Trump Supporters Photobomb Dragon Recovery
Better screengrab: Trump supporters in power boats & a sailboard with a big campaign banner within mere feet of the #DM2 spacecraft with an active propulsion system leaking highly poisonous fuel. Can't wait to see their cellphone videos and selfies. #idiots #MakeSpaceGreatAgain pic.twitter.com/gdN7awomBK
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 2, 2020
.@KeithCowing follows up, asking if they won't splashdown so close to shore.
Bridenstine: "We have a number of different options but you're absolutely right, we can do better … that capsule was in the water for a good period of time and the boats just made a bee line for it."
— Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) August 2, 2020
"What is not nominal is to have people approach a spacecraft with Nitrogen Tetroxide and we need to better inform people about that in the future "@JimBridenstine
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 2, 2020
They care so little that they’re making tweets and blog posts about it as quickly as their fingers can type. Thanks for the signal boost!
Yes, they definitely need to have more security next time, and to land further offshore to make it harder for the undesirables to reach it. But it also appeared that one of the parachutes draped itself over the capsule on landing. I wonder if that is a possible safety issue.
14 U.S.C. § 89.
“(a) The Coast Guard may make inquiries, examinations, inspections, searches, seizures, and arrests upon the high seas and waters over which the United States has jurisdiction, for the prevention, detection, and suppression of violations of laws of the United States.”
The Coast Guard released a statement about the incident yesterday which is somewhat vague. They said that because the DM-2 splashdown was more than 12 nautical-miles offshore they were not authorized to create an official safety zone which would have given them legal authority over boaters in violation of entering the area. All they were able to do was put out warnings in advance to avoid the area. And on the day of the splashdown an 87-foot patrol boat and a 45-foot response boat “established a physical presence” in order to “discourage boaters from entering within 10 nautical miles of the NASA designated splashdown zone”. This would infer that both boats were stationed 10 miles from the splashdown location, and presumably stayed there the entire time.
They did not say if they made any attempts to stop people, although the statement infers that they did not. They did say however that the Coast Guard does have legal authority to board vessels and enforce laws outside of the 12 nautical-mile rule, but that it would have required “a massive undertaking of resources to engage each boat that came into the area and suspend their voyage or otherwise escort them out”
Huh? In the overhead shot of the splashdown area I counted about twenty boats surrounding the capsule. Twenty small pleasure boats overwhelmed the Coast Guard? Again I realize that patrolling a 10-mile radius of ocean is like herding kittens, and keeping that large of an area completely clear would require a lot of resources. But back to my point in my other post, it can’t be that hard to keep for example a one-mile radius clear. In spite of being busy with recovery, the SpaceX boats were able to at least shoo the pleasure boats a hundred yards or so away. Surely a small Coast Guard patrol boat could have pushed them back even further.
The Coast Guard statement says that prior to the splashdown they “worked closely with NASA and SpaceX to plan the recovery of the Dragon crew in a way that prioritized the safety of the boating public and those involved in the recovery operations”. If so then it was during those discussions that the ball got dropped. My guess is that the discussions didn’t go into much detail, SpaceX and NASA probably assumed that the Coast Guard knew what it was doing (à la Boeing software). If they had known that the Coast Guard only planned to warn people and did not intend to actually try and stop people from reaching the capsule, they may have sought out other resources to assist with security closer to the recovery area. My guess is that is what they will do for the next splashdown.
Exactly. This is lesson learned #1 for managing the landing zone. It will never happen again. Like you say, a couple of Coast Guard small boats could have kept the fishing boats to a safe-away distance.
It’s also a legal matter. On this occasion, the Coast Guard issued a warning about the landing zone, not a exclusion zone. That means the Coast Guard ships had no authority to keep boats out. They just had the authority to warn those boats that they were doing something dangerous or stupid. In the future, I expect the announced area will be a keep out zone, not a safety warning zone. (And, for those who are also reading the similar comments on Ars Technica… Yes. I am using easily understandable rather than technical, legal terms to describe this.)
I think they do have authority to keep people out, in their statement they said they could do that even beyond the 12 mile limit (which isn’t always the exact distance it’s just the standard one). They said the issue was the amount of resources required to do that in a large area.
What they could not do legally in this situation is arrest people for entering the splashdown area or charge them with a crime, since they were not able to designate the area in a way that gives them that authority because of the 12-mile limit. Of course they don’t really need to arrest people and I assume they don’t want to, but it certainly makes enforcement easier if you have that authority, as well as discouragement if people know they can potentially be arrested for going into the restricted area. But even without authority to arrest people I don’t think they would have had any problem keeping people a mile or so from the capsule, if they had simply stationed at least one of the normal small patrol boats there like they do in the coastal areas near the launch pad on launches. Instead it seems that they just parked two ships 10 miles out and hoped that people would comply with the warnings.
The Coast Guard has a whole lot of authority outside the 12 mile limit, but it mostly applies to US owned and operated vehicles. Since boats sailing out of the Florida coast were the problem, the 12 mile limit shouldn’t be an issue. But they also have to announce exclusion areas before they can enforce them. If they don’t declare one (and it looks like they didn’t), then they can’t do nearly as much to warn off sightseers and other idiots.
If the USCG is unable to provide safety and security in the landing zone than turn the job over to the USN. I am sure they would have had no trouble keeping the area secure. All it would have taken was one terrorist to turn that triumph into a tragedy because of the USCG failure to provide security.
And if their excuse is that their authority ends at the 12 mile limit change the landing zone to the Great Lakes were there is no such issue.
I’m not sure what their error ellipse on landing is, but it’s hard to get more than 50 miles away from shore on the Great Lakes. I think they also want to land near Canaveral for operational reasons.
But I don’t think the problem is what the Coast Guard can do, or have the legal authority to do. It’s what they actually did in this case. I think they could have, but did not, declare an exclusion area. That would have allowed them to chase off boats entering the area (well, perhaps only US owned or flagged boats…) What they issued sounds like a warning to mariners, which is more advice than something they can enforce.
It is also worth noting, as others have pointed out, that the landing was in the Coast Guard’s Eighth District, which covers the north-west Gulf coast of Florida (among other things) rather than the Seventh District, which includes the Atlantic coast of Florida and is used to spaceflight-related work. I’m fairly sure this is the first time the Eighth District ever had to deal with something like this. Let’s give them a chance to figure out the appropriate rules and procedures.
I think it would be a perfect test for the Littoral Combat Ship.
It isn’t clear if those boats violated any laws. The Coast Guard did issue a notice, but it looks like it didn’t announce a formal exclusion zone. (I.e. in effect it said, “Warning: Sailing here could be dangerous” rather than “Do not enter.”) I’m also reminded of a cartoon about someone arguing with a police officer about to ticket his parked car. He’s pointing to a sign next to his car, and saying “How can you give me a ticket? The sign says, `fine for parking here.’ ”
I wonder if hypergolic or any other dangerous material is actually exiting the space craft in an uncontrolled or ‘leaking’ manner, though? Surely not? Not a material we want in the water.
As I understand it, the Endeavour was not leaking or releasing any toxic material. It does look like small amounts of nitrogen tetroxide was detected, in an unpressurized portion of the vehicle after its recovery. But not in dangerous concentrations. If the spacecraft had not safely splashed down, that might have been different. But the gases in question are very reactive, and when exposed to water, they do react very quickly. Fast enough that there would not have been any risk of putting dangerous materials into the water. The dangerous stuff would have reacted with water and turned into non-dangerous stuff almost immediately.
Thanks. I do understand the chemical reactions involved; nitrogen tetroxide plus water results in both nitric and nitrous acids, and likely very small amounts. If I remember my chemistry!
But how in the world could any hypergolic be ‘remaining’ anywhere and exposed to the air or water? These chemicals are all behind multiple valves (or should be, as SX recently discovered).
There is still quite a bit of hypergols in the tanks after splashdown. Yes it is not supposed to leak out, but that doesn’t mean something couldn’t go wrong. It’s deadly, carcinogenic stuff so there is no reason to take a chance. You might remember that on Shuttle landings no one went near the Shuttle until the sniffer people had carefully approached in full hazmat gear and check all around for leaks.
A Dragon 2 shouldn’t be nearly as bad as the Shuttle. The Shuttle used hydrazine in its auxiliary power system, and that was running all the way until landing. Dragon 2 uses hydrazine and NTO for its attitude control thrusters, and those aren’t used after atmospheric entry. (Or somewhere around entry, at the point where aerodynamic forces and stability provide attitude control.) Not that there wouldn’t be some residuals hanging around, but much less than there were for the Shuttle.
