A NASA spokesperson clarified in a statement on Thursday how this change factors into the agency’s ability to fly its astronauts to the space station.
“NASA’s Commercial Crew Program does not specify a specific launch pad for crew rotation missions and maintains a launch capability at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,” the spokesperson said. “If needed, SpaceX could still support NASA crewed launch operations from pad 39A in the future.”
20:37 “We’re going to do some maintenance on the crew arm. I think the general plan is we’ll keep the crew arm on the ground after we do those repairs, but we’ll be ready to put the crew arm back up again if we need to go back and launch crew from pad 39A.”
23:40 “In the timeframe it takes us to get Falcon and Dragon ready we can be ready to get the pad operational.”
Perhaps he chose to do that because they realized some people had been assuming SpaceX were removing their redundancy of crew launch pad options? It seems that NSF probably did assume that: TWIS 2026-02-07 (3:33 - 4:17).
Gerstenmaier elaborated on this during the 2026-02-09 Crew-12 Prelaunch News Conference.
20:37 “We’re going to do some maintenance on the crew arm. I think the general plan is we’ll keep the crew arm on the ground after we do those repairs, but we’ll be ready to put the crew arm back up again if we need to go back and launch crew from pad 39A.”
23:40 “In the timeframe it takes us to get Falcon and Dragon ready we can be ready to get the pad operational.”
Perhaps he chose to do that because they realized some people had been assuming SpaceX were removing their redundancy of crew launch pad options? It seems that NSF probably did assume that: TWIS 2026-02-07 (3:33 - 4:17).