SpaceX will simulate Sunday the emergency ejection of astronauts from a rocket a few minutes after launch, the last major test before the dispatch in two months of a crew from Nasa to the International Space Station (ISS). The test, with no one on board, will take place between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. (1 p.m. and 7 p.m. GMT) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Originally scheduled for Saturday, it was pushed back due to the winds and rough seas in the ditching area.
The space company of Elon Musk, under contract with NASA, has fixed its new capsule Crew Dragon on top of one of its Falcon 9 rockets, programmed as if it were to launch the spacecraft into orbit.
A simulation
One minute and 24 seconds after takeoff, at an altitude of about 19 kilometers above the Atlantic, simulating an anomaly, a abandonment sequence will be triggered: the capsule will ignite its powerful SuperDraco propellants to eject from the rocket, and distance itself as quickly as possible. In a manned mission, this would save the strapped astronauts inside Dragon, should the rocket ever have a problem or follow a bad trajectory.
Crew Dragon will continue, alone, its course towards the sky until about 40 km of altitude, before falling naturally towards the Atlantic Ocean, while the rocket will disintegrate in flight under the effect of the sudden separation. The rocket may well explode and create a "fireball," warned Benji Reed of SpaceX. Then the four large parachutes of the capsule will open in order to slow down the fall and the ditching in the Atlantic, where rescue teams will be pre-positioned.
A first manned flight no earlier than early March
The success of this test is essential for SpaceX and for NASA, which urgently needs to certify a vehicle to transport its astronauts to the ISS this year. Since 2011, the United States has been obliged to have its astronauts travel on the Russian Soyuz rockets, the only ones to have this capacity since the retirement of the American shuttles. NASA signed a similar contract with Boeing, which developed the Starliner capsule.
In March 2019, SpaceX successfully made a one-week round trip to the ISS with Crew Dragon. In April, a ground test of the SuperDraco propellants had caused an explosion, but SpaceX and Nasa claim to have solved the problem after investigation. Boeing was to perform the same mission in December, but an orbit error led to shortening the mission and bringing back Starliner two days after the launch, a setback for the aerospace giant.
The first manned flight of Crew Dragon will have as passengers American astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken. If all goes well, this mission will take place at the earliest in early March, said Kathy Lueders, head of NASA's commercial flight program on Friday.
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