Fresh from a 64-day test flight to the International Space Station with astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, SpaceX’s first man-rated Crew Dragon spaceship is back at Cape Canaveral for inspections, refurbishments and upgrades before flying back to the station with a four – person crew next spring.
The crew capsule – named “Endeavor” by Hurley and Behnken – arrived at Port Canaveral aboard SpaceX’s “Go Navigator” recovery ship on August 7 after sailing from the Gulf of Mexico, where the Dragon spaceship sailed under parachutes. August 2 south of Pensacola, Florida.
The splashdown supported a successful demonstration flight to the International Space Station. The test flight, referred to as Demo-2, was the first Crew Dragon mission with astronauts on board. NASA plans to check data from the Demo-2 mission before the Crew Dragon formally certifies for regular flights for crew rotation to the space station earlier this year.
SpaceX and NASA personnel aboard the recovery ship helped Hurley and Behnken escape from the spacecraft after it was lifted onto the ship. As the astronauts returned to Houston by air, SpaceX’s recovery crew returned to Port Canaveral on the east coast of Florida, where engineers and technicians were waiting to transfer the Crew Dragon spacecraft to a processing facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force. Station.
SpaceX has built a new Crew Dragon spaceship for the first operational crew rotation flight to the space station this fall. That mission, known as Crew-1, will carry NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi on a roughly six-month mission to the station.
The second regular Crew Dragon flight is set for launch as soon as next March. Earlier this year, SpaceX and NASA agreed to re-fly the Crew Dragon from the Demo-2 test flight on the Crew-2 mission next year.
SpaceX is under contract to fly six of these “post-certification missions” for NASA through the mid-2020s. NASA has a similar contract with Boeing for six flights for crew rotation on the Starliner crew capsule, which is yet to launch on a test flight with astronauts.
SpaceX will upgrade the Crew Dragon spaceship in a facility known as Area 59 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Once used to prepare Air Force GPS navigation satellites for launch, the Area 59 site is now under SpaceX management for the Crew Dragon program.
While SpaceX’s past space station cargo missions with an earlier Dragon design ended with splashdowns in the Pacific coast of California, managers moved the proceeds of Crew Dragon flights to locations in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida , closer to the redevelopment facility at Cape Canaveral. The Demo-2 mission crashes in the Gulf of Mexico due to concerns about weather in the Atlantic Ocean from the Hurricane Isaias.
“The capsule is designed for five to 10 missions,” said Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief executive officer of SpaceX. “We’ll have to see how things work out after we examine the capsule when it’s back in the harbor and back to the Cape to our facilities there, but based on the telemetry and all the visible directions we have. so far, the car seems to be in really good shape. ”
Steve Stich, director of NASA’s commercial crew program, said SpaceX’s proposal to reuse the Crew Dragon spacecraft “looked like it was a ridiculous thing to do.”
“I think part of the question was how long does it take to repair the car,” Stich said. ‘It takes about four months. We have a lot of margin to get to the flight in the spring frame for Crew-2. The car … when it returns to Area 59 at the Cape, it will continue through maintenance. “
Stich said NASA will follow up with the maintenance of SpaceX, “just to make sure nothing is answered.”
SpaceX originally proposed using Crew Dragon spacecraft on astronaut missions when NASA selected the company to develop and fly its crew capsule in 2014. At that time, SpaceX was aiming to return Crew Dragons to propulsive landings on the planet. coast, instead of splashdowns at sea.
SpaceX later pursued that idea, and the company and NASA agreed to fly new Crew Dragon cars on astronaut missions. But SpaceX has gained experience in upgrading Dragon charge capsule to splashdowns in salt water, and NASA said in June that it had agreed to fly astronauts on reused Crew Dragon spacecraft and previously flown Falcon 9 rocket boosters.
NASA Director Jim Bridenstine said the agency’s approval to fly astronauts on reused capsules fits NASA’s strategy.
“Our desire as an agency has been for sustainability, and that means reusability,” Bridenstine said.
SpaceX teams at Cape Canaveral will remove the outer panels from the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and begin inspections to assess how the spacecraft expanded its 64-day space mission, according to Benji Reed, SpaceX’s director of crew mission management.
“We want to make sure we dig kind of deep and understand everything that happened to this vehicle, make sure we’re really ready to go, and then do some aspects of the conversion,” Reed said. “There are some things we will replace, some things that will be replaced by default, some things that we want to upgrade based on learned lessons, or that were already planned in the work.”
SpaceX will still have to build a new trick for each Crew Dragon mission. The trunk is an unprecedented module mounted on the back of the Crew Dragon capsule, and provides electrical power with solar systems, and radiators to maintain stable temperatures in the spacecraft.
The trunk is jettisoned before re-entering and burning into the atmosphere.
“We need to produce a new trunk for each flight,” Reed said. “For this flight, we have upgraded solar panels.”
Otherwise, Reed said that Crew Dragon’s spaceflight will be “almost completely rebuilt”, other than a few things that will be upgraded or replaced.
SpaceX says that reusing space – such as launching and reusing rockets – not only comes with economic benefits, but also improvements in reliability.
“You learn so much from a car that can fly again, and you need to build it better, too,” Reed said. “You have to build it stronger for a car that you know you have to use multiple times.”
SpaceX will also fly a variant of the spaceship Crew Dragon for missions to the space station. The crew and cargo versions are collectively known as the Dragon 2 design, built on the first-generation cargo-carrying Dragon 1 spaceship, which SpaceX retired earlier this year
“We’re building a Dragon 2s fleet, but freight and crew version,” Shotwell said. “We want to wait and see how much we have to build before we say we are done building the fleet. We want to see what this car looks like, if we get the chance to inspect it and such, but we expect that we will build the fleet. ”
NASA announced astronaut missions for the Crew-2 mission last month.
Veteran astronaut Shane Kimbrough will command the Crew-2 mission. He spent 189 days in orbit on two previous missions to the International Space Station, first aboard a NASA spacecraft, and then a six-month expedition in 2016 and 2017 in which he launched and landed on a Russian Soyuz spaceship.
NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, a veteran of a nearly 13-day spaceflight in 2009, will serve as a pilot of the spaceship Crew Dragon. McArthur is married to Bob Behnken, who just completed his flight on the same Crew Dragon spaceship.
“Megan is primarily an astronaut when it comes to our perspective,” Shotwell said.
“We’ll make sure that car is as good as the car Bob flew in … What we did for Bob, I think we can do an even better job for Megan, and I hope she’s really excited. to fly in this particular capsule. I was really excited to call her the pilot for the Crew-2 mission. ”
“It’s definitely her turn to focus on getting her mission done, while I take care of the things that need to be taken care of for our home lives,” Behnken said last week.
Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European space agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet will accompany Kimbrough and McArthur on the Crew-2 mission. Hoshide and Pesquet are experienced space whistleblowers with long-term space station expeditions to their credit.
The Crew-2 astronauts will be part of the space station crew during their planned six-month mission. The other three crew members will launch on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, bringing the entire station crew to sand.
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