NASA appears to be close to making a decision as to whether or not SpaceX will be able to take Dragon all the way to the ISS on its next flight, now tentatively scheduled for November 30th. That would be almost a year since the last flight. From the article, it’s not clear what the long pole in the tent is, but it looks like it could be problems on the NASA side, and not just development and teething issues for SpaceX. Allowing them to combine test objectives would save SpaceX on the order of a hundred million bucks, but more importantly, it will accelerate the schedule to make us less dependent on the Russians, and potentially expand ISS crew size. Once they’ve demonstrated rendezvous and docking capability, combined with the landing demonstration, all they would need to use the system as a seven-person lifeboat would be a rudimentary life support system.