Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 17 2020, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the let-me-out dept.

How to watch SpaceX show NASA the Crew Dragon capsule can escape if a launch goes wrong

Plan for success. Prepare for failure. SpaceX is setting out to prove that a critical safety system will be able to save astronaut lives in the event of a launch emergency.

The Crew Dragon in-flight abort test is scheduled for Jan. 18. This is a required step before NASA will allow astronauts to fly to the International Space Station in the SpaceX capsule as part of the Commercial Crew Program.

NASA announced on Tuesday it will livestream the event, with coverage starting at 4:45 a.m. PT [0745 ET, 1245 UTC] on Saturday. SpaceX and NASA are targeting 5 a.m. PT [0800 ET, 1300 UTC] for the launch, but the test has a four-hour launch window to work with.

Crew Dragon will take a ride on a Falcon 9 rocket, which won't survive the test. The launch will take place at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, which will allow the rocket to break up over the Atlantic Ocean. It could be quite an eye-opening experience.

[...] If all goes well, the Crew Dragon capsule will separate from the rocket, deploy parachutes and float gently down to the water.

An animation of the in-flight abort (IFA) test is available on YouTube.

Also at Ars Technica.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:10AM

    by Sulla (5173) on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:10AM (#944809) Journal

    https://www.space.com/34086-spacex-boeing-test-crew-vehicle-abort-systems.html [space.com]

    Boeing also plans to do a pad-abort test with its crew vehicle, known as the CST-100 Starliner. The company has already done a water-landing test of the abort system. However, Boeing will not perform a flight-abort test, said former NASA astronaut Chris Ferguson, now Boeing's director of crew and mission operations.

    "We looked very early on at where we could get the most testing value," Ferguson said, and "made the conscious decision" that the company could certify the vehicle in a wind tunnel and did not need to conduct a flight-abort test. He added that "we consider the pad-abort test more robust and challenging" and said the company is currently conducting many abort-system tests in a wind tunnel.

    Kathy Lueders, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, confirmed that NASA's safety thresholds did not specifically require an in-flight test of the abort system. The guidelines did require that the companies "show that they have the abort reliability that we needed to have. And so we provided them the ability to propose their own strategy for how they met that, and both currently are meeting the requirements."

    While I am unsure how insurance works for manned launches. I presume that the more extensive your testing the cheaper your insurance rates will be. It looks like SpaceX will not be recovering the booster from tomorrows launch, so the cost of the test is somewhere less than the 57m they charge others to launch and I am unsure what their margin is. Boeing might be willing to take a greater risk than Spacex is able to. If one of the first 10 Boeing manned launches fails, it won't ruin their companies future. Not sure if SpaceX could weather that.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam