Supercluster by David W. Brown, Erik Kuna, Pauline Acalin, Jenny Hautmann and John Kraus 4/4/2023
By the time I met Stuart Keech for an exclusive interview in a conference room at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California, he had already launched astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a Dragon crew capsule and seen them through flight. Concurrently, a second Falcon 9 rocket carrying a flotilla of Starlink satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Dragon docked with the space station, and impossibly, it seemed, there was still another launch to go. Two Intelsat communications satellites were set to fly from Cape Canaveral, and in perfect SpaceX fashion, would coincide within ten seconds of Dragon opening its hatch and feeding astronauts to the station. It had been a long day, and had a long way to go.
Keech is the senior director of Dragon Engineering, and as such, is the man in charge of keeping America in the human spaceflight business. (Previously, he was director of Dragon Propulsion.) Dragon is the only way astronauts can get to the space station from U.S. soil, and with the proliferation of issues plaguing Russia’s Soyuz capsules, might soon be the only way for anyone at all to travel there.
In a matter of days, the company will fly the Starship Super Heavy rocket for the first time. The sleek silver ship and its booster, the latter taller than the Statue of Liberty, are both entirely reusable, with Starship designed for orbital refueling. It is the sort of rocket you imagine NASA would have been building all this time, but hasn’t—a rocket designed for the future, making its orbital launch a turning point in human spaceflight: at last, a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts not only to the moon and the Lunar surface, but also to Mars. It will be able to carry Starlink satellite nodes in much greater numbers, as well as Starshield, the Defense Department counterpart to Starlink. In addition, Starship is theoretically capable of point-to-point flights to different places on Earth, which again, is of great interest to the Defense Department for moving large amounts of cargo very quickly. NASA’s robotic space science program is also considering the potential of Starship for launching heavier robotic spacecraft on new, and sometimes direct, trajectories.
No part of NASA, the American military, or human exploration can achieve their loftiest ambitions without Starship’s success. It is, in short, the sort of quantum leap that was the Apollo program itself.
In terms of sheer splash, this might make Dragon and Falcon 9 seem obsolete or destined for scrapyards and museums. But when you walk onto the shop floor at SpaceX Headquarters, you realize immediately that not only is Dragon still the backbone of human spaceflight, but that it’s just getting started. After crossing through the cube farms of engineers and others—Elon Musk’s desk is nondescript, one among many—you enter a literal spaceship factory, and hanging above, outside mission control, is the very first Dragon cargo capsule ever flown. It is scorched all around, having survived launch, docking, reentry, and splashdown. And there, on its side, is a tiny testament to the SpaceX style of forward-thinking. They put a window in the cargo craft. One day, they were going to fly people. They succeeded in 2019.
“The whole world sees Starship as SpaceX’s next thing, and I'm responsible for the Dragon program that right now is the American spaceflight program,” says Keech, a youthful, affable engineer who made time to chat despite an unbelievably busy schedule. “It could be soon eclipsed by something like Starship that’s also going to be flying humans to space, but I think that the mission statement for Dragon is to continue to expand the envelope of of human flight in low Earth orbit.”
Even after Starship gets its space legs in the next few years, SpaceX will be mounting increasingly ambitious and unexpected missions for Dragon—missions that NASA has no other way to achieve.
Keech had awakened at two in the morning before the Crew 5 launch for a meeting with NASA to talk about the weather. When launching astronauts, it wasn’t enough to have a clear, beautiful day over Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Dragon would fly. Worst-case scenarios also demanded attention.
“We were specifically tracking some weather at the stage separation location for Dragon,” he said. “If Dragon aborted off the top of Falcon, we want to make sure it was safe for the crew when the capsule splashed down.” This meant somewhere off the coast of South Carolina. “It’s got to be safe for the astronauts, and for the team that would recover them.”
More:
https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/the-road-dragon-paved-for-starship
