🔒 Peep inside Elon Musk’s SpaceX space rocket – The Wall Street Journal

By Andy Pasztor

(The Wall Street Journal) – SpaceX postponed the launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday afternoon because of stormy weather, including a tornado warning, less than 20 minutes before the scheduled liftoff.

The countdown up to that point had gone smoothly, and flight controllers didn’t indicate any significant technical issues to hold up the launch.

The long-awaited mission would have represented the first time a company ever flew commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the international space station. If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. eventually reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country’s space endeavours and the first human launch from U.S. soil since 2011. It would also represent a long-awaited milestone for NASA and a resounding achievement for SpaceX and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk.

The countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had its share of suspense Wednesday, as weather forecasts hours before predicted only a 50/50 chance of acceptable conditions. The next opportunity comes Saturday.

Rain and high-level winds pose hazards for rockets, and SpaceX staff also monitored weather conditions at dozens of sites around the world in case the astronauts had to separate from the rocket en route for an emergency descent.

President Trump, while touring the space center before launch, was asked if he had a message for the astronauts. “God be with you,” he said. “It’s a dangerous business, but they’re the best there is.”

The Crew Dragon capsule – featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars—has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching Saturday morning, the capsule is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months.

SpaceX’s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totalling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top. But if things ultimately go smoothly on the launchpad and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly approve SpaceX’s systems as space taxis that would ferry crews to and from orbit.

For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a successful flight would represent the culmination of more than eight years of efforts to shift its approach to transporting humans beyond the atmosphere. The agency has long sought to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.

Having a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the ageing US space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasising deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavours, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.

Some longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government “a customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,” said Mark Albrecht, a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. “NASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.”

Beyond the policy changes and revamped contracting arrangements, however, the sheer promise of accelerating human space exploration excites many government and industry officials. Nothing generates as much pride as adding humans to the equation. “When you put an astronaut on top of a rocket, that changes everything,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten, a longtime space expert and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a White House space-policy council last week. “Dreams come when you start flying.”

Space age

Here is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.

SpaceX operations, designated essential by authorities, have been largely uninterrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Launch preparations were conducted with reduced personnel and special precautions involving masks and social distancing. But NASA has gone out of its way to protect the timetable for what it considers its current priority mission, according to people familiar with the details, even at the expense of scrimping on other programs.

“Human space flight is really, really tough,” Benji Reed, director of crew mission management at SpaceX, said during a media teleconference Friday, as he and other speakers sketched out the long push to fix problems that cropped up. As company and NASA engineers work together to identify and alleviate risks, he said, “we are all holding each other accountable.”

Boeing Co. has developed a rival capsule, the Starliner, which has struggled with its own technical challenges and might make a test flight later in the year without astronauts.

SpaceX started in 2002 with barely a dozen employees in a converted warehouse near a Southern California strip mall. The company has become a global powerhouse renowned for reducing prices to launch commercial and government payloads.

With some 7,000 employees, and facilities from Washington state to Texas and Florida, the company already has notched several records: It was the first private entity to place a satellite into Earth’s orbit; the first to land and then reuse major parts of returning rockets; and the first to send spacecraft without humans to link up with the orbiting international laboratory.

After investing a total of more than $7bn of taxpayer money so far in SpaceX and Boeing efforts to resume astronaut liftoffs from US soil, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine sees a successful launch as recasting the path for America, other nations and industry to reach space. U.S. astronauts “need to have the capability of accessing space, not just for NASA but for all of humanity,” he said this month.

Roughly $3 billion of NASA’s total investment so far in such commercial space taxis has gone to support SpaceX’s work, based on agency documents and space experts’ estimates. Mr. Musk’s company, which hasn’t publicly released details of its own spending, will be paid a fixed price for each astronaut sent into orbit. Separately, experts have estimated SpaceX has invested nearly $1bn to develop a heavy-lift booster.

By encouraging private investments in such ventures, academics and industry officials said, NASA is increasing the likelihood of getting humans to the moon quickly and establishing a longer-term presence there, instead of depending entirely on federal support.

Traditional government funding strategies, by themselves, won’t be adequate to support U.S. space ambitions, said Howard McCurdy, a space historian at American University. “The [older] financial options certainly aren’t viable; they aren’t going to do it on a Project Apollo model.”

But even a trouble-free demonstration flight isn’t likely to usher in a booming era of smaller, inexpensive rockets – something Mr. Musk and other commercial-space champions once considered inevitable.

“Elon Musk opened the door to making space deals acceptable,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have spawned scores of such startups world-wide. But even before the pandemic, only a handful of the new generation of rocket companies appeared to be gaining significant traction. Now, the contagion is creating formidable additional hurdles. With a few prominent exceptions—including Rocket Lab of New Zealand and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos – the spectre of the virus has eroded financing and marketing prospects for many proposed projects.

Virgin Orbit, a small-satellite launch provider founded by Richard Branson, suffered a catastrophic rocket failure seconds into its maiden flight last weekend.

Many SpaceX operations facilities have remained at least partly staffed, in contrast to the recent turmoil surrounding Mr. Musks’s moves to restart production at the Northern California factory of electric-car company, Tesla Inc., in defiance of local authorities.

The safety of the Dragon capsule and its crew depend on a host of complex, interrelated features – from autonomous docking to life-support systems—working in precise sequence on the first try, Mr. McCurdy said. The Russian space agency has achieved a formidable safety record carrying people to space, thanks to its long and steady history of launches.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told reporters recently she never has to remind her employees about the importance of safety: “They remind themselves.”

Doug Hurley, a veteran NASA astronaut who flew on the final space-shuttle mission and is to be commander on the coming SpaceX launch, told Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the White House space-policy group that the reality of what is about to happen has yet to sink in: “In some ways, it’s really hard to believe we’re going to launch.”

– Write to Andy Pasztor at [email protected]