Elon Musk and NASA Chief Get on Same Page, Vow to Complete Crew Dragon
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Elon Musk and NASA chief get on same page, vow to complete Crew Dragon
[...] During the presentation, both Bridenstine and Musk provided information about the schedule for the first Crew Dragon mission that will send astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit. If all goes well, Bridenstine said, the mission could happen during the first quarter of 2020.
Two main technical issues remain to be resolved: parachutes and the in-flight abort system. Regarding parachutes, Musk said the company is going to a more advanced parachute, dubbed Mark 3, that has more durable Zylon lines connecting to the parachute canopy. Zylon is stronger than Kevlar and about three times stronger than the previously used nylon lines. SpaceX has an aggressive test program during which it hopes to complete 10 tests of the new parachutes between now and the end of 2019. If all of those tests show good performance, there may be enough data to put to rest concerns about parachute performance when Dragon re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
The other issue is the Super Draco thruster system used during an abort. This thruster experienced a catastrophic failure during an April test, but since then SpaceX and NASA believe they have identified the problem and implemented a fix. A ground-based test of this system should occur within a couple of weeks, Musk said. That will be followed by an in-flight abort test in late November or early December.
After this point, if all the testing goes well, engineers from both SpaceX and NASA will review the data to ensure that every step to improve safety of the vehicle has been taken.
"Space is hard, obviously," Musk said. "Very few countries have created an orbital vehicle. I guess just three. This is a very hard thing. There are a lot of people working super hard at SpaceX and NASA and our suppliers. They're doing their best."
NASA and SpaceX Hope for Manned Mission to ISS in Early 2020
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NASA and SpaceX hope for manned mission to ISS in early 2020
Musk, who appeared at a news conference alongside Bridenstine and the two astronauts who are set to fly on board the spacecraft, said he hoped to have the capsule delivered to NASA by the end of the year.
He stressed, however, that safety was paramount and the launch would be delayed without hesitation if any problems arise.
"If everything goes according to plan, it would be in the first quarter of next year," Bridenstine said of the launch. "But remember—and this is the important thing that we have to get right on messaging—there are still things that we can learn or could learn that could be challenging that we have to resolve.
"I'm not saying that's going to happen, I don't know. That's why we test."
Some of the technical challenges SpaceX is working on include concerns about the parachutes and the propulsion system.
"It's a pretty arduous engineering job to get the parachutes right," Musk said.
"Parachutes, they look easy but they are definitely not easy," he added. "We want to get at least something on the order of 10 successful tests in a row before launching astronauts."
Since retiring its space shuttle program, NASA has had to rely on Russia to ferry astronauts to and from the space station at a cost of $85 million a seat. It is now counting on SpaceX and Boeing to carry out that task.
Related Stories
SpaceX fires up redesigned Crew Dragon as NASA reveals SuperDraco thruster "flaps"
On November 13th, SpaceX revealed that a planned static fire test of a Crew Dragon's powerful abort thrusters was completed without issue, a strong sign that the company has successfully redesigned the spacecraft to prevent a catastrophic April 2019 explosion from reoccurring.
Pending a far more extensive analysis, Wednesday's static fire should leave SpaceX on track to perform Crew Dragon's next major flight test before the end of 2019.
[...] Each capable of producing several dozen pounds of thrust, both Crew and Cargo Dragon use Draco thrusters to orient themselves in orbit, rendezvous with the International Space Station, and lower their orbits to reenter Earth's atmosphere. Crew Dragon's Draco thrusters are also designed to control its attitude during abort scenarios, stabilizing and flipping the spacecraft to prevent a loss of control and ensure proper orientation during emergency parachute deployment. The Draco firings during Crew Dragon's November 13th static fire were meant to simulate that additional use-case.
Aside from verifying that SpaceX has successfully redesigned Crew Dragon to mitigate the failure mode that caused capsule C201's catastrophic explosion in April 2019, the Draco static fires specifically mirrored the burns Crew Dragon C205 will need to perform to successfully complete its In-Flight Abort (IFA) test. As noted by NASA and SpaceX, with the static fire complete, both teams will now comb through the data produced, inspect Crew Dragon to verify its health and the performance of its redesigned high-flow pressurization system, and perform any necessary refurbishment.
NASA's post on Crew Dragon's static fire revealed another thoroughly intriguing detail: the SpaceX spacecraft's SuperDraco thrusters apparently have flaps! A bit of retroactive speculation suggests that SuperDracos are closed out with plugs of some sort to create a seal against the environment before Crew Dragon is rolled out to the launch pad. Perhaps, in the event of a SuperDraco ignition, SpaceX included actuating flaps as a method of resealing those thrusters prior to splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.
Related: SpaceX Crew Dragon Suffers "Anomaly" During Static Fire Test
Investigation Into Crew Dragon Incident Continues
SpaceX and NASA Investigation Identifies Cause of Crew Dragon Explosion
NASA and SpaceX Hope for Manned Mission to ISS in Early 2020
Boeing Performs Starliner Pad Abort Test. Declares Success Though 1 of 3 Parachutes Fails to Deploy.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 12 2019, @06:56AM (5 children)
Looks like this meeting only happened because of Bridenstine's little tweet statement at the time of the Starship presentation.
From comments:
Haha.
What Starship could really use is a new type of contract. Cheap NASA science payloads w/ cheap launch cost, made quickly, starting with low Earth orbit and later targeting solar system destinations with in-orbit refueling. They could do cubesats first before moving onto "big 'n cheap".
