The Commercial Crew Program – All About Redundancy
SpaceX’s second-stage failure on their venerable Falcon 9 booster Thursday demonstrates exactly why NASA wants dissimilar redundancy for crewed flights. The idea is simple: if one launch provider is grounded for a technical issue or a launch failure investigation, the other can take up the slack. The duopoly of crewed launch providers is meant to assure the nation of continuous access to orbit while launching from American soil.
SpaceX to date has been a hugely successful company, one that has been a trailblazer in areas of spaceflight that seemed impossible less than twenty years ago. SpaceX has designed and built perhaps the most reliable launch system in history, changed the economics of spaceflight, and been a rock-solid provider of access to space for astronauts, commercial customers, the US government, and, of course, their own Starlink subsidiary. Space X launches from the Florida coast have become all but “routine” – so much so that locals hardly notice any more, save for when one or two of their boosters announce a return and landing with sonic booms that reverberate through the area.
All that said, SpaceX is not perfect, and we saw that last night on their 353rd Falcon 9 flight. SpaceX boosters have had three failures over the last nine years – two in flight and one on the launch pad. The company’s first failure was in 2015, when a Falcon 9 second stage detonated as it rose towards orbit, the second in 2016 when another second stage had a tank failure resulting in an on-pad explosion, and the third, last night, again a second stage that failed, this time while it was in its initial orbit after ascent from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Given the number of launches of Falcon 9 over its fourteen-year career, that’s a remarkable record and perhaps earns Falcon 9 the most reliable rocket in history. Still, failures are a statistical inevitability and this week, the odds caught up to Falcon 9.
By comparison, NASA’s other Commercial Crew program contractor, Boeing, has flown two previous test flights of their Commercial Crew vehicle, Starliner. Now, Boeing is in the middle of the third Starliner mission, their first crewed flight, and things are not going well. The current Starliner mission remains parked at the International Space Station indefinitely as NASA and Boeing engineers evaluate the vehicle’s thrusters and other problems that arose during Starliner’s maiden crewed flight before it arrived at the International Space Station. Since then, engineers from Boeing and NASA have been analyzing, testing and discussing some of the spacecraft’s service modules thrusters before sending the crew towards reentry and home.
So, effectively, both crewed systems are at an operational stand still, save for the flights currently in progress: SpaceX’s Crew-8 and Boeing’s Starliner Crewed Flight Test, both of which are docked at the International Space Station. Getting the crews home shouldn’t be a problem – but how soon can we get new ones up there?
With the inevitability of failures happening—no matter the launch provider—NASA envisioned that the Commercial Crew program should have “dissimilar redundancy” or two rocket systems that assures the nation of orbital access for human beings. We’re working on it, but certainly not there.
The Heat Is On
If anything, the SpaceX booster failure last night puts more pressure on Boeing to right the ship with its troubled Starliner program. Starliner is years late, more expensive and much more troubled than SpaceX’s half of the bargain. Yes, SpaceX had a rare failure last night, but SpaceX already has a four year track record of ferrying astronauts to and from ISS as well as on a free-flying mission that did not go to ISS.
On the other hand, Boeing has had major problems with all three Starliner flights: OFT-1 and OFT-2 had major issues that led to major delays, and their Crewed Flight Test hasn’t gone much better. In short, SpaceX has delivered, and Boeing’s performance has been left wanting. As it stands today, they cannot provide a backup to SpaceX in the event of a failure like the one that occurred last night, because Starliner itself is not a reliable certified vehicle.
It should be noted that Starliner’s problems are confined to Boeing and Boeing only: their launch provider, United Launch Alliance, has performed admirably in delivering Starliner to orbit in each of the three missions Starliner has flown. It is only after separation from the Atlas V it rode to space that Starliner’s problems began.
Accident Investigations Take Time
History has shown us that it will may take some time to get things moving again. Last night’s failure will bring an investigation by both SpaceX and the FAA to determine the root cause of the failure and how to prevent it from happening again — standard fare in aviation. After all, human lives are on the line when a Crew Dragon is launched atop one of the same type of Falcon 9 second stages that malfunctioned last night.
Fortunately, SpaceX has grown accustomed to accident investigations, with plenty of experience from the first three Starship launch attempts, as well as the aforementioned Falcon 9 failures. Following all of the SpaceX incidents, a whole class of the company’s rockets were grounded while an investigation was conducted. Remediations had to be devised and implemented, but the fact is, SpaceX is good at doing just that. With investigations led by SpaceX and overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration, the government agency responsible for licensing American commercial spaceflight, SpaceX never seems to spend more than a few months on the ground. The best part is that when SpaceX finds a problem, they’ve fixed it and no similar issues have happened since then.
As quickly as we would like to see them resolved, the fact remains that investigations take time: engineers and mission managers must closely examine all the data gathered from the spacecraft in the time leading up to the accident and also throughout the manufacturing process of building the rocket.
The first incident’s investigation — CRS-7 in 2015 — took 180 days until Falcon 9 flew again. The second problem occured on the Amos-6 mission. With that investigation, 132 days passed until the next Falcon 9 mission. While no one can know as of today how long it will take for the third investigation and subsequent remediations to be completed, history suggests it will be longer than a few days. It could run for weeks, if not months, until we see Falcon 9 rise again from a launch pad in Florida or California, where the company’s other Falcon 9 launch facility is located.
Editorial Opinion- Now Batting: Boeing
It’s time for Boeing to step up and deliver what they signed a contract to do: provide reliable access to space for NASA and the nation. SpaceX have done a great job thus far, and so has United Launch Alliance. As the ostensible “leading” aerospace company in the US, it is time for Boeing to do the same. Otherwise, NASA should quickly find a new partner to provide the dissimilar redundancy they envisioned.
