NASA advisers say Musk’s SpaceX could put lives at risk
WHEN Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea - keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.
But the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff - while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this manoeuvre, known as “load-and-go,” could set off an explosion.
The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labelled load-and-go a “potential safety risk.” A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was “contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years.”
Concerns at NASA over the astronauts’ safety hit a high point when, in September 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up while it was being fuelled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt, but the payload, a multimillion-dollar satellite, was lost. The question on many people’s minds at NASA instantly became: What if astronauts were on board?
The fuelling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science.
In this culture clash, SpaceX is the daring, Silicon Valleystyle outfit led by a man who literally sells flamethrowers on the Internet and wholeheartedly embraces risk. Musk is reigniting interest in space with acrobatic rocket-booster landings and eye-popping stunts, such as launching a Tesla convertible toward Mars.
His sensibilities have collided with a bureaucratic system at NASA that has been accused of being overly conservative in the wake of two shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts.
The concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing’s contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fuelling was rejected by NASA in the past because “we never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you’re loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation.”
SpaceX supporters say tradition and old ways of thinking can be the enemy of innovation and thwart efforts to open the frontier of space.
Greg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump’s NASA transition team.
“NASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organisation,” he said. “But every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, ‘But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue’- and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue.” — Washington Post
NASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organisation. But every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, ‘But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue’- and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue. – Greg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California