Pad 40 has been the primary Falcon 9 launch site for most of the rocket\u2019s history, while Pad 39A provided a location for crew launches and an augmentation to support SpaceX\u2019s growing launch cadence. But there are signs the Falcon 9 launch cadence, which reached 165 missions last year, may be peaking as the company turns its attention to Starship. And SpaceX has steadily reduced the time it takes to reconfigure Pad 40 between launches, cutting the turnaround time to less than 48 hours.<\/p>\n
If needed, SpaceX officials said they could reinstall the crew arm for Dragon missions launching from Pad 39A.<\/p>\n
Repairs required<\/p>\n
Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said there\u2019s another pressing reason for removing the crew arm at Pad 39A. The bearings that connect the arm to the launch pad\u2019s tower need repairs.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo physically get access to those, the arm needs to be removed,\u201d Gerstenmaier said. \u201cThose bearings have to come out and they have to be reinstalled. We\u2019ll do that work at the Kennedy Space Center. And the intent there is, we don\u2019t need to put the arm back up \u2026 When we get a call-up for a mission and we have to go fly a mission, if it requires that, we have plenty of time to get the arm back up.\u201d<\/p>\n
SpaceX has continued launching Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from Pad 39A amid the nearby construction work to prepare for Starship flights. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t impact our ability to launch from the pad,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.<\/p>\n
That could change as SpaceX begins testing and launching Starships from Kennedy Space Center. Starship launch operations may routinely force the closure of Pad 39A to personnel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe right thing to do is get those bearings replaced in the environment on the ground, make some upgrades to them, and then we\u2019ll be ready to go and put the arm back up when it\u2019s time to go fly, if we need to go fly,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pad 40 has been the primary Falcon 9 launch site for most of the rocket\u2019s history, while Pad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-280045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}