It’s pushing the limits of my chemistry, but I’m fairly sure a rocket firing doesn’t burn 100% of the reactants. Probably well over 99% of it, but that’s still not 100%. So after a thruster firing, there would be a small amount unburnt propellent around. On the outside, since the firings were in space, I wouldn’t expect any of that remain on the vehicle. But I think the concern was about trace amounts remaining inside unpressurized portions of the capsule. As for why it doesn’t all burn in the engine or react afterwards, I suspect a some minimum concentration is required for the hypergolic chemicals to burn as opposed to smolder very slowly. Since we’re talking about hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, I guess the concentration required for safety concerns is much lower than the concentration required for actual combustion.
In this particular case the amounts detected were very low, it was well below the threshold for safe crew egress, however since the capsule had already been hoisted safely onto the deck and the astronauts seemed to be in good shape they decided to do a purge just as a precaution even though that meant another fifteen minutes or so for the astronauts in the capsule. I would be interested to know if the levels they detected, even though safe, were higher than they expected, and not knowing the exact cause they preferred to play it safe and get things purged and make sure that the levels did not return which could indicate a leak. That’s the impression that I got from how the scenario played out, but I don’t want to read too much into it, since either way the levels were apparently extremely low.
The nitrogen purge seemed to get things all cleared out. Makes you wonder if on future flights they might just have the purge run automatically at splashdown, or maybe even prior to splashdown since as you said the RCS is no longer needed. Unless there are drawbacks to running a purge if it is not needed. Or possibly it’s not something that the computer can initiate, I noticed that it required a hazmat wearing recovery crew member to perform the purge, although I couldn’t tell if they were opening a valve or just pushing buttons.
Everything leaks. It is a matter of degree. MMH is a carcinogen but the NTO is much much more interesting. Both breakdown in water to various harmless nitrates (eventually). Almost all testing facilities used to have big lagoons to flush their test lines and tanks into with some of the fattest happiest rushes and weeds you ever saw. We are a bit more circumspect in disposal these days.
The chemical chain for NTO decomposition is a bit more problematic. It is an non-equilibrium mixture of various nitrogen oxides. It has a very low vapor pressure so it readily vaporizes. The first thing these oxides do is form nitric acid in the presence of moisture: your lungs, micro cracks in the tanks lines, the sea, etc…
If they follow a typical protocol then the propellant tanks would have been vented during descent to reduce the driving gas pressure and mitigate any leak risk during handling after splash down. That would be a double action: vent then close. A failure in either action would leave the system in a different hazard state.
An active spacecraft, toxic propellent and civilians dropping by. One could think of it as natural selection.
AT NASA we did not call N204 ‘MFRG’ for no reason.
Gwynne Shotwell made it clear that it was the Coast Guard’s responsibility to keep the area clear, it wasn’t the job of SpaceX employees to police the area. I think her point is a valid one, as neither NASA or SpaceX would be criticized for encroachments into the exclusion zone during a launch.
My guess is the Coast Guard didn’t make the adjustment for a splashdown versus the launches which they are more accustomed to patrolling. Yes it’s true as Jim Bridenstine said that a ten mile radius is a big area to keep clear. And encroachments into launch exclusion zones are not unusual. But in any security situation you make sure that at least the much smaller radius near the asset is protected. That’s where the Coast Guard totally failed today, it would be as if during a Shuttle launch they placed resources along the outskirts of the exclusion zone but none near the launch pad. It doesn’t take a fleet of Coast Guard Cutters to do that either, one seaman in a small patrol boat could have easily kept the boats farther away than they were allowed to get today, if they had simply assigned one to accompany the the SpaceX recovery boats and guard the immediate vicinity surrounding the capsule. Since they didn’t, from what I can infer from Gwynne Shotwell’s comments SpaceX did in fact wind up having to police the area near the capsule.
Same crowd that doesn’t wear masks on land.
Why when it was a NASA mission. SpaceX were just providing the ride, nothing else. If it had been a SpaceX one then yes but it wasn’t.
The onus was on NASA to ensure adequate security.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Cheers
Neil
Regarding many boaters surrounding Dragon, this on Flickr which seems to me random people getting too close:
“Support teams and curious recreational boaters arrive at the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020.”
https://www.flickr.com/phot…
full album,
https://www.flickr.com/phot…
Cue the Coast Guard. No excuse for such incursions, for any reason .
Out-gassing fuel didn’t seem to bother officials at the San Diego pier when EFT-1 landed in the Pacific.