One is planned for November, and the other for January. I don’t know why NASA keeps talking about 2017, except to try to get more money out of Congress. Of course, that only gives them one provider, and they’d still have to accelerate Boeing and/or Sierra Nevada.
10 thoughts on “Dragon Abort Tests”
Comments are closed.
Yeah – what was that article I saw a few days ago talking about? It seemed to be saying that Boeing has completed an important milestone in time for the decision, and SpaceX hasn’t. What are they referring to, some form that needs to be filled out? It seems obvious that SpaceX is way way ahead in getting a real ship with humans flying.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/09/16/reports-boeing-to-beat-out-spacex-for-nasa-contract-thanks-to-jeff-bezos/
“a “growing consensus” of experts in industry and government believe Boeing will win the primary award of the contract, due to a belief that the veteran aerospace company is the “least risky” option.” As long as you’re not in a hurry…
Three contenders. Only one doing abort tests. Seems fair.
Boeing isn’t serious. Other than to be happy to spend money the government hands them.
In Seattle, Boeing and the FAA had an unofficial revolving door arrangement with retirees. It was once a great company and could be again, but this is a sad situation.
That’s a pretty exciting schedule. I’m curious, has SpaceX done any abort tests involving a capsule and the SuperDracos on their own that haven’t been made public? They have a LOT riding on the proper functioning of the SuperDraco engine and unit testing will only get you so far. I guess I’m just being a bit nervous because I really want to see the Dragon v2.0 succeed with or without NASA.
I’m sure they’ve done a lot of SuperDraco testing in McGregor. They could have done an integrated hold-down test on a Merlin stand without having to tell anyone.
Damn, first comment was trashed. Trying again.
I’m not aware of any publicized SuperDraco tests. However, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if SpaceX has conducted all-up static test fires of the abort system. They might’ve even injected some test inputs into the guidance system to see how the system responds as a whole. Those are the kinds of tests I’d want to do before the pad abort.
There was a video from a couple months ago of a test of their new parachute system. It showed a Dragon capsule being lifted by a helicopter to several thousand feet altitude. The capsule was deliberately rigged to start tumbling upon release. The chutes functioned well despite the tumbling which is a worst case scenario. You can probably find the video still online.
This should be something that’s easy to model before doing the real thing. Models have limitations but we don’t have that many variables here. The response rate of the engines is probably the trickiest thing. Get that wrong and instead of dampening an oscillation you could increase it.
This seems an ideal time to start recovering Falcon 9 boosters at the cape.
Is it possible that the the three engine F9 with reduced fuel load is what will be used for the flight abort test at the max drag point? With recovery to the Cape? Hence the three Merlins on the test article that was lost recently?
Garrett Reisman has spoken of “one thousand separate requirements” which NASA is imposing on SpaceX.
So, there are 999 possible reasons, in addition to the abort test. NASA is not going to sign off on all of them overnight.
I don’t understand why people expect government bureaucracy to move faster simply because they invoke the magic name of “Elon.”
I don’t see any particular advantage for Elon in promising an earlier date, either. He’s been criticized in the past for making optimistic predictions and missing his dates — and NASA isn’t offering any extra money for early delivery.
I don’t see how earlier delivery would be useful to NASA, either. They’ve already committed to buying Soyuz flights through 2016/2017. They couldn’t fit Dragon 2 into their schedule before then unless they defaulted on the contract with Russia, which would cause every diplomat in the State Department to begin screaming about “international law.”