Any detail is essential to shout pause and restructure from the beginning the launch of a spaceship. Much more if it is manned by four astronauts who are on their way to the International Space Station (ISS).
That’s what he did SpaceX with the launch of his Crew Dragon Endurancewhich was propelled by a rocket Falcon-9 of the trade company association Elon Musk with NASA.
It seems unusual and insignificant, but from the control room one of the SpaceX specialists saw a human hair in one of the hatches. The mission, which thankfully wasn’t cancelled, was delayed and cost a lot of money by retooling part of this release from scratch.
According to what Gizmodo reviews, this eventuality occurred on the morning of October 5 of this year, during the launch of the Crew 5 mission.
A total of four astronauts were ready to blast off into space when the keen eye of one of the engineers spotted the human hair on the latch seal as the hatch was closed.
They called this human hair FOD (Foreign Object Debri) term used to name strange or unusual objects that break into the middle of a space mission.
A hair can trigger a catastrophe
The fact that this hair has been called a FOD is reason enough to set off alarm bells. It happens that with these situations you do not know what can happen.
And when you’re sending people or payload into space, propelled by a rocket that weighs tons and undergoes a brutal combustion and explosion process, there’s no room for improvisation.
In those cases, you have to activate the protocol, stop everything, clean and test that everything is working in order to continue.
Gizmodo He reports that the rig team calmly reopened the ship’s hatch, removed the offending strand, and conducted another inspection. They cleaned once more thoroughly and closed the hatch for the second and last time.
“Something like hair, depending on its size and orientation, can result in a leak path,” said John Posey, NASA principal engineer for Crew Dragon.