Real space travel news this week: NASA and SpaceX have pushed the Crew-13 launch to the International Space Station past its September 12 target, after engineers found an oxidizer leak in the Dragon capsule’s propulsion system during routine prelaunch processing. The leaking chemical is nitrogen tetroxide, the oxidizer half of the hypergolic pair that powers Dragon’s eighteen Draco thrusters — mix it with the fuel, monomethylhydrazine, and the two ignite on contact, no spark plug required. Handy in orbit. Less handy when it’s dripping on a launch pad.
Repairs are expected to take two to four weeks, which bumps the flight to “no earlier than late September.” Once it does go up, Crew-13 will carry NASA’s Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Roscosmos’s Sergey Teteryatnikov, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Joshua Kutryk, who’ll become the first Canadian to fly a long-duration mission on a commercial crew vehicle. That’s a genuinely big deal buried under a very unglamorous cause: a fuel leak nobody wanted to find two weeks before launch.
We’ll admit it stings our professional pride a little. Somewhere out there, actual engineers are delaying an actual rocket over actual propellant chemistry, while we’re over here “selling” space tickets for flights that don’t have a launch pad, a capsule, or a drop of nitrogen tetroxide to leak in the first place. Say what you want about our business model, but our safety record is spotless — it’s hard to have an oxidizer leak when you’ve never purchased any oxidizer.
Anyway, if you were holding your breath for late September, hold it a little longer — NASA says the new date is still being worked out. We’ll keep watching, mostly because tracking real space travel news is more interesting than restocking our nonexistent fleet.
Fictional tickets, real delays. Book none of it with us.