Dragon v2 unmanned test (SpX-DM1) - Falcon 9 (B1051) - Kennedy LC-39A - 02.03.2019, 07:49 UTC

[opinion]

Старый пишет:

Yutani пишет:
Я так понял, что при посадке на сушу астронавты получат серьёзные травмы, плюс потеля корабля?

А двигатели САС нельзя использовать как двигатели мягкой посадки?

Если не ошибаюсь, Союз садился без срабатывания двигателей мягкой посадки. Без серьезных травм. Думаю здесь так же. Посадка на сушу не штатная, но не смертельная.

[ХВ.]

Двигатели посадки работают на НДМГ . После их работы как-то стрёмно выходить из корабля. Разве что в скафандрах.

[opinion]

Alex_II пишет:

Старый пишет:
А двигатели САС нельзя использовать как двигатели мягкой посадки?

А можно наверное - это же те же самые супердрако, на которых его сажать собирались, вообще без парашютов... Вот только что там у него с топливом на момент посадки?

На NSF есть тема, в которой обсуждают, можно ли использовать супердрако в случае отказа парашютов. Ответ - нельзя. Нет ПО, нет достаточно точных высотомеров. С импульсом мягкой посадки те же проблемы, плюс несимметричная подвеска.

[Denis Voronin]

Alex_II пишет:
Вот только что там у него с топливом на момент посадки?

Ну пукнуть то для гашения полюбому есть чем.

[Guest1]

А никто не поделится ссылкой, что там за система сближения и стыковки? Оптика с лазером, как на ATV, телевизионная или миллиметровая?

[Denis Voronin]

opinion пишет:
На NSF есть тема, в которой обсуждают, можно ли использовать супердрако в случае отказа парашютов. Ответ - нельзя. Нет ПО, нет достаточно точных высотомеров. С импульсом мягкой посадки те же проблемы, плюс несимметричная подвеска.

Если есть движок, который умеет нужную тягу и нужный вектор, то всё остальное это фигня.

[opinion]

Про нужный вектор.

Вчера сообщения дублировались, потом пропадали. Попробую в третий раз.
Если кто-то не заметил, Дракон тормозил носовыми двигателями. Маск реально троллит всех любителей фантастики 50-х.

[zandr]

https://tass.ru/kosmos/6200085

СМИ: приводнившийся космический корабль Crew Dragon будут использовать для тестов
НЬЮ-ЙОРК, 8 марта. /ТАСС/. Американский космический корабль Crew Dragon, совершивший в пятницу в 08:45 по времени восточного побережья США (16:45 мск) приводнение в Атлантическом океане в 360 км от побережья Флориды, будет в дальнейшем использован для тестирования системы спасения. Об этом сообщил в пятницу интернет-портал Space.com.
По его данным, испытание системы, предназначенной для спасения корабля в случае неполадок с ракетой-носителем, может состояться уже в июне. Корабль оснащен системой экстренного спасения, использующей восемь ракетных двигателей SuperDraco разработки компании SpaceX.
После этого испытания, вероятно, в июле, ожидается первый полет корабля к Международной космической станции (МКС) с пилотами Бобом Бенкеном и Дугом Хэрли на борту. Если он будет успешным, NASA примет решение о сертификации Crew Dragon для регулярных полетов.
Корабль был выведен на орбиту в минувшую субботу ракетой-носителем Falcon-9 компании SpaceX с космодрома на мысе Канаверал (штат Флорида). Он представляет собой модифицированную грузовую капсулу Dragon, которая с 2012 года неоднократно доставляла грузы на МКС. В частности, на корабле установлена система жизнеобеспечения, а также новая парашютная система, предусматривающая выпуск сначала одного, а затем четырех куполов парашютов. Корабль осуществил стыковку и расстыковку с МКС в автоматическом режиме.
Приводнение корабля в Атлантике произошло в том же районе, где 50 лет назад, 13 марта 1969 года, приводнилась капсула корабля "Аполлон-9".
После завершения программы полетов космических кораблей многоразового использования Space Shuttle в 2011 году американских астронавтов доставляют на МКС российские корабли "Союз", однако после успешного завершения полета Crew Dragon у США появился собственный пилотируемый корабль.

