Oxygen shortages could hurt space companies
High hospital admission rates in many parts of the U.S. due to the COVID-19 pandemic are putting pressure on liquid oxygen supplies. In the last few weeks, hospitals in Florida have even warned that they were running dangerously low on the crucial gas.
The shortage is having an unforeseen impact on another industry though — spaceflight. Liquid oxygen (LOX) is a crucial component in rocket fuel, and shortages here on Earth have delayed launches and may force high-flying space companies to scale back their efforts this year.
“We’re actually going to be impacted this year with the lack of liquid oxygen for launch,” Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said during a panel in August at the 36th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We certainly are going to make sure hospitals have the liquid oxygen they need.” She added, jokingly, “[If] anybody has liquid oxygen to spare, send me an email.”
On Friday, Aug. 20, NASA put a hold on a planned Aug. 23 satellite launch to save liquid oxygen for COVID patients who desperately need it. The NASA and United Launch Alliance, a joint effort between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has moved the liftoff date for their Landsat 9 satellite to no earlier than Sept. 23.
“The medical and space-launch industries are two of the biggest markets for pure oxygen, and when one needs a crisis-level amount, the other suffers. Thus, the high demand for medical LOX [liquid oxygen] is causing NASA and private space companies to delay or scale back their launches,” says space expert and co-founder of Revenue Geeks Adam Wood. “There is currently no replacement for the cutting-edge, powerful engines utilized by launch providers, which are sometimes the most expensive components of a rocket.”
“It's not only the quantity of oxygen accessible across the country: [Shipping] logistics, which were already severely hampered by the epidemic, are producing a bottleneck,” Wood says.
Transporting liquid oxygen isn’t like transporting toilet paper. It’s highly flammable, has to be kept extremely cold during transport, and even requires special trucks for transports, Rich Gottwald of the Compressed Gas Association told Axios.
The liquid oxygen shortage has put a damper on the private space industry’s high-profile year. On July 20, Jeff Bezos went to space on one of his very own Blue Origin rockets. Another member of the wealthy space crew, Sir Richard Branson took his craft, VSS Unity, up into space on July 11 of this year, and is now facing an FAA probe into a deviation on the ship’s return to Earth. Not to be outdone, in March, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched four astronauts up to the International Space Station in a mission dubbed Crew Dragon Crew 2.
