A Few Small Space News Items - A Week of Delays

The first delay is that the Ax-1 mission crew visiting on the ISS has been unable to leave the station due to unfavorable landing zone weather across the SE.  It's crowded up there, with the docking ports taken up by the Crew Dragons for Ax-1 and Crew-3.  It turns out there's a shortage of docking ports on the ISS. 

In a twist of fate that can be partially blamed on SpaceX, the ISS only has two docking ports (parking spots) capable of receiving Crew Dragon. NASA technically contracted Boeing to build three such ports but the first was destroyed when Falcon 9 failed catastrophically while attempting to launch Cargo Dragon’s CRS-7 space station resupply mission in June 2015. For unknown reasons, close to seven years later, NASA still hasn’t so much as attempted to build or launch a replacement docking adapter. As a result, most NASA cargo or crew missions have become more sensitive to the delays of other spacecraft and missions as NASA and its providers attempt to juggle a packed manifest with just two parking spots.

Because the Ax-1 mission can't leave, SpaceX can't launch the Crew-4 mission and because Crew-4 isn't there, Crew-3 can't return.   Currently, SpaceX, Axiom Space, and NASA are targeting no earlier than (NET) Saturday, April 23 at 6:30 p.m. ET (22:30 UTC) for Dragon and the Ax-1 astronauts to depart from the International Space Station.  Splashdown is likely to be 1:46 p.m. ET on Sunday, April 24.  Crew-4, which had been scheduled for today, has been reassigned to NET Tuesday April 26 at 0815 GMT (4:15 a.m. EDT).  I see no preliminary date for Crew-3 to leave the station, but the ordinary way of doing these switches is that both crews overlap for "a few days or a week" to ensure all the loose ends are transferred. 

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It's getting to seem pretty routine, but another Falcon 9 booster had its 12th successful flight yesterday, landing on drone ship Just Read The Instructions after the launch experienced a roughly two hour weather delay.  Booster 1060 joined fleet leader B1051 less than two years after its June 30th, 2020 launch debut.  

With its 12th mission complete, B1060 has launched an average of once every 55 days over the last 22 months. B1060 also set SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 booster turnaround record of 27 days between launches – fully halving the far more complex Space Shuttle orbiter’s 54-day record. Altogether, out of a total of 21 total flight-proven Falcon 9 Block 5 stages, SpaceX’s four most productive Block 5 boosters have completed 45 orbital-class launches in the last three and a half years – more than half of all Falcon 9 launches conducted in the same period.

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Another delay has been Rocket Lab's first attempt to snatch one of their Electron boosters out of mid-air with a helicopter, as we covered back on April 7.  Their mission “There And Back Again” originally scheduled for this past Tuesday, April 19, was delayed for unknown reasons.  They currently have a launch window of 2235-0040 GMT on 27th/28th (6:35-8:40 p.m. EDT on Wednesday the 27th).  

And because I'm still at the stage where a rocket landing on its tail on a metaphorical postage stamp hundreds of miles out into the Atlantic hasn't gotten old...

B1060 just as the single landing engine shut off.