[tnt22]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2019/03/08/demo-1-post-splashdown-remarks-from-steve-stich/

Demo-1 Post-Splashdown Remarks fr om Steve Stich

Marie Lewis
Posted Mar 8, 2019 at 11:44 am


NASA's Commercial Crew Program Deputy Manager Steve Stich

The following is a transcript of NASA's Commercial Crew Program Deputy Manager Steve Stich's comments during the NASA TV broadcast following Crew Dragon splashdown on Friday, March 8:

It's great to be here representing the Commercial Crew Program. What an outstanding day to be part of our program. We started our contracts in 2014 for these first missions, and to sit here today and talk about Demo-1 and how great the flight went and what we're going to learn from it is just amazing.

I'd like to congratulate the SpaceX team on a phenomenal job getting the vehicles ready and executing the flight, and our whole NASA team that worked the mission. If you just think about the enormity of what happened in this flight and all of the prep that went into it—getting the pad refurbished at (Launch Complex) 39A, getting the flight control room set up, getting the vehicles built, getting the Falcon 9 ready, all of the analysis, all of the mission support that went into it, the simulations and the practice leading up to this flight over the last year or so—it's just been a tremendous job.

I would say one of the things that we learned during this flight is the great relationship we have between the program and SpaceX. I would say our teams worked seamlessly back and forth with SpaceX, not only in the lead-up to the flight but in how we managed the flight through the Dragon mission management team, and then also working with Kenny Todd and the International Space Station Program. The space station program did a phenomenal job supporting our program while we were docked to station, on the way to station, and the international partnership as well, so it was a really great opportunity for this mission.

The last 24 hours have been exciting for us. You know we closed the hatch yesterday around noon (Central Time), got into the undock today around 1:31 a.m. (Central Time), did a few small separation burns to get away from station—if you watched that on NASA TV that was flawless—did about three separation burns to get down below station, executed the deorbit burn at about 6:52 a.m. Central Time and then landed just a few minutes ago at 7:45 a.m. (Central Time).

The vehicle is doing well. The recovery crews are out on the scene. They've already been around the spacecraft and made sure it was secure for personnel. It was a very calm day with low winds and low sea states, and one of the chutes kind of landed on the Dragon capsule; they've already gotten that off, so that's going really well. It'll probably take 30 minutes to maybe an hour to get it back on the ship.

When you look overall at this mission, it was a great dress rehearsal for Demo-2. We learned a phenomenal amount in the prelaunch timeframe about how to load the vehicle, and thinking forward to how we'll put the crews in the vehicle. The ascent profile for this flight, we practiced the exact profile that Mike Hopkins and others will fly very soon—Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken (on Demo-2). We had the abort system—the crew escape system on Dragon—actually enabled for this flight, and we were able to see how that worked and we'll get the data back and look at those triggers and how it performed.

On-orbit we got a lot of great data on the vehicle in terms of the thermal performance and power performance; the vehicle really did better than we expected. Then the rendezvous was phenomenal as we came in and checked out those sensors. During the attached phase of course we had cargo operations, and we'll do the same thing both on Demo-2 and then Crew Dragon-1 and other missions. Then we did a robotic survey of the vehicle to look at the thermal protection system and other systems, and that went really well.

I will say one thing: this mission, it was only six days long. It was a sprint from start to finish, and thinking about wh ere we've been in operations in that sprint, I think Kenny (Todd) would probably tell you the same thing—it was just a phenomenal job by the team. And then of course today, the undocking, watching how those systems performed, that went flawlessly. It's a very tight sequence between undocking and de-orbit burn, how the nose cone performed, how the de-orbit burn was executed, then the entry was phenomenal.

We did have Ripley on board, an anthropomorphic test device, and that's going to give us a lot of important data for the accelerations during both the ascent phase and then the entry phase under the parachutes and then landing. So we'll collect that data, and then look at that.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be doing post-flight reviews. In fact just next week we'll have one for the launch vehicle and the ground segment at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), we'll start reviewing that. And then subsequently we'll do reviews with SpaceX on the orbit phase of the mission.

This flight really sets us up well for the rest of the year. The vehicle that's hit the water in the Atlantic today will be the in-flight abort vehicle, and so one of the first things that'll happen is the vehicle will come back to KSC and go over into the processing area and start getting refurbished for the in-flight abort test which should be in the June timeframe. And then the Demo-2 vehicle is in Hawthorne, CA getting ready for the first crewed mission. That's in progress and going well. That work has continued all through the flight, so it will be a busy year for us with SpaceX with in-flight abort in the June timeframe and then Demo-2 later in the year with the first crewed mission.

I don't think we saw really anything in the mission so far—and we've got to do to the data reviews—that would preclude us from having the crewed mission later this year.

If you look in the April timeframe we're also getting ready for the Orbital Flight Test for Boeing, and that will happen very soon. So our program will transition after this mission and the data reviews into preparing not only for in-flight abort and Demo-2, but also the Orbital Flight Test—the uncrewed flight test—for Boeing, and that'll be coming up in the April timeframe. Spacecraft 3, which is the Boeing vehicle, is coming together at the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility down in Florida. And (Boeing) is in the middle of a bunch of very critical testing right now out at El Segundo (California) to verify that the spacecraft can work successfully in space. And then later on this year we'll have the Crew Flight Test for Boeing as well.

If you just look at all the activities in commercial crew, it's a super busy time. In addition to this flight, in the last few weeks we did parachute tests for SpaceX and Boeing and so if you look at all of the activities to get ready for flying our crews, it's just a very exciting time.

Again, congratulations to our SpaceX team and all of the NASA people across the country that worked so hard for many, many years on this flight. It really sets us up for the rest of the year, and it's a super exciting time to be in commercial crew.

[tnt22]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2019/03/08/demo-1-post-splashdown-remarks-from-benji-reed/

Demo-1 Post-Splashdown Remarks from Benji Reed

Marie Lewis
Posted Mar 8, 2019 at 4:45 pm


Benji Reed (far left), Director of Crew Mission Management at SpaceX

The following is a transcript of SpaceX Director of Crew Mission Management Benji Reed's comments during the NASA TV broadcast following Crew Dragon splashdown on Friday, March 8:

To be honest, I'm shaking, and I'm super excited. It was an incredible journey to get to this moment. The teams have just done an amazing job, both the SpaceX and the NASA teams jointly. Fundamentally this is a great day for the nation, for SpaceX, for NASA, for all of us—really for the world.

I think it was Anne (McClain) who said this is the first time in 40 years that we've had a spacecraft designed for humans (test) fly, and not only did she fly and go to the space station and do everything she was supposed to do, but we brought her home safe and sound landing in the Atlantic. It's amazing.

I can't believe how well the whole mission has gone. I think on every point, everything's been nailed, all the way along—particularly this last piece. We were all very excited to see re-entry and parachute and drogue deploy and main deploy, splashdown—everything happened just perfectly, right on time the way that we expected it to. It was beautiful.

As a team, SpaceX, we're just super honored to have the opportunity to have done this mission, to work with NASA, to work through this. You know, Demo-1 is fundamentally this first major milestone in our process towards certification. I always like to remind everybody that this is a whole system—there's Crew Dragon, there's the Falcon that's going to be certified to fly humans, there's also the ground systems, the operations, our entire factory and production system—everything that we do is being certified to be able to fly astronauts safely, and this is a huge step towards that.

If you kind of look back over what happened over the last two days, which just seems incredible to me, really it's the culmination of years of work to get us to this day. We had launch, Crew Dragon deployed, and we saw beautiful free flight. One of the things that's hard to test when you're on the ground is how fluids work in microgravity. And what's amazing is everything worked just like we expected.

We got to station, docked, and, you know, it's the first time I think in history a commercial vehicle and also an American vehicle has docked autonomously to the International Space Station, so that's super cool. (Crew Dragon was) loaded with all kinds of sensors, all kinds of tests that we did. We all met Ripley, and she's loaded with sensors so we can understand exactly all the forces that the crew will feel as they're launched to station from home. We got to meet the little Earth guy (laughs); I heard he's going to stay on station. Undocking, of course, some more free flight, and then we came home. We jettisoned the trunk, closed the nose cone, and then again, like I said, just beautiful parachute deployment, everything the way we expected. All of these tests that we've been doing on parachutes, all of the analysis that we've done on understanding the aerodynamics of re-entry and coming home. Everything was just wonderful.

