion in October 2014.
