An oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of the Crew-13 Dragon spacecraft has pushed NASA and SpaceX off their planned launch date to the International Space Station, and there’s no new one on the calendar yet.
Engineers found the leak during routine spacecraft processing ahead of launch. Not during a countdown, not during a fueling test. Routine processing.
That matters more than it sounds. An oxidizer is the chemical that helps fuel burn inside a rocket or spacecraft propulsion system, which makes it a necessary part of the vehicle’s ability to maneuver. A Dragon that can’t maneuver reliably is a Dragon that can’t rendezvous with a space station or come home on its own terms.
What happens between now and a new date
NASA and SpaceX teams are running additional testing and reviewing data from the spacecraft. Any repairs or other required work get finished before Dragon is cleared to fly.
NASA hasn’t announced a new target launch date. The agency and SpaceX said they’ll announce one once the testing, the data reviews and any necessary work on the spacecraft are done. That’s the whole schedule right now, and it’s worth reading the order of those three items carefully: the date follows the work, not the other way around.
Four astronauts, four agencies, one Expedition
NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will serve as commander and pilot of Crew-13, respectively.
Flying with them are CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, both mission specialists.
Once they reach the station, the four join Expedition 75, the long-duration crew that handles research, maintenance and other operations aboard the orbiting laboratory.
About two weeks before the flight, the Crew-13 astronauts begin quarantine at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. It’s a low-tech precaution with a specific purpose: reducing the chance that a crew member gets sick right before traveling to space. And it’s one more piece of the timeline that has to be re-clocked every time a launch date moves.
The hardware, unchanged
When the mission is cleared, Crew-13 rides SpaceX’s Dragon, the spacecraft built to carry astronauts to and from orbit.
Dragon launches on a Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Nothing about that configuration has changed. What’s changed is that one of its tanks leaked before anyone strapped in, which is the version of this problem you want to have.
