SpaceX Crew Dragon during a proprietary hover test in 2015. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX and NASA are joining forces this month to launch the first official crew mission to the International Space Station from the United States in nine years. The mission, known as Crew-1, will take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the 31st. This will not be the first time since the Crew-1 space shuttle era has landed on U.S. soil. It will mark the beginning of a series of launches under NASA’s Commercial Crew program aimed at expanding private industry involvement. Crew Launch Sector.
On the front, NASA and SpaceX officials held a series of press briefings earlier this week. The purpose of the briefings was to provide the parties with an update on the upcoming mission and changes to SpaceX’s crew dragon after their return from the ISS following the culmination of NASA’s Demo-2 mission. Through this mission, astronauts Robert Behanken and Douglas Hurley evaluated the capsule spacecraft on the space station.
Test with NASA for Crew Dragon Certificate, SpaceX Extended Simulations Highlights
During the second round of press briefings held on Tuesday, Mr. Benjamin Reid, Director of Crew Mission Management at SpaceX, provided the company with important details on how the Crew Dragon mission moves forward without any hiccups to make sure the company has worked with NASA.
His remarks were made in the first round of briefings by SpaceX Vice President Build and Flight Reliability Mr. Hans-Jorge Konigsman that the company suffered unexpected heat shield damage on the crew Dragon vehicle while returning from the ISS upon completion of Demo-2. . Mr Koenigsman said the damage was a safe incident and had repeatedly stated that neither Hurley nor Behankan were in any kind of danger during the return phase of the mission.
Astronauts Robert Bancan and Douglas Hurley are seen in SpaceX’s crew dragon simulator before the liftoff of the DM-2 mission earlier this year. Image: SpaceX
As part of his initial statements, Mr. Reed highlighted that both his company and NASA have worked extensively together to ensure that Crew Dragon is able to safely take and return astronauts from the ISS. According to his initial statement:
So you know we have mentioned a lot of work as a joint team to bring us here. Many of the efforts between you know the beginning of this program and now the development, partnership and certification – tons of certification work that has become for us to get ready to fly functionally. Some examples of the work we’ve done, we’ve done 500 hours – 500 tests, the King King simulation at the Johnson Space Center. We’ve done over eight million hours of hardware-in-loop testing between our hardware systems and our software software systems, including tests that basically work with Dragon and Falcon. Our systems working with NASA systems.
On top of that, we’ve done thousands of hours of simulations here in SpaceX with our operations operations teams, our joint operations operations teams with NASA and crew. We’re at a stage now, as Kenny Todd said, we’ve finished this stage rations operations readiness review, so now we come to a stage where we’re in the final lane, we’re getting ready for this launch.
Pre-launch simulations involve flight control teams that run mission processes according to a timeline that they follow in real life. These processes include events such as docking and undocking from ISS and re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, the spacecraft operates crew simulations that mirror what they might experience after being separated from the upper- and f-inside of its vehicle and its first-stage rocket booster.
Crew Dragon astronauts Robert Behenken and Douglas Hurley have been taken aboard SpaceX’s Geo Navigator reconnaissance ship after it splashed down in Space Gust. The crew appears at the bottom of the dragon’s heat shield capsule. Image: NASA / Bill Ingles
NASA officials reiterate satisfaction with Crew Dragon’s upgraded heat shield
In addition, Mr. Steve Stitch, NASA’s Program Manager for the Commercial Crew Program, provided important details for the expected heat shield erosion and agency improvement. In response to a question from Douglas Messier of the Parabolic Arc, Mr. Stich replied:
Most of the consoles for re-entry you and SpaceX’s case have to separate the dragon trunk and there are some bolts that separate once on the trunk orbit and on the comeback of the vehicle. Orion and other spacecraft and the surrounding area have the same design. This is a very complex flow area of stressful relationships. So basically what happened on Demo-2 is in this complex flow area, there was a slight erosion of some of the material between the tiles that we saw in this flight and the same area is in this complex flow area in Demo-1 for whatever reason and we saw No. That. And when the vehicle was inspected we did not find this after landing.
So what we’ve done is we’ve changed a lot of stuff into good stuff. We have strengthened this area, we have improved the area between these tiles. We have a better installation process. We took those design changes and we tested them in the Ames space in the same facility we used for the space shuttle and other programs. It is called an arc jet and is capable of simulating that entry atmosphere. So we took five different samples and we sent them on the Ames Arc jet. We exposed them to the re-entry environment, we also exposed them to the abortion environment. So during the ascent if we want to run an escape or separate from the Dragon F9 [Falcon 9], For some cases those entries are a little more aggressive than usual. So we tested these changes and those changes displayed very well. We’ve analyzed the changes and so we’re very pleased with what we have with Crew-1 and possibly the configuration can fly for many more flights.
SpaceX and NASA have jointly developed the Dragon Heatshield and the agency is confident that the improvements will not result in future problems. Following in the footsteps of their predecessors, NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Waker and Victor Glover, and Sochi Noguchi, an astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JXA), have also changed the name of the capsule in which they will head to ISS. His moniker for the dragon is ‘resilience’ and the team returns to Earth after completing a 210-day mission to the space station that will last for the full duration of the crew dragon’s execution capability.
