SpaceX’s Riskiest Business
SpaceX’s first attempt to fly astronauts to space and back was, from start to finish, a success. The launch into orbit—seamless. The spacecraft’s arrival at the International Space Station—smoothly done. On return, the capsule, buffeted by billowy parachutes, coasted through the sky, toward the waters off the coast of Florida—a vision of a new era of American spaceflight.
But later, when technicians inspected the capsule up close, they saw something they didn’t like. On the astronauts’ way home, the heat shield, the hardware that protects the capsule as it plunges through the atmosphere, eroded more than SpaceX had expected.
When Nicole Jordan, an engineer at NASA, heard about that, she shivered. Her colleagues at NASA did too. “The hair stood up on the back of their neck,” Jordan told me. “Everybody understood the potential seriousness of a problem.”
Jordan was an intern at the agency in 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry and its crew was killed. Now she’s a mission manager on the program that supports SpaceX’s astronaut flights, and the accident report compiled after Columbia was required reading for her job at Mission Control in Houston. She works alongside other engineers who lived through the tragedy—and, 17 years before humans into space on a regular basis again, but the people behind the effort can never act as if a safe flight is a given.