The important thing now is we're going to take all of this data and we're going to apply that to the next steps. There's a lot more to do because our ultimate goal is to be able to continue to staff space station, to provide astronauts rides up to space, give them a safe place to be, a safe place to come home in, and do crew rotations every six months. So how do we get there? So we finished Demo-1, huge milestone, the next step is we take that data, we apply it, we learn from it, and we're going to go to our in-flight abort test, similar to that pad abort test that we did a few years ago. We actually will put the same Dragon that we flew on Demo-1, we're going to take that and we're going to put it on top of Falcon 9, launch it, get it going super fast to test conditions, and then escape it off of the rocket and again do the same thing, bring it home safely under parachutes, land it in the ocean.

From there, after we get that done, we go to Demo-2, and that's kind of like, wow, that's the big prize, because that's going to be sending Bob (Behnken) and Doug (Hurley)—our NASA astronauts, our partners, our friends—sending them up on Dragon and taking them to station safely and bringing them home safely.

When that's done, we'll go through final, full certification and start those six-month rotation missions, which we're all so excited about.

It's important to take a step back and think about all that it took to get here, all the work of all the joint teams—NASA and SpaceX—all the support that we've had from friends and family. Really, I think, the most important thing is that on behalf of all of the 6,000 people here at SpaceX, we really want to thank NASA, we want to thank the space station, the international partners, and thank the American public for their support and partnership as we go through this. We're really proud to be part of this endeavor.

[opinion]

Guest1 пишет:
А никто не поделится ссылкой, что там за система сближения и стыковки? Оптика с лазером, как на ATV, телевизионная или миллиметровая?

Очень хороший вопрос. Кажется, во время стыковки говорили про GPS. Кроме того, были изображения МКС, полученные с помощью лидара. И наконец, на стыковочном узле была установлена банальная мишень в виде крестика.

[tnt22]

Jonathan McDowell‏Подлинная учетная запись @planet4589 8 мар.

Dragon Trunk cataloged as object 44064 in a 395 x 401 km orbit, only a bit below ISS which is in a 406 x 411 k m orbit. Looks like the Dep-3 and Dep-4 burns were quite small.

[tnt22]

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/03/08/spacex-crew-capsule-returns-to-earth-paving-the-way-for-human-launches/

SpaceX crew capsule returns to Earth, paving the way for human launches
March 8, 2019 | Stephen Clark


SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft returned to Earth on Friday with an on-target splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft closed out a six-day test flight in low Earth orbit Friday with an on-target splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, and officials hailed the ship's performance before it flies with astronauts for the first time later this year.

Slowed by four orange and white parachutes, the gumdrop-shaped spaceship splashed down in the Atlantic east of Florida at 8:45 a.m. EST (1345 GMT) Friday, and SpaceX and NASA teams stationed nearby sped toward the capsule, removed a parachute that fell onto the craft after the ocean landing, and readied the Crew Dragon for retrieval.

Around an hour after splashdown, ground crews hoisted the spacecraft onto SpaceX's "Go Searcher" recovery vessel, where the Crew Dragon was expected to be moved into a hangar for the trip back to the Florida coast.

The textbook splashdown Friday punctuated a seemingly picture-perfect mission, a precursor to NASA's plans to resume astronaut launches on U.S. spacecraft to the International Space Station later this year. Since the last space shuttle landed in 2011, NASA astronauts have rode to space and back aboard Russian Soyuz ferry ships.

"I can't believe how well the whole mission has gone," said Benji Reed, director of commercial crew mission management at SpaceX. "Pretty much, I think, at every point, everything has been nailed all the way along, particularly this last piece we were all very excited to see. As we (went) through re-entry, and parachute, drogue deploy, main deploy, splashdown, everything happened just perfectly, right on time, the way that we expected it to."

Officials from NASA, which has paid SpaceX more than $3 billion since 2010 to develop the Crew Dragon spacecraft, agreed with Reed's preliminary assessment.

"I don't think we saw really anything on the (Crew Dragon test flight) mission so far — and we've got to do the data reviews — that would preclude us having the crewed mission later this year," said Steve Stich, deputy manager of NASA's commercial crew program.

