Elon Musk‘s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX reportedly lost ground control for at least an hour during the Polaris Dawn mission in September which included the first-ever private spacewalk.
What Happened: The loss of ground control was caused by a power outage at a California facility of SpaceX, according to a report by Reuters, which cited three people familiar with the matter.
The SpaceX mission control was unable to command its Dragon spacecraft in orbit during the outage but the vehicle remained safe and maintained some communication with the ground with the help of the company’s Starlink satellite network, the report added.
The power outage triggered by a power surge disabled the mission headquarters in Hawthorne and also hit servers that host procedures meant to overcome an outage and stopped the company from transferring mission control to a backup facility in Florida, the report said.
Reuters, however, couldn’t determine if the company informed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about the outage. However, as per one of the agency’s sources, the company did notify NASA while adding that the problem has been resolved and will not be an issue in future missions.
As per present regulations, private space missions are not regulated by U.S. law and private operators need not disclose mishaps in orbit owing to a moratorium approved by Congress in 2004, Reuters noted.
Reuters could also not determine the exact time and duration of the outage. However, as per two of the agency’s sources, it happened before the planned spacewalk and lasted at least an hour. However, the astronauts were trained to control the spacecraft themselves in the event they lost contact with the ground, the report noted.
Prior to the Polaris Dawn crew’s launch into space, Musk had said in a post on social media platform X that it was “triple-checking everything” to ensure there was nothing more it could do for crew safety.
Why It Matters: The five-day Polaris Dawn mission included a spacewalk carried out by private astronauts including billionaire and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman. President-elect Donald Trump nominated Isaacman to be administrator of NASA earlier this month. The nomination must be confirmed by the Senate before Isaacman is appointed.
As part of the mission, Isaacman and fellow crew member Sarah Gillis separately exited SpaceX‘s Dragon spacecraft into the vacuum of space at an altitude of 435 miles (700 km) on Sept. 12, marking the first-ever private spacewalk.
While space agency NASA routinely conducts extravehicular activities with government astronauts, no commercial player or civilians attempted it before, making Polaris a landmark mission for SpaceX and commercial spaceflight companies.
Trump in November named Musk to co-lead a government efficiency commission aimed at bringing down government bureaucracy, slashing excess regulations, cutting waste expenditures, and restructuring federal agencies.
The billionaire is likely to further slash regulations in the private space exploration sector in his new role given that he has previously slammed the FAA for delaying SpaceX missions and even called for the resignation of the agency’s leadership.
In September, Musk called for “radical reform” at the FAA to enable SpaceX’s vision for taking humans to Mars. “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!,” Musk wrote in a post on X.
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Photo courtesy: NASA/SpaceX
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