A SpaceX cargo spacecraft had a glitch in space during its last mission.
A SpaceX Dragon docked with the International Space Station for 23 days in June had a thruster valve stuck open because of a corrosion problem, a SpaceX official said Tuesday (July 25) during a NASA press conference.
“It didn’t impact the mission in any respect,” Benji Reed, senior director of SpaceX’s human spaceflight program, said within the livestreamed opportunity. Since SpaceX’s spacecraft are similar enough between the cargo and Crew Dragon versions, nonetheless, engineers are all spacecraft in production to handle the difficulty.
To date this case may have no impact on the launch date for the subsequent astronaut mission, often called Crew-7. Crew-7 will launch with NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos.
They’ll head to the ISS from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:56 a.m. EDT (1056 GMT) on Aug. 17. You’ll be able to watch the events live at Space.com, via NASA Television.
The valve — often called an isolation valve — is designed to come back on in case of a thruster leak, Reed said through the press conference. Since no leak was happening on the time it was stuck open, the valve “didn’t must serve any purpose.”
The affected spacecraft, often called CRS-28, otherwise returned to Earth normally on June 30 after 25 days in space. After checking into the valve on CRS-28, SpaceX checked out its entire spacecraft line. They found “corrosion amongst certain units,” Reed said, which SpaceX is looking into identifying and addressing.
As a part of this work, SpaceX has already tested all of the isolation valves on its six Crew Dragons and can proceed to accomplish that during their normal maintenance and certification for flight. “At this point, no anomalous behavior has been identified on any of those valves. They’re all operating, opening and shutting appropriately,” he said.
While there are backup valves available to isolate a leak in case of trouble, Reed said SpaceX will do its best to handle the basis cause and to maintain NASA apprised of developments.
“We are going to proceed to work closely with NASA and all of our SpaceX teams to make sure that we’re able to fly,” he added.
SpaceX engineers, he emphasized, “will proceed our mini tests and reviews that we have been doing. These all the time give us a chance to step back, review the info, take heed to the hardware, and mitigate any risks.”