Big 'n cheap is where it's at. JWST's "final" budget is at $9.66 billion. How much did the components cost? The original budget was $500 million for an 8-meter aperture design. Now they are down to 6.5-meters. The entire spacecraft could fit into a Starship payload fairing without some or all of the unfolding process, which introduces many potential points of failure.
If NASA plays its cards right, it could start getting 10-20 space telescopes for the price of one. Reduce the testing, reduce the points of failure in the design, reduce the costs. That's not even considering modular telescopes, built remotely or by astronauts, where one bad piece could be replaced and the size could easily become many times larger than the Starship payload fairing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday October 12 2019, @02:14PM (4 children)
It's going to take a sea change before they do that. The last time they did bunches of spacecraft for anything was at the beginning of the Apollo program in the early to mid-1960s when they sent a bunch of space probes to the Moon (around 20, a combination of orbiters, colliders, and landers) to find places for manned missions to land. Ever since they have never made more than two of a design for any purpose.
You'll have to overcome, from Congress on down, the attitude "We already have one space telescope, why do we need ten more?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:22PM
https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=4491 [youtu.be]
Musk estimates that (at an absolute maximum) a Starship could be launched up to 3 times a day, 365 days per year, carrying 150 tons to LEO. So about 150,000 tons for a single Starship, or 3 million tons to orbit for a fleet of twenty Starships. And current rockets including Falcon are launching only about 200-300 tons per year, total. A single Starship could be used to launch 500 times more mass to orbit than is currently being launched by all other rockets.
Even if you knock off an order of magnitude or two for realism, that is an exceptional amount. That is what is made possible by the fully reusable rocket. Filling the thing with propellant costs on the order of hundreds of thousands or low millions of dollars. Potentially "free" if SpaceX operates a giant solar-powered facility for creating liquid oxygen and methane on site, so it doesn't have to be trucked in from a supplier.
NASA could purchase/rent its own dedicated Starships in California, Texas, and Florida, and be able to launch anything they can fit into the payload fairing whenever they please. In-orbit refueling to get to solar system destinations outside of low Earth orbit is a bit more complicated, but with access to LEO alone, they could just dump telescopes that are bigger than Hubble or JWST into orbit (wavelengths would match Hubble or LUVOIR since you want mid/far-infrared telescopes further from Earth). Make them assembly line style. Use loads of tinier mirror segments.
Instead of spamming JWSTs, they could do a few gigantic (bigger than LUVOIR [wikipedia.org]) telescopes, including modular if possible, and then spam thousands of cubesats and CHEOPS [wikipedia.org]-sized telescopes. Many could be deployed in a single launch. Eventually, we could have a dedicated telescope for every nearby star, and a spacecraft for every large asteroid or moon.
This would definitely be a change of pace for NASA, but it will become obvious to everyone very quickly that the economics of space launch have changed forever. Building all these telescopes also gives the Beltway bandits something to do with SLS off the table. They can certainly screw that up (see JWST), but NASA's requirements are partly to blame. You don't need strict testing when your cheapo design doesn't need to be optimized for small mass/size, doesn't need to unfold in space, and can be flown for somewhere between $1-10 million. If it dies, you make another one.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:55PM (2 children)
Incorrect assumptions. The problems are all about management, meetings, progress reports, approvals, and other bureaucratic processes. To make sure that $250m thing is done properly and following correct procedures and testing regimes, they are spending the rest of the money on compliance.
Also, it's difficult to make 1 of anything that is complex. If we only made one of a modern CPU of of nothing, it would cost $100b. But because we make so many in an iterative process allowing for mistakes to be made, the cost is about $100.
NASA has missions where they allow for failure. They tend to be successful and cost a fraction of the expensive projects. And you may want to see how many actual missions NASA is doing. They are not 1 thing wonder.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?search=&type=current&missions_target=&mission_type=spacecraft&launch_date=#submit [nasa.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Program [wikipedia.org]
^^ not exactly "expensive" when it comes to space.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 12 2019, @04:16PM (1 child)
I would consider it more a factual observation than an assumption since I can point to multiple such categories where one thing is somehow good enough (Mars landers, Jupiter orbiters, solar missions, space telescopes in a given frequency, etc). But let's move on. How hard is it really to cash a $250 million check? Just hire some people to supervise the documentation of the ass-wiping. And fire them when government auditors find deficiencies. And when your project goes over budget, get more check to cash. Cha-ching!
Nobody in the establishment has an interest in economies of scale. Building one space telescope is good for the politicians. Building a second is nearly worthless since the press and public won't wake up for it. All the profit is in R&D for the contractors and their workers (who also get paid no matter how much meaningless paperwork they do). Same for the scientists in on the R&D. Once the project launches, they'll need to fight to get on the low funding operations team, or move on to the next R&D program. It's not hard to see what comes of this. We have 50 years of history.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday October 13 2019, @09:52PM
"Building a second is nearly worthless since the press and public won't wake up for it. "
Yep, that was one factor in killing the Apollo program earlier than planned. With the exception of Apollo 13, NASA had made going to the Moon routine and boring. The massive coverage leading up to the first Moon landing quickly dissipated as they repeated the feat. The lunar 'dune buggy' helped revive it a bit for 15 through 17, but nobody was interested in the mission itself, just the amazing sight of driving around on the Moon.
Science is little appreciated by the public unless it is new. Once done, it quickly becomes 'meh.'
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.