Спойлер

...
The six-day test flight — known as Demo-1, or DM-1 — was a crucial forerunner before a second orbital test flight — Demo-2, or DM-2 — blasts off with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the next Crew Dragon spacecraft later this year.

The Crew Dragon capsule for the Demo-1 mission launched March 2 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and reached the space station March 3 with a successful automated docking, the first fully automated link-up with the space station by a U.S. spacecraft.

There were no astronauts on-board, but the Crew Dragon carried an instrumented test dummy named "Ripley," a nod to the protagonist from the "Alien" film franchise. Ripley rode in one of the Crew Dragon's four seats, and sensors in the mannequin's head, neck and spine collected measurements on the g-forces and other conditions astronauts on the ship will experience.

A plush Earth toy also launched inside the Crew Dragon and earned adoration from the space station's crew, who kept the "Little Earth" inside the orbiting science lab after the SpaceX capsule departed Friday. Behnken and Hurley will bring "Little Earth" back home on their test flight.
...
The Crew Dragon ferried nearly 450 pounds (204 kilograms) of equipment to the space station — mainly crew supplies — and astronauts planned to pack around 328 pounds (148 kilograms) of hardware and scientific specimens into the capsule's pressurized cabin for the trip back to Earth.

Canadian flight engineer David Saint-Jacques and NASA astronaut Anne McClain closed hatches leading to the Crew Dragon spacecraft Thursday, setting up for the ship's undocking from the forward port of the station's Harmony module at 2:31 a.m. EST (0731 GMT) Friday. The craft fired its Draco thrusters to back away from the space station, then accomplished several additional departure burns to fly a safe distance from the complex in preparation for landing.

The capsule jettisoned its rear trunk at 7:48 a.m. EST (1248 GMT), leaving the power module behind in orbit as the crew return craft ignited its Draco thrusters again at 7:52 a.m. EST (1252 GMT) for a 15-minute, 25-second braking burn. The impulse from the deorbit burn slowed the capsule's velocity enough to drop its orbit into the atmosphere, allowing friction from air particles to bring the Crew Dragon back to Earth.


The Crew Dragon spacecraft backs away from the International Space Station after undocking Friday. Credit: SpaceX

After closing a protective nose cone over its docking port and hatch, the capsule encountered the first traces of the atmosphere at 8:33 a.m. EST (1333 GMT) as it flew on a northwest-to-southeast track over the United States, and temperatures outside the Crew Dragon built up to thousands of degrees.

A NASA WB-57 research airplane flying over the Atlantic captured live infrared video of the Crew Dragon spacecraft emerging from the re-entry plasma sheath, then showed the spaceship deploying a pair of drogue stabilization parachutes, followed by the unfurling of four orange and white main chutes.

The parachute deployment was closely watched by SpaceX and NASA engineers. The older cargo-carrying Dragon spacecraft comes down under three chutes, while the heavier Crew Dragon requires four, and parachute anomalies during testing — and on the return of a Dragon supply ship — have put the system under greater scrutiny from engineers and safety managers.

The chutes appeared to work normally Friday, and live video beamed from the splashdown zone showed the capsule — its heat shield blackened from the fiery re-entry — descending under a morning sun before splashing down more than 250 miles ( 400 kilometers) northeast of Cape Canaveral, roughly due east from the Florida/Georgia border.


SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft descends under its four main parachutes Friday. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston

"All of these gazillions of tests that we've been doing on parachutes, all of the analysis and work that we've done on understanding the aerodynamics of re-entry and coming home, everything was just wonderful," Reed said after the splashdown.

Stich, a former space shuttle flight director, sounded a repeating refrain after the Crew Dragon's Demo-1 flight: It was "phenomenal."

"It was a great dress rehearsal for Demo-2 (the crew test flight)," Stich said. "We learned a phenomenal amount in the pre-launch timeframe, about how to load the vehicle, and thinking forward to how we'll put the crews in the vehicle. The ascent profile for this flight, we practiced the exact profile that (astronauts) will fly very soon. We had the abort system, the crew escape system in Dragon, actually enabled for this flight, and we were able to see how that worked, and we'll get the data back and look at those triggers and how it performed.

