Officials said at a Feb. 4 briefing that the delayed opening of one of four parachutes on both the Crew-2 splashdown Nov. 8 and the CRS-24 cargo mission splashdown Jan. 24 could be an artefact of the aerodynamics of those parachute systems, but they will look into it further before the next Dragon missions.
The first inflation:
All four parachutes inflated normally during the Dragon spacecraft’s first two crewed flights in 2020 and 2021. However, when the Crew-2 mission with four men returned to Earth in November 2021, one of the four parachutes took 75 seconds to fully inflate. The spacecraft’s anticipated descent rate was unaffected since the extended parachute still provided some drag.
Following the night landing, NASA and SpaceX conducted a quick but thorough investigation into the problem, concluding that it posed no severe hazard to future spaceflights. The Crew-3 mission launched two days later in a separate Crew Dragon spacecraft. Endurance, the name given to this vehicle, is scheduled to return to Earth in April 2022.
The second time:
A Cargo Dragon spacecraft splashed down on January 24, 2022, after a month-long supply mission to the International Space Station. NASA stated that the untelevised landing was normal, however Space News claimed two days ago that one of the four parachutes failed to deploy on time. The parachute was 63 seconds late in inflating this time. The spacecraft landed safely once more.
Kathy Lueders, NASA’s leader for human spaceflight operations, Steve Stich, NASA’s chief of commercial crew, and Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX senior engineer, all joined a teleconference with reporters on Friday to explain what had happened, what engineers were doing about it, and why NASA and SpaceX were confident in the Crew Dragon vehicle’s safety.
Later, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, suggested that the prior mishaps involved a different version of the parachutes than the Mark 3 parachutes used on the current Dragon spacecraft.
“We see this trailing parachute phenomenon with these enormous ring sail parachutes,” Stich explained. “What we believe — and this is just a hunch at this moment — is that the three other canopies may shade, if you will, one of the other canopies, and it just struggles to inflate at times.” He stated that because this occurred on two consecutive missions, NASA and SpaceX are taking extra time to analyze the parachutes and examine other data from those operations.
