Sometime next year, SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean and end recoveries of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida.
This will allow SpaceX to make changes to the way it brings Dragons back to Earth and eliminate the risk, however tiny, that a piece of debris from the ship's trunk section might fall on someone and cause damage, injury, or death.
"After five years of splashing down off the coast of Florida, we've decided to shift Dragon recovery operations back to the West Coast," said Sarah Walker, SpaceX's director of Dragon mission management.
Public safety
In the past couple of years, landowners have discovered debris from several Dragon missions on their property, and the fragments all came from the spacecraft's trunk, an unpressurized section mounted behind the capsule as it carries astronauts or cargo on flights to and from the International Space Station.
SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded human-rated version of Dragon started flying in 2019, SpaceX moved splashdowns to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company's refurbishment and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida included a faster handover 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 trunk after the deorbit burn, allowing the trunk to fall into the Pacific. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the trunk before the deorbit burn. This meant that the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and lacks a propulsion system, usually takes a few weeks or a few months to fall back into the atmosphere and doesn't have control of where or when it reenters.
Air resistance from the rarefied upper atmosphere gradually slows the trunk's velocity enough to drop it out of orbit, and the amount of aerodynamic drag the trunk sees is largely determined by fluctuations in solar activity.
SpaceX and NASA, which funded a large portion of the Dragon spacecraft's development, initially determined the trunk would entirely burn up when it reentered the atmosphere and would pose no threat of surviving reentry and causing injuries or damaging property. However, that turned out to not be the case.
In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that departed the International Space Station fell on the property 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.
These 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 the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC.
Pieces of a Dragon spacecraft also fell over Colorado last year, and a farmer in Australia found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land in 2022.
"SpaceX is unaware of any structure damage or injuries caused by these debris," the company said in an update posted on its website. As a temporary measure, SpaceX and NASA have agreed to pause disposal of decommissioned scientific instrument boxes and other relatively large items from the space station inside Dragon's trunk because this additional hardware could cause more debris to survive reentry and reach the ground.
But to completely eliminate any chance of damage or injuries, SpaceX officials, with NASA's agreement, have decided to keep the Dragon spacecraft's trunk attached to the capsule during the deorbit burn on future missions.
"To date, the majority of that trunk debris has reentered over unpopulated ocean areas, but the fact that any debris reenters indicates to us that we need to draw a different conclusion from that initial analysis," Walker said.
This means SpaceX can no longer splash down off the coast of Florida because the trajectory would bring debris from the trunk down over populated areas in the United States or Mexico.
When recoveries shift to the West Coast, the Dragon capsule will fire its Draco thrusters to slow down, and then once on course for reentry, release the trunk to burn up in the atmosphere on a similar trajectory. Any debris from the trunk that doesn't burn up will impact the Pacific Ocean while the capsule deploys parachutes for a slow-speed splashdown.
"What we'll do is we'll implement a software change to complete the deorbit burn before jettisoning the trunk, like we did with Dragon 1, and then the trunk will intentionally land safely uprange in an unpopulated area of the ocean again," Walker said.
This won't happen immediately. The next several crew missions will continue splashing down off the coast of Florida, including SpaceX's Crew-8 mission scheduled to return from the International Space Station next month. SpaceX is working with NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration to identify the precise locations of recovery zones in the Pacific Ocean. The goal is to have all this in place to allow Dragons to start splashing down in the Pacific by the middle of next year.
“We will eventually land all Dragons on the West Coast," Walker said.
Repositioning assets
After West Coast splashdowns resume, astronauts and equipment returning to Earth from the space station will be flown by helicopter back to shore in California, rather than to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"To make this change possible, we'll move a Dragon recovery vessel to the Pacific sometime next year, and we'll use SpaceX facilities in the Port of Long Beach (near Los Angeles) for our initial post-flight processing," Walker said.
SpaceX has two recovery ships outfitted to retrieve Dragon capsules at sea. Each vessel has a lifting crane to hoist Dragons out of the water, medical facilities for astronauts, and a helipad to quickly transport crews and cargo back to shore. With the first-generation Dragon spacecraft that flew between 2010 and 2020, NASA didn't require such a rapid return of cargo to shore. NASA set up labs and receiving facilities at Kennedy Space Center to process scientific experiments as they come back to Earth on Dragon.
"NASA gave us new requirements... for even tighter return timelines, enhanced science capability, and that was all factored in when we were designing and building the whole system in Florida," Walker said.
She said SpaceX is looking at how it can replicate these rapid return capabilities once Dragons start splashing down off the West Coast. "That's (what) we're solving right now, is how to do that here on the West Coast when we initially designed it all in Florida."
The change in Dragon's reentry profile might also have a modest impact on the spacecraft's overall performance. With the trunk attached, the capsule's thrusters will need to burn more propellant for the deorbit burn. It wasn't immediately clear whether this might affect how much cargo Dragon can transport back to Earth.
There is one additional important advantage to shifting to West Coast splashdowns.
“One benefit of the move to the West Coast is much better weather," Walker said. "We have a number of sites in Florida, that we feel like we’re sometimes threading hurricanes a lot. When we look at the flight rules for wind, rain, wave height, all of the criteria that determine our flight rules for return, we actually saw that the West Coast sites that we’re looking at have much better weather, which allows us to have much better return availability.”
