One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is exposure in an unlikely place: the space industry.
A summer surge in COVID-19 patients is diverting LOX from rocket launch pads to hospitals, leading NASA to announce Friday it’ll delay the September launch of its next Earth-surveillance satellite by every week .
Oxygen chilled to its liquid form at -300 F (-184 C) may be a crucial propellant for launch firms like SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and Virgin Orbit. Now, the industry is anticipating launch delays as patients on ventilators take precedence within the commodity gas supply chain.
“People come first,” said Richard Craig, vice chairman of technical and regulatory affairs for the gas Assn., an industry trade group.
While oxygen supplies have grown tighter nationwide thanks to medical use of oxygen, the necessity is most acute in Florida where a surge in COVID-19 infections have filled hospitals.
Some Florida cities, including Orlando and Tampa, have imposed water-use restrictions because some water-treatment plants use oxygen within the sanitizing process.
Labor shortages among commercial truck drivers,who must have specialized training to move some gases like oxygen, have also compounded the availability bottlenecks, Craig said. Beyond rocketry, LOX (commonly called LOX) is employed in welding and within the production of steel, paper, glass, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. President Gwynne Shotwell sounded the industry alarm in the week at a conference in Colorado, calling for anyone with oxygen to spare to contact her. SpaceX uses methane and LOX 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 getting to confirm the hospitals are getting to have the oxygen that they have except for anybody who has LOX to spare, send me an email,” Shotwell said Aug. 24 during a discussion at the 36th Space Symposium.
Elon Musk, the company’s founder, tweeted Thursday that lean LOX supplies pose “a risk, but not yet a limiting factor” for SpaceX’s launches. the corporate planned to launch 4,800 pounds of food and other supplies to the International space platform on Sunday and a batch of its Starlink satellites next month.
SpaceX launched 26 rockets last year and plans to surpass that total in 2021, even with a two-month hiatus from mid-June to mid-August, Sarah Walker, the company’s director of Dragon mission management, said Friday at a NASA press conference before the cargo launch. Hawthorne-based SpaceX has completed 20 launches this year “with more to return ,” Walker said. “The pace is extremely quick.”
The tight oxygen supply in Florida “is directly due to the amount of COVID patients being treated within the state,” Craig said, calling the state “an area of concern.”
NASA and therefore the United Launch Alliance, a venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., said that the launch of Landsat 9, a surveillance satellite that monitors global climate change , are going to be delayed by every week to Sept. 23 due to constraints facing nitrogen supplier Airgas Inc. ULA will launch the satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard its Atlas V rocket.
“Current pandemic demands for medical LOX have impacted the delivery of the needed nitrogen supply to Vandenberg,” NASA said Friday during a statement. ULA uses nitrogen to check the rocket before launch and for its countdown sequence.
A spokesman for Air Liquide’s Airgas, one among the most important U.S. industrial gas suppliers, said the corporate is “resolutely committed to making sure optimal support to its customers and is focusing all available resources to satisfy the requested demand of consumers for medical oxygen during the pandemic.”
Some gas producers have begun moving oxygen, which is produced at dozens of plants nationwide, from Texas to Florida, said Craig, the gas association executive. Most LOX is distributed 200 to 300 miles from a production site, but the pandemic has created supply-chain distortions in order that producers are shipping oxygen farther than in normal times, he said.
“What happens is that sometimes supply chains are often like balloons — you squeeze in one area and it’ll change form ,” Craig said.