According to Steve Stich, NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager, and Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX Vice President of Construction and Reliability, SpaceX has made major upgrades to the Crew Dragon spacecraft to improve its safety.
The two shared details at a Crew9 press conference earlier today that the Dragon spacecraft can now activate its thrusters for a soft landing in an emergency. NASA and SpaceX are scheduled to launch the "Crew-9" mission tomorrow, and the two crew members will return to Earth in February accompanied by Boeing's "Starliner" astronauts.
Before launch, SpaceX statically launched the Falcon 9 rocket and performed last-minute troubleshooting operations on the Crew Dragon. Stich said the Dragon spacecraft's troubleshooting involved "the cooling water system used for the Dragon spacecraft, which provides cooling for the Dragon spacecraft." The system leaked at the last moment and SpaceX has repaired it.
Another cause of problems for the Dragon spacecraft is strong winds in Florida. According to NASA officials, after SpaceX statically launches the Falcon 9 rocket, the smoke generated by the engine usually "is discharged eastward to the water and then blown onto the spacecraft." NASA and SpaceX discovered the smoke as they rolled the vehicle back from the site and had to clean the spacecraft's solar arrays and other areas.
The SpaceX team did a great job repainting, especially doing a little touch-up on quadrants one and four and getting it all cleaned up and ready to go, Stich added, "Paint is very important to the spacecraft because it blocks the sun's heat and helps maintain temperatures in the harsh environment of space."
NASA officials explained that launching the Crew9 mission's booster will be the second time the booster is reused. In order to certify the booster, SpaceX and NASA must work together. Their work also includes details related to the Falcon 9 final stage accident and a booster hard landing earlier this year, both of which were rare for SpaceX.
When introducing the details of the "Manned Dragon" propelled emergency landing capability, Stich revealed: "For the first time, we have a unique capability on Crew Dragon 8 and Crew Dragon 9. This is an emergency landing emergency capability. If all the main parachutes fail, the Super Draco thrusters will ignite immediately before the aircraft touches the water, and then perform emergency configurations to save the crew in a very bad situation."
NASA officials explained that the "Dragon" spacecraft has passed 210 days of certification. Previous work included the "Dragon" spacecraft's windows, structure, all rotating machinery, avionics, thermal protection systems, and propeller systems.
SpaceX's Gerstenmaier added details about the new emergency landing feature, saying: "We've actually used it on a few other Crew Dragon flights before this. This is the first time it's been flown on a NASA mission."
He outlined, "How it works is that in the event of complete failure of all parachutes, it will ignite the thrusters at the end, which essentially gives the crew a chance to land safely and escape the vehicle. So, it will not be used under any circumstances." Because the vehicle can land with one parachute failing, we can also land with other failures in the parachute system. "
When "the capsule detects a problem, the system kicks in and fires the Draco thrusters at the end and then provides a tolerable landing with the crew. So this is a true deep contingency scenario," Gerstenmaier outlined.
SpaceX also put the crewed Dragon to the limit on the Polaris Dawn mission, its highest altitude mission. Gerstenmaier explained that SpaceX was able to test decompression emergencies on the Polaris Dawn mission and take advantage of the high-radiation environment to establish an automated sequence "that was actually able to reboot and automatically restore the hardware without any interaction from the crew."