Upgrades at SpaceX’s most-used launch pad in Florida will get a trial run Thursday with the liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon cargo ship heading for the Worldwide House Station.
SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon spacecraft is about for launch at 4:55 pm EDT (20:55 UTC) Thursday from House Launch Complicated 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral House Pressure Station in Florida. This mission, often known as CRS-30, is SpaceX’s thirtieth resupply mission to the area station since 2012.
The automated Dragon provide ship will take off on prime of a Falcon 9 rocket, then head for a month-long keep on the Worldwide House Station, the place it can ship greater than 6,000 kilos of {hardware}, recent meals, and experiments for the lab’s seven-person crew.
In the previous few months, SpaceX has outfitted the launch pad with the tools essential to assist launches human spaceflight missions on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The Cargo Dragon capsule is similar measurement and form as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, but it surely’s crammed with cargo racks and storage platforms relatively than seats and cockpit shows.
This week, SpaceX technicians have used the newly put in launch tower and crew entry arm at SLC-40 to load time-sensitive experiments and provides into the Cargo Dragon capsule atop the Falcon 9 rocket.
“CRS-30 might be our first Dragon to launch from Pad 40 since we put that model new crew tower in place,” mentioned Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission administration.
Constructing new functionality
Beginning final yr, development crews at Cape Canaveral erected segments of a greater than 200-foot-tall metallic lattice tower at SLC-40, proper subsequent to the beginning blocks for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Earlier than then, SLC-40 was primarily based on a “clear pad” structure, with none constructions to service or entry Falcon 9 rockets whereas they have been vertical on the pad.
In November, contractors raised the crew entry arm to an connect level close to the highest of the tower. This walkway will permit astronauts to crawl into the Crew Dragon spacecraft throughout a launch countdown. It additionally supplies entry to the hatch on the Cargo Dragon spacecraft for remaining cargo loading.
Earlier this yr, SpaceX examined an escape chute at SLC-40 that might be utilized in an emergency to assist astronauts and floor crews rapidly get away from the pad. The chute is comparable in operate to slide-wire baskets in use for many years at LC-39A, however as an alternative of driving a basket from the highest of the tower, personnel escaping a pad emergency would slide down a chute to hold them a number of hundred toes from the rocket.
SpaceX workers examined the pad escape chute final month at SLC-40. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operator officer, took the experience down the chute. “Astronaut and personnel security is SpaceX’s highest precedence, which is why I needed to personally take a look at the brand new slide,” she posted on X, alongside a wink emoji.
Groups take a look at the brand new emergency chutes from the pad 40 crew tower in Florida pic.twitter.com/rWVj7zaHp0
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 19, 2024
“The group took commercially obtainable off the shelf know-how and utilized it to the crew tower,” Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vp of launch, wrote on X. “You might be educated on it the identical method you might be educated on utilizing an emergency exit door on airplane. Solely takes a few fast bodily actions to deploy the slide and anybody can successfully do it.”
As extra folks journey to area, significantly on bigger autos like SpaceX’s Starship, simplifying security techniques might be necessary.
“This method will assist us scale to larger towers and spaceships (assume 100 folks on Starship),” Dontchev wrote.
SpaceX and its contractors accomplished all of this work as Falcon 9s fired off SLC-40 each few days with Starlink satellites and different missions.
For the final 4 years, all of SpaceX’s crew and cargo launches to the area station have departed from Launch Complicated 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy House Middle, just a few miles up the coast from SLC-40. In 2018 and 2019, SpaceX outfitted LC-39A for Cargo Dragon and Crew Dragon missions forward of the firm’s first human spaceflight mission in 2020.
Walker mentioned the brand new infrastructure added at SLC-40 is “practically functionally an identical” to the tools for crew missions at LC-39A. The first variations are the technique of pad escape—the chute as an alternative of slide-wire baskets—and a extra sturdy elevator within the tower at SLC-40.
Beforehand, SpaceX used each SLC-40 and LC-39A for launches of its now-retired first-generation Dragon cargo capsules, which had their remaining provides loaded earlier than SpaceX raised the rocket vertical for launch. Like common satellite tv for pc launches on Falcon 9s, each pads might assist the first-generation Dragon cargo missions.
“Because of this new state-of-the-art crew tower required for our human spaceflight missions, that late-load cargo operation received a large improve, too,” Walker mentioned. “It’s a lot simpler to load an enormous complement of time-critical NASA science into our Dragon spacecraft within the flight orientation.”
SpaceX has drastically ramped up its launch cadence since constructing LC-39A for Dragon missions. The corporate plans practically 150 Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launches this yr. Whenever you’re flying rockets each two or three days, it is inevitable two missions will find yourself vying for a similar launch slots. Most lately, that occurred in February, when a NASA crew mission was able to launch from LC-39A across the identical time as a slim launch window for Intuitive Machines’ first industrial lunar lander. Each needed to go off of LC-39A.
“Traditionally, Pad 40 has form of turn out to be our excessive price pad,” Walker mentioned. “We’ve gotten the time between launches down to only a few days.”
LC-39A has seen much less use, primarily for Dragon crew and cargo flights, Falcon Heavy missions, and different “uniquely complicated” missions just like the Intuitive Machines lander, Walker mentioned.