Updated 9 a.m. Eastern with Northrop Grumman statement.
WASHINGTON — Potential damage to a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft has led NASA to revise the manifest of an upcoming cargo Dragon mission to the International Space Station.
NASA said late March 5 that it was “assessing potential mission impacts” to the next Cygnus mission, scheduled for June, after workers found damage to the shipping container for the spacecraft’s pressurized cargo module when it was transported to the launch site in Florida. “Mission teams will inspect the module during the coming days to assess whether there is any damage and any associated impacts to schedule,” NASA said at the time.
At a March 7 briefing about the upcoming Crew-10 mission to the station, NASA officials said it was too soon yet to know if the issue would delay the launch of the mission, designated NG-22 and currently scheduled for June. “I expect that we’ll have to have some follow-on discussions and assessments to determine if there is spacecraft damage or any impacts to the overall mission schedule,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program manager, at the briefing.
“The shipping container for our Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) for the NG-22 resupply mission was damaged during a commercial shipping accident as it went to the launch site,” Northrop Grumman spokesperson Dan Leone told SpaceNews. “We are inspecting the PCM to assess its condition and will ensure NASA is aware of any impact to the mission that is currently scheduled for launch in June.”
The NG-22 mission was originally scheduled to launch in February, she said, but was delayed by an avionics issue with the spacecraft that neither NASA nor Northrop Grumman had widely publicized.
The potential for additional delays in NG-22 led NASA to revise the cargo manifest for the next Dragon cargo spacecraft to the ISS, SpX-32 and scheduled for late April. NASA said it will remove some of the science experiments that were to go on the mission and instead fly food and other consumables.
“The real challenge was in just the large movement of our cargo missions,” Weigel said, adding that if NASA had known earlier of the delays in NG-22 it would have added more consumables to cargo missions launching last fall.
NASA did not disclose how many research payloads would be removed from the next SpaceX cargo mission to be replaced by food. The previous cargo Dragon mission, SpX-31 in November, carried 961 kilograms of crew supplies and 917 kilograms of science investigations. SpX-30 in March 2024 carried 545 kilograms of crew supplies and 1,135 kilograms of science investigations.
Another change is a shortened handover between the new Crew-10 mission and departing Crew-9 mission at the station. Crew-10 is scheduled to launch March 12 and arrive at the station early March 13. NASA is planning to have Crew-9 undock from the station as soon as March 16, shorter than the typical handover of five or more days between missions.
Weigel said the shortened handover was designed to conserve consumables during that time when there are 11 people on the station. “What that really does for us is it just opens up more undock opportunities, so we have a chance to find a good weather opportunity for undock to minimize how long we have additional crew on board.”
