NASA and SpaceX have slipped off their scheduled departure for the International Space Station after an oxidizer leak turned up in the propulsion system of the Crew-13 Dragon spacecraft — and no replacement date has been penciled in.
The leak surfaced while engineers were performing routine spacecraft processing in the lead-up to launch. It wasn’t caught mid-countdown, and it wasn’t caught during a fueling test. Routine processing.
That detail carries more weight than it first appears. An oxidizer is the chemical that allows fuel to burn inside a rocket or spacecraft propulsion system, which makes it essential to the vehicle’s ability to maneuver. And a Dragon that can’t maneuver dependably is a Dragon that can’t meet up with a space station — or return home on its own terms.
What happens between now and a new date
Additional testing is underway, with teams from both NASA and SpaceX poring over data from the spacecraft. Any repairs, or other work deemed necessary, will be wrapped up before Dragon is cleared for flight.
No new target launch date has been announced by NASA. The agency and SpaceX have said one will be shared once the testing, the data reviews and any required work on the spacecraft are complete. That is the entirety of the schedule at the moment, and the sequence of those three items rewards a careful read: the date comes after the work, not before it.
Four astronauts, four agencies, one Expedition
Crew-13 will be commanded by NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, with fellow NASA astronaut Luke Delaney serving as pilot.
Joining them as mission specialists are Joshua Kutryk of CSA (Canadian Space Agency) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.
Upon arrival at the station, the four will fold into Expedition 75 — the long-duration crew responsible for research, maintenance and other operations aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Roughly two weeks ahead of the flight, the Crew-13 astronauts enter quarantine at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The precaution is decidedly low-tech but serves a clear purpose: cutting the odds that a crew member falls ill just before heading to space. It is also yet another element of the timeline that must be re-clocked each time a launch date shifts.
The hardware, unchanged
Once the mission gets the green light, Crew-13 will fly aboard SpaceX’s Dragon, the spacecraft designed to ferry astronauts to orbit and back.
Dragon lifts off atop a Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
None of that configuration has been altered. What has changed is that one of its tanks sprang a leak before anyone had strapped in — which is the version of this problem you’d rather be dealing with.