Tag Archives: Crew Dragon

Commercial Crew Update

Originally published on Jan 16, 2017 | NASA Commentator Kyle Herring talks with Kathy Lueders, the manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, about the status of efforts to develop commercial space vehicles to deliver human crew members to the International Space Station. NASA is working with Boeing and SpaceX as those companies work through milestones to get their vehicles, Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, ready for their first crewed flights to the station, while the space station program is reconfiguring the station and preparing for spacewalks to install the new International Docking Adapters to which the new commercial spacecraft will dock.

Although YouTube states that the above video was published this month, I suspect that it was actually recorded two years ago in mid-June 2015. Reason being that reference was made in the video (@6:20) of the upcoming launch of the International Docking Adapter (IDA-1). However IDA-1 was lost during the launch failure of SpX CRS-7 on June 28, 2015.  (Reference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_Adapter)

Additionally the Crew Dragon Pad Abort occurred in May of 2015.

SpaceX Pad Abort Wide Angle

Via Zero-G News

  

Mathew Travis has done an excellent job of covering this. Check out his complete coverage at

http://www.zerognews.com/2015/05/07/spacex-successfully-completes-crew-dragon-pad-abort-test/

If you watched the previous post, ABORT ABORT ABORT, you should have noticed one of the reasons that SpaceX will be most cost effective (cheaper) commercial space carrier. The Crew Dragon capsule contains the SuperDraco thrusters used both for abort and terrestrial landing. Every other manned system to date with the exception of the Space Shuttle used or uses a disposable abort escape tower. Look at the tower used for Orion. What a monster … and it is thrown away with very launch!