SpaceX conducted a static fire test of their human-rated Crew Dragon capsule on Wednesday near the company’s Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral. The test was a major milestone for SpaceX, who is working towards restoring America’s crewed orbital launch capability.
Under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, SpaceX, along with Boeing, are developing vehicles to transport American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
With the static fire on Wednesday, SpaceX set out to prove that a problem which occurred during a similar test on April 20, 2019 had been fixed. The April test resulted in a catastrophic explosion of a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
During this week’s static fire test, Crew Dragon fired its SuperDraco engines as if it were to be performing an abort maneuver to get itself away from the launch vehicle in the event of a serious problem. Early indications are that everything went to plan during the test stand firing.
A slide from the Oct. 2019 NASA NAC meeting on the recovery from the April anomaly.
Wednesday’s test occurred just 207 days after the April anomaly, a quick turnaround time given the complexity of the systems at hand.
The incident earlier this year occurred just milliseconds before the engines were to have ignited, and was eventually traced to valves leaking propellant into high-pressure helium lines.
The company has also been performing several smaller-scale tests of the redesigned system at their test facility in McGregor, Texas. Last month, SpaceX Tweeted a video of one such test.
Test of Crew Dragon’s upgraded launch escape system ahead of static fire and in-flight abort tests – altogether we are conducting hundreds of tests to verify the system's advanced capabilities to carry astronauts to safety in the unlikely event of an emergency pic.twitter.com/a4FucMh85l
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 24, 2019
Wednesday’s test was the first full-scale firing of all eight of Crew Dragon’s SuperDraco’s at once since the April incident.
“Following these initial Draco thruster burns, the team completed a full-duration firing for approximately nine seconds of Crew Dragon’s eight SuperDraco engines. The SuperDraco engines are designed to accelerate Dragon away from the F9 launch vehicle in the event of an emergency after liftoff,” said NASA in blog post on Wednesday evening.
“Today’s tests will help validate the launch escape system ahead of Crew Dragon’s in-flight abort demonstration planned as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. SpaceX and NASA will now review the data from today’s test, perform detailed hardware inspections, and establish a target launch date for the In-Flight Abort Test.”
In a Tweet, SpaceX stated that the data reviews from the day’s testing were currently underway.
Full duration static fire test of Crew Dragon’s launch escape system complete – SpaceX and NASA teams are now reviewing test data and working toward an in-flight demonstration of Crew Dragon’s launch escape capabilities pic.twitter.com/CMHvMRBQcW
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 13, 2019
Assuming that the data reviews go as planned, SpaceX will move forward with the inflight abort test – the next major milestone in Crew Dragon’s certification campaign for human spaceflight.
The inflight abort will see a Crew Dragon attempt to escape from a Falcon 9 rocket during the period of maximum aerodynamic pressures on the launch vehicle. The test will validate Crew Dragon’s abort capability under the most challenging circumstances.
Being able to abort a launch at such phases of flight will give Crew Dragon a major safety advantage over NASA’s previous crew transportation system, the Space Shuttle.
SpaceX and NASA are currently targeting for the inflight abort test in early December, shortly after a cargo Dragon variant is launched to the International Space Station during the CRS-19 mission.
The same Crew Dragon capsule which executed Wednesday’s static fire will be used for the upcoming inflight abort. Due to the redesigned propulsion system which replaced valves with burst discs, technicians will replace the spacecraft’s single-use burst discs ahead of the inflight abort test.
The inflight abort is the final test flight of Crew Dragon that SpaceX must execute before flying crew.
The company previously performed a pad abort test of Crew Dragon in 2015, and earlier this year, successfully docked an uncrewed Crew Dragon to the Space Station and returned it safely back to Earth in a mission known as Demo-1.
Demo-2 astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley Credit: Brady Kenniston for NSF L2
The first crewed flight of Crew Dragon – known as Demo-2 – will transport NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the Space Station. The length of their stay at the Station is still to be determined. NASA is exploring the option of increasing the duration of the mission from the original plan of approximately two weeks.
A long-duration mission would allow the flight to act as a standard crew rotation mission – decreasing the schedule pressure on the Commercial Crew vehicles to become fully operational.
NASA has been relying on the Russian Soyuz rocket for transportation services to the Space Station since the end of the Space Shuttle program. However, NASA is hoping to transition to American vehicles as soon as possible, as Soyuz rides currently cost $85 million per seat.