SpaceX uses methane and liquid oxygen to fuel the Merlin engines on its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets.
One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is showing up in an unlikely place: the space industry.
A summer surge in Covid-19 patients is diverting liquid oxygen from rocket launch pads to hospitals, leading NASA to announce Friday it will delay the September launch of its next earth-surveillance satellite by a week.
Labor shortages among commercial truck drivers, which must have specialized training to transport some gases such as oxygen, have also compounded the supply bottlenecks, Craig said. Beyond rocketry, liquid oxygen (commonly called LOX) is used in welding and in the production of steel, paper, glass, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. President Gwynne Shotwell sounded the industry alarm this week at a conference in Colorado, calling for anyone with oxygen to spare to contact her. SpaceX uses methane and liquid oxygen to fuel the Merlin engines on its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets. The company’s much larger next-generation rocket, Starship, also uses LOX as a propellant.
“We certainly are going to make sure the hospitals are going to have the oxygen that they need but for anybody who has liquid oxygen to spare, send me an email,” Shotwell said Aug. 24 during a panel discussion at the 36th Space Symposium
Elon Musk, the company’s founder, tweeted Thursday that lean liquid oxygen supplies pose
“a risk, but not yet a limiting factor” for SpaceX’s launches. The company planned.
0 Comments