Ahead of the California-based company inaugural astronaut launch, a flight known as Demonstration Mission 2 (Demo-2 /DM-2), Falcon 9 rocket has experienced an engine failure less than three minutes after liftoff and shortly before the stage separation was scheduled.
The Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon including its booster B1058 which is an expandable upper stage, a space trunk, and of course the Crew Dragon capsule itself is believed to be at SpaceX's Florida launch and processing facilities already. The two spacecraft will be used for the company's inaugural astronaut launch.
Before the scheduled launch of Falcon 9 on March 18, it was revealed that the last two items to be finalized are the few parachute tests and a whole lot of paperwork and reviews, as well as important but less show-stopping astronaut training. Unluckily, SpaceX has suffered two unforeseen mishaps of varying degrees in the last couple of days that guaranteed to impact Crew Dragon's astronaut launch debut schedule.
The first one was the engine failure of the Falcon 9 on March 18. For the first time, SpaceX launch operators have not reported any landing burn-related call-outs which is an indicator that something was seriously wrong. The company acknowledged a few minutes later that the booster had been lost, maybe it was the lacking propellant is needed to attempt a landing.
It was the Merlin 1D engine's first in-flight failure to be recorded in history. The other seemingly similar one was during in 2012 when one of the original Falcon 9 V1.0's rocket's nine Merlin 1C engines also suffered an in-flight failure.
The anomaly is believed to be caused by the fact that the booster was SpaceX's pathfinder for a fifth-flight reusability milestone, which means that it is the most reused rocket booster that was ever launched. NASA has ordered all of the Crew Dragon missions to launch on the new Falcon 9 rockets in hopes that it will mitigate direct outcomes between the Starlink L6 anomaly and astronaut launches.
Nevertheless, NASA requires SpaceX to complete its internal failure review and implement changes before it's allowed to launch astronauts from the space agency.
Investigation on the engine failure may take weeks or less, but it could also take months to fix the problems that allowed the engine failure of Merlin 1D.
Another problem that may cause the delay of the astronauts' launch is when just before the parachute testing, SpaceX has already encountered some problems.
The test article suspended beneath the helicopter became unstable and as such, the parachute did not deploy its deployment sequence.
This incident is not the failure of the parachute but with the test article that was lost and fortunately, no one was injured.
Ultimately, the anomaly in Falcon 9 and the failed testing of Crew Dragon parachute could substantially delay SpaceX's Demo-2 astronaut launch debut.
Still, the targeted schedule for the launch is in mid-to-late of this year's May. It's reasonable to expect changes on the schedule in the next four to six weeks.
