June 28 was Elon Musk’s 44th birthday, and he had hoped to celebrate with a successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It would be carrying a Dragon capsule full of supplies for the International Space Station (ISS), under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract he signed with NASA back in 2006.
Musk had also hoped that once the Dragon capsule was well on its way to the space station, the Falcon’s first stage would return to Earth’s surface for a powered landing on a barge off the coast of Florida. A successful flight would have been a major step toward building a reusable launch vehicle, which could radically reduce the cost of getting payloads into orbit.
Instead, the Falcon 9 exploded a few minutes after leaving the launch pad.
It has been a rough time recently for ISS logistics. In October an Antares rocket launched from Virginia by Orbital Sciences blew up, and in April a Russian Progress supply capsule was lost when its Soyuz launcher malfunctioned. NASA says that there are enough supplies onboard the ISS to last until October. If this summer’s planned launch of a Japanese HTV supply capsule goes wrong, things could get dicey.
The latest accident is not just bad news for Musk and for SpaceX. It is bad news also for the American space program as a whole.
The latest accident is not just bad news for Musk and for SpaceX. It is bad news also for the American space program as a whole. NASA was hoping that SpaceX would be able to send astronauts to the ISS using the Falcon and a new version of the Dragon capsule sometime in 2017. That possibility is now almost certainly gone.
The U.S. Air Force had recently certified the Falcon 9 as able to carry national-security payloads, including GPS, early-warning, and military-communications satellites. This certification was putting huge pressure on the United Launch Alliance consortium (led by Boeing and Lockheed Martin) to cut its high prices for its Delta IV and Atlas V launch vehicles.
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Meanwhile, Congress has ordered the Air Force and NASA to stop buying Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines for the Atlas V. This congressional demand makes sense in the context of Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine — or as much sense as anything coming out of Washington these days — but the executive branch and ULA have responded to it by running around making the-dog-ate-my-homework excuses.
In the purely commercial arena, it was beginning to look as if SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was replacing the European Ariane rocket as the dominant force in the business of sending money-making communication satellites into space. Not only did the Falcon 9’s hardware cost much less than the Ariane’s, but it may also have cost less to insure, and insurance in a major factor in the economics of commercial space transportation.
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But now, instead of a smooth transition to a new era of relatively low-cost space transportation, the U.S. is faced with yet another period of urgent and expensive reworking of its space-access systems. The last time we faced such a problem was after the 1986 Challenger disaster, when we not only lost the use of the Space Shuttle for almost three years, but also lost the use of the heavy-lift Titan IV rocket, which we depended on to launch spy satellites. Our space capabilities had not fully recovered by the time of the first Gulf War in 1991.
In the long run, commercial reusable space-access systems such as the one that Musk and SpaceX are trying to build are the logical way to go. But the June 28 disaster is a reminder of just how hard this Rocket Science stuff really is.
— Taylor Dinerman is the author of Subway Lists and Other Writings from the iPhone Era.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since its initial posting.