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We hope you weren’t planning to spend Halloween watching NASA and SpaceX launch the first operational Crew Dragon mission. NASA has delayed the Crew-1 launch from at least early to mid-November as SpaceX wanted more time to finish evaluating the “unusual behavior” of a Falcon 9 rocket during a private flight. SpaceX wanted to know what happened to the first-stage engine gas generators before moving forward.
NASA Associate Administrator Kathy Lueders said both the agency and SpaceX were “actively working on this find” and hoped to be “much smarter” with the engines over the next week.
Other NASA flights relying on the Falcon 9 are still ongoing, including a partnership with ESA on a satellite (Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich) to launch on November 10 and a resupply mission scheduled for late or early November. from December.
A lot is at stake in Crew-1. While the Demo-2 flight made history as a return to American astronauts launching from their homeland, Crew-1 represents NASA’s first standard mission to use a busy, privately made capsule. It will be a while before such flights are considered normal, but this is a crucial step in that direction.
