Assuming good weather and a mild last few weeks on the International Space Station, astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken plan to take off from the orbiting research post on August 1 and return to Earth the next day to complete a test flight from 64 days duration. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the target dates for the crew’s decoupling and Dragon Drop in a tweet on Friday.
A few hours after leaving the space station, the Crew Dragon will fire its Draco thrusters to burn the brakes and reenter the atmosphere, targeting a parachute-assisted splash in the sea.
“Splashdown is the target for August 2,” he tweeted. “The weather will drive the actual date. Stay tuned.”
NASA and SpaceX are evaluating return zones in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Officials originally selected the landing sites in the eastern Atlantic of Cape Canaveral and Jacksonville, and a location in the Gulf of Mexico south of Pensacola, Florida. Last month, NASA said authorities were evaluating additional candidate locations for the Crew Dragon splash in Daytona Beach, Tampa, Tallahassee and Panama City.
The additional options would give mission managers more flexibility in deciding when to approve the decoupling and reentry of the Dragon from the crew.
The final selection of a landing site will depend on the weather and the sea states. Climatology evaluations suggest that conditions in the Gulf of Mexico are more likely to be favorable for splashes in early August, the sources said.
Hurley and Behnken will be the first NASA astronauts to return to Earth to land in the water since Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand splashed on July 24, 1975, in an Apollo command module to end the Apollo mission- Soyuz, which included the first docking between Russian and American spacecraft in orbit.
“Probably the biggest area of concern is how long it has been since humans have done this on the United States side, splashing around in the water and then being retrieved,” Behnken said from the space station in a recent interview with Washington. Post.
SpaceX has practiced capsule recovery at sea with cargo missions returning from the space station, an unmanned Crew Dragon test flight last year, and a series of training and rehearsal sessions.
“They have done it many times at this point, and they have retrieved those capsules quite successfully and made the timeline relatively short, so we hope to be back on the ship within an hour after the spill,” Behnken said. .
The crew is expected to remain inside the Dragon until the spacecraft is hoisted onto the deck of SpaceX’s recovery ship.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft launched with Hurley and Behnken on top of a Falcon 9 rocket on May 30 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the first launch of astronauts into orbit from American soil since the last launch of the space shuttle on July 8, 2011.
The crew capsule autonomously docked with the International Space Station on May 31, allowing Hurley and Behnken to join space station commander Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.
The main objective of the Crew Dragon’s first mission with the astronauts, called Demo-2 or DM-2, is to test the performance of the capsule built by SpaceX before regular crew rotation flights to the space station begin. later this year. SpaceX successfully flew a pilotless Crew Dragon to and from the space station in 2019 before NASA approved the capsule to transport astronauts.
Hurley and Behnken have also assisted the space station’s long-running crew with experiments, maintenance, and other tasks. The Demo-2 mission was originally planned to last no more than a couple of weeks, but NASA announced earlier this year that the test flight would be expanded to expand the size of the crew on the space station.
At the time, Cassidy was the last American astronaut NASA had booked to fly on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, which has been the only vehicle to transport crews to and from the space station since the end of the space shuttle program nearly one of each. That meant Cassidy would have been the only American astronaut on the station for most of the time from April to October, limiting the research and spacewalk opportunities necessary to update and keep the complex in orbit.
With the Demo-2 extended mission, Behnken has joined Cassidy on three spacewalks since June 26 to finish replacing the batteries in the space station’s solar-powered shell. One more Behnken and Cassidy spacewalk is scheduled for Tuesday, July 21.
NASA says Crew Dragon has worked well since its launch. While docked at the space station, the capsule has been put into hibernation and woken up several times to verify its readiness to serve as a lifeboat for the crew should they have to evacuate the orbiting research laboratory in an emergency.
Ground crews have also monitored the performance of solar panels mounted on the crew’s Dragon body, which can degrade over time due to the harsh environment in low Earth orbit. So far, power generating arrays have performed better than anticipated.
Last week, four of the space station’s crew members boarded the Crew Dragon to assess the spacecraft’s ability to accommodate a crew of four in orbit, particularly when astronauts will be required to sleep in the vehicle during transit to and from the space station.
If the Demo-2 mission returns to Earth in early August, SpaceX and NASA will go ahead with preparations for the first operational Crew Dragon mission. That flight, designated Crew-1, is slated to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in mid-to-late September.
Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said last month that engineers will need about six weeks to evaluate Crew Dragon test flight data before formally certifying that the capsule is ready for operational missions. .
The new Falcon 9 first-stage booster for the Crew-1 mission arrived at Cape Canaveral on Tuesday for launch preparations. The Crew Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-1 mission will arrive in the coming weeks.
NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi are training for the Crew-1 mission. Noguchi, a veteran of two previous space missions, will become the first astronaut to launch on the space shuttle, Russia’s Soyuz rocket, and SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
NASA has ordered six crew rotation flights on the Crew Dragon spacecraft through 2024, each with four astronauts to and from the space station on expeditions lasting up to 210 days. SpaceX also has agreements with Axiom Space and Space Adventures, two commercial space companies, to bring private citizens into orbit on shorter Crew Dragon missions beginning in late 2021.
SpaceX developed the Crew Dragon under contract with NASA, but the company is free to use the spacecraft for commercial flights without NASA’s involvement.
NASA has a similar contract with Boeing for the development of the Starliner crew capsule, which has yet to fly with the astronauts. A pilotless Starliner test flight was disrupted before docking with the space station in December, and Boeing plans to fly a second demonstration mission later this year before a test flight with an onboard crew in early 2021.
There are several modifications to the pod that SpaceX is building for the Crew-1 mission, although major components, such as the pod’s life-support system and guidance, navigation, and control systems, have not changed greatly since the Demo-2 configuration.
“The Crew-1 vehicle can land in a slightly higher wind state,” Stich said at a press conference on May 31. “SpaceX has changed some of the external composite panels to make it a little stronger.”
“It also has the ability not only to dock with the space station’s forward port, but it can also go to the zenith (space-oriented) port, so it has that capacity and it has a couple of other features,” Stich said.
NASA and SpaceX have not released official wind and sea state restrictions that officials will use to determine the final timeline and location for the Demo-2 splash.
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