SpaceX Looks for Late September Flight for Falcon 9 and Dragon

Photo caption: Flight hardware for the inaugural launch of Falcon 9 rocket undergoing final integration in the hangar at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. Components include: Dragon spacecraft qualification unit (left), second stage with Merlin Vacuum engine (center), first stage with nine Merlin 1C engines (right). (Credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is beginning to assemble components for its second Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, eying a late September launch date for a crucial test of its Dragon cargo freighter.

Spaceflight Now reports that the schedule depends upon progress in preparing the Dragon capsule for flight:

SpaceX is reconsidering the duration of the Dragon demonstration flight, which was slated to last three orbits, or approximately five hours.

“There’s a slight debate internally,” Musk said. “It will be somewhere between one and three orbits. We haven’t made a firm decision on that point.”

The Dragon’s heat shield will also be put to the test during re-entry. The capsule’s blunt end is coated with phenolic impregnated carbon ablator, a resistant insulator used by NASA’s Stardust mission that returned comet samples to Earth.

The ablator, called PICA-X for short, was tested inside an arc jet laboratory at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The website also reports that SpaceX is looking into two problems that occurred during the inaugural launch of Falcon 9 last month. One was a roll torque that imparted a twisting movement on the rocket during launch. The other issue was a brief restart of the second stage engine in orbit that did not go as hoped.

Musk said there is an easy fix for the roll torque. He is not saying much about the engine restart.