SpaceX Tweaks Dragon’s Heat Shield, Parachutes Before New Flight

(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk’s SpaceX has made two minor changes to its Crew Dragon spacecraft ahead of a mission next month to the International Space Station, based on data collected earlier this year from the vehicle’s first flight with astronauts.

The company is reinforcing the Dragon’s heat shield after finding more erosion than expected, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said Tuesday at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration news conference. The erosion affected four small areas where the capsule connects to the vehicle’s trunk, which is jettisoned before landing.

Additionally, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has installed a different screen for a barometric pressure sensor, allowing for more precise readings. That will cause the capsule’s two large drogue parachutes to deploy at a slightly higher altitude than on the crewed test flight, which returned to Earth on Aug. 2.

Neither the heat shield nor parachute-release point posed any danger for the vehicle, NASA and SpaceX said. The changes were made to add additional protections, Koenigsmann said.

‘Exclusion Zone’

For next month’s mission, NASA also plans to ask the Coast Guard to enforce a 10-mile “exclusion zone” around the Dragon’s landing site. In the previous mission, a bevy of boaters approached the space capsule after it splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico south of Pensacola, Florida.

Earlier this week, NASA rescheduled the next launch by eight days to Oct. 31 at 2:40 am Eastern time, to “deconflict” the mission with flights by Russia’s Soyuz space vehicle.

The four-member crew -- three NASA astronauts and a Japanese astronaut -- will dock with the station on Nov. 1. The Dragon will spend about seven months, or 210 days, in orbit on the station, representing the vehicle’s first regular mission after the crewed test flight that was completed last month.

“I’m counting on a beautiful mission, the exact same way,” as the demonstration flight from May to August, said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for human spaceflight.

The added time before the next launch will also give space station engineers additional time to locate and potentially remedy a persistent air leak that has bedeviled the ISS for a year.

Late Monday, NASA noticed a small increase in the rate of the leakage and decided to awaken the station crew to perform additional detection work on locating the leak’s source. Mission controllers believe the leak is in the Russian Zvezda service module and is coordinating with Russia’s space agency, said Kenny Todd, space station deputy manager.

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