NASA
Sometime next year, SpaceX will begin returning the Dragon crew and cargo capsules to landing sites in the Pacific Ocean and will complete the recovery of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida.
This will allow SpaceX to make changes to the way Dragons are brought back to Earth, and eliminate the risk, however small, of a piece of debris from the ship's trunk falling on someone and causing damage, injury or death.
“After five years of being grounded off the coast of Florida, we have decided to move the Dragon recovery operation back to the West Coast,” said Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX.
Public safety
In recent years, landowners have discovered debris from various Dragon missions on their property. The debris all came from the spacecraft’s trunk, a non-pressurized section mounted behind the capsule that carries astronauts or cargo on flights to and from the International Space Station.
SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to landing sites in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded version of Dragon began human flight in 2019, SpaceX moved the landing sites to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company’s renovation and launch facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida include faster transfer of astronauts and time-sensitive cargo back to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.
The old version of Dragon, known as Dragon 1, separated its hull after a deorbit burn, allowing the hull to fall into the Pacific Ocean. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the hull before the deorbit burn. This meant that the hull would remain in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The hull, which is made of composite materials and has no propulsion system, typically takes a few weeks to a few months to reenter the atmosphere, and it has no control over where or when it reenters.
The drag of the thin upper atmosphere causes the trunk to gradually decrease in speed, causing it to fall out of its orbit around the sun. The amount of aerodynamic drag experienced by the trunk is largely determined by fluctuations in solar activity.
SpaceX and NASA, which funded much of the development of the Dragon spacecraft, initially determined that the fuselage would burn up completely upon reentry and would not pose a threat to reentry survival or cause injury or property damage. However, that turned out not to be the case.
In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that had launched from the International Space Station fell onto the grounds of a “glamping” resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.
The events followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-pound piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined in February that the debris had fallen from space, and SpaceX employees arrived at the farm earlier this month to retrieve the wreckage, CBC reported.
Last year, pieces of a Dragon spacecraft also fell in Colorado, and in 2022, a farmer in Australia found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land.
