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SpaceX has made major upgrades to the Crew Dragon spacecraft to improve its safety profile, according to NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich, and SpaceX's Vice President, Build and Reliability Bill Gerstenmaier. The two shared details during a Crew 9 press conference earlier today, and now, the Dragon can fire its thrusters for a soft landing in case of an emergency. NASA and SpaceX are slated to launch Crew 9 tomorrow, with two crew members, accompanied by Boeing's Starliner astronauts, when they return to Earth in February.
SpaceX Cleans Soot From Crew Dragon Ahead Of Tomorrow's Launch
Ahead of the launch, SpaceX static fired its Falcon 9 rocket and conducted last minute troubleshooting operations on the Crew Dragon. Stich shared that the Dragon troubleshooting involved "the chilled water system that's used for Dragon, this provides cooling up into the Dragon spacecraft," which sprung a leak at the last moment that was fixed by SpaceX.
Another problem that surfaced on the Dragon resulted from strong winds in Florida. According to the NASA official, after SpaceX static fired the Falcon 9 rocket, the soot produced from the engines which typically "goes out and exhaust out to the East to the water" was blown "back over on to the Dragon spacecraft." NASA and SpaceX discovered the soot when they rolled the vehicle back from the site and had to clean the solar arrays and other areas on the ship.
"The SpaceX team did an incredible job of repainting in particular quadrants one, and a little touch upon four and got it all cleaned up and ready to go," added Stich, explaining that paint is important to a spacecraft as it rejects the Sun's heat and helps maintain temperature in the harsh environment of space.
The booster launching the Crew 9 mission will be a second flight booster, explained the NASA official. To certify the booster, SpaceX and NASA had to work together. Their work also covered details surrounding the Falcon 9 upper stage mishap and a hard booster landing earlier this year, both of which were rare accidents for SpaceX.
Sharing details about the Crew Dragon's propulsive emergency landing capabilities, Stich revealed "We have a unique capability for the first time on Crew-8 and Crew-9. It's an emergency contingency capability for landing where if the main parachutes were all to fail, the Super Draco thrusters will fire right before the vehicle would make contact with the water, and then it would be an emergency configuration to save the crew on a really bad day."
The Crew Dragon has also been certified for 210 days, explained the NASA official, after work covering the "Dragon's windows, the structure, all the rotating machinery, the avionics, thermal protection system, [AND] the prop systems."
Adding details abut the new emergency landing capabilities, SpaceX's Gerstenmaier shared that ""we've actually flow it on several other Dragon flights before this. This is the first time it flies on a, on a NASA mission." He outlined that the "way it works is, in the case all the parachutes totally fail, this essentially fires the thrusters at the very end that essentially gives the crew a chance to land safely and essentially escape the vehicle. So it's not used in any, you know, partial conditions," since the Dragon "can land with one chute out, we can land with other failures in the chute system."
The system works when "the capsule detects that there's a problem, and it fires the, essentially the Draco thrusters at the very end, and then provides a tolerable landing through the crew. So it's a, it's a true deep, deep contingency," outlined Gerstenmaier.
SpaceX also learned by testing the Crew Dragon to the limit during the Polaris Dawn mission, its highest-altitude mission. Gerstenmaier explained that SpaceX was able to test a depressurization contingency with Polaris Dawn and use the high radiation environment to build auto sequences "that actually rebooted hardware and recovered the hardware automatically without any interaction from the crew."
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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