"On orbit, we got a lot of great data on the vehicle in terms of the thermal performance, power performance," Stich said. "The vehicle really did better than we expected, and then the rendezvous was phenomenal as we came in (and) checked out those sensors. The link to space station worked, the command link... And then having a real precise docking and seeing how the docking system performed, that was phenomenal."
...
The return trip from the space station went just as well, Stich said.

"Today, the undocking, watching how those systems performed, that went flawlessly," he said. "It's a very tight sequence between undocking and the deorbit burn, how the nose cone performed, how the deorbit was executed, and then the entry was phenomenal."

Weeks of data reviews lie ahead for NASA and SpaceX engineers to analyze the results of the Crew Dragon test flight in more detail.

"This mission was only six days long, " Stich said. "It was a sprint from start to finish."

SpaceX will refurbish the Crew Dragon capsule that returned to Earth on Friday for an in-flight abort test scheduled for June. The abort system trial will verify the Crew Dragon's eight SuperDraco thrusters can safely push the capsule away from an exploding launcher in flight, using a modified Falcon 9 booster to reach supersonic speed in the stratosphere before triggering the escape maneuver.

Meanwhile, workers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, continue assembling the Crew Dragon spacecraft for the test flight with astronauts.


SpaceX's first Crew Dragon spacecraft slated to fly with astronauts on the Demo-2 mission is being assembled and tested at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. This image of the capsule was taken in August 2018. Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now

Assuming the data reviews, the high-altitude abort test, and unresolved technical issues are completed in the coming months, Behnken and Hurley could strap into the next Crew Dragon spacecraft as soon as July, according to the most recent schedule officially published by NASA.

In their comments this week during the Crew Dragon's test flight, NASA and SpaceX officials did not commit to the July timetable for the demonstration launch with astronauts. But top managers, including NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, said they were confident a commercial capsules developed by SpaceX or Boeing will be ready for a human spaceflight before the end of this year.

"One of the things that we're very excited about from this DM-1 mission, is that for the first time we've gotten to see an end-to-end test," said Mike Hopkins, an astronaut assigned to the Crew Dragon's third space mission, the second with astronauts on-board. "So now we've brought together the people, the hardware, and all the processes and procedures, and gotten to see how they all work together, and that's very important as we move toward putting people on-board the vehicle."

"We're very interested in seeing the data," Hopkins said Friday. "I suspect there's going to be be some lessons learned, some improvements, some changes that we're going to have to make from this. That's all part of the testing process."

NASA says SpaceX still must complete further testing of the Crew Dragon's parachutes before astronauts can ride the spacecraft. Engineers may need to install heaters in propellant lines leading to the capsule's Draco thrusters to address a concern that cold fuel could cause a shock and damage the control jets.

SpaceX kept the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants warm on the unpiloted test flight my pointing certain parts of the spacecraft toward the sun. NASA will likely desire a more permanent solution before astronauts get the green light to fly.

Engineers are also still studying the safety of carbon overwrapped pressure vessels inside the Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon spacecraft, officials said before last week's launch.

The vessels on the Falcon 9 rocket contain helium to pressurize the launcher's propellant tanks. SpaceX began flying a redesigned helium reservoir last year with fixes to avoid a problem that led to friction in the fibers on the outside of one of the vessels, causing a spark inside an oxygen tank that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket and a commercial communications satellite during a pre-launch test in 2016.

"We're very interested in seeing the data," Hopkins said Friday. "I suspect there's going to be be some lessons learned, some improvements, some changes that we're going to have to make from this. That's all part of the testing process."


The Crew Dragon spacecraft aboard the Go Searcher recovery ship after Friday's splashdown. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner crew capsule, which is also primarily funded through a multibillion-dollar NASA contract, is scheduled to lift off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket later this year for an unpiloted test flight to the space station, similar to the mission just concluded by SpaceX.

The most recent schedule released by NASA indicates the first Starliner test flight could launch as soon as April. However, that is widely expected to be delayed until some time this summer, at the earliest, as Boeing engineers contend with their own technical issues.

Once the Crew Dragon and Starliner spaceships complete their test flights, NASA plans to use the capsules to transport astronauts to and from the space station in six-month increments, ending the agency's sole reliance on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft.

Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, lauded government leaders for keeping the agency committed to commercializing human spaceflight operations in low Earth orbit, an initiative begun under the George W. Bush administration for cargo services, then expanded by President Barack Obama in 2010 for crews.

"This really is an American achievement that spans many generations of NASA administrators, and in fact, over a decade of work by the NASA team," Bridenstine said.

Some in Congress pushed back against NASA's efforts to turn over crew transportation to the commercial sector, preferring to maintain government control and slashing the program's budget below what the agency said it needed. The funding shortfall, coupled with engineering redesigns and development issues, led the first commercial crew test flights to be delayed from 2015 until this year.

The delays have forced NASA to continue purchasing Soyuz seats from the Russian government for years longer than officials hoped. NASA is considering an option to buy two more Soyuz seats, covering launches and landings through September 2020, to hedge against further delays in the SpaceX and Boeing crew programs.

"It seems like we lurch from one administration to the next, and changing visions and changing budgets," Bridenstine said Friday. "How do we keep constancy? Well, this is a perfect example of a program. When we talk about these things that NASA does, it takes, in many cases, decades to achieve this kind of capability, and the constancy of purpose here for all of these years is important.

"Now, NASA can be a customer," Bridenstine said. "We can one customer of many customers for human spaceflight in what we believe will be a very robust commercial marketplace for space operations, and we're going to have numerous providers that are going to compete on cost and innovation."

[свернуть]

[tnt22]

Elon Musk‏Подлинная учетная запись @elonmusk 22 мин. назад (14:28 PST - 9 мар. 2019 г.)

В ответ @NASA @SpaceX и еще 2

Dragon 2 was designed to land using thrusters, with parachutes as backup. Switched to chutes as primary, due to difficulty of proving safety, but Dragon can still do it.

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Опубликовано: 21 янв. 2016 г.

On November 24, SpaceX's Dragon 2, powered by eight SuperDraco engines, executed a picture-perfect propulsive hover test at the company's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

Eight SuperDraco thrusters, positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle in pairs called "jet packs", fired up simultaneously to raise the Crew Dragon spacecraft for a five-second hover, generating approximately 33,000 lbs of thrust before returning the vehicle to its resting position. This test was the second of a two-part milestone under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The first test—a short firing of the engines intended to verify a healthy propulsion system—was completed November 22, and the longer burn two-days later demonstrated vehicle control while hovering.

[Старый]

opinion пишет:

Alex_II пишет:

Старый пишет:
А двигатели САС нельзя использовать как двигатели мягкой посадки?

А можно наверное - это же те же самые супердрако, на которых его сажать собирались, вообще без парашютов... Вот только что там у него с топливом на момент посадки?

На NSF есть тема, в которой обсуждают, можно ли использовать супердрако в случае отказа парашютов. Ответ - нельзя. Нет ПО, нет достаточно точных высотомеров. С импульсом мягкой посадки те же проблемы, плюс несимметричная подвеска.

При чём тут отказ парашютов? Вопрос об использовании их в качестве ДМП.

[tnt22]

SpaceXFleet Updates‏ @SpaceXFleet 28 мин. назад

GO Searcher is back on tracking too and is more north of GO Navigator.




5 мин. назад

Seeing a number of rumours floating that GO Searcher is going to take Dragon into the secure Navy Trident Submarine Wharf for off-loading rather then heading to the normal SpaceX Docks. Unconfirmed at this time but a very reasonable suggestion.

[Alex_II]

Старый пишет:
При чём тут отказ парашютов? Вопрос об использовании их в качестве ДМП.

Софт и высотомер для этого все равно нужны - но я так думаю, что это решаемый вопрос...

[tnt22]

SpaceXFleet Updates‏ @SpaceXFleet 53 сек. назад

ARRIVAL! Recovery support ship GO Navigator has returned to Port Canaveral. The ship is carrying the NASA and medical teams.

[tnt22]

SpaceXFleet Updates‏ @SpaceXFleet 46 сек. назад

GO Searcher has come to a halt outside Port Canaveral and is preparing to start 'small boat operations'

[tnt22]

SpaceXFleet Updates‏ @SpaceXFleet 19 мин. назад

ARRIVAL! Just under 8 days after launch, Dragon has returned from the ISS and has been recovered and safely returned to Port Canaveral aboard GO Searcher.