A chimney column paved the way for a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket to propel NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station in May, a historic project that arrives at another fiery milestone.
This dramatic, high-risk sentiment will go back this weekend when your Crew Dragon capsule leaves the outpost in orbit and then gets into the ocean near where it all began. The heat shield will be the star of the show, bearing the weight of thousands of degrees as the capsule dives into earth’s atmosphere.
The scariest part? The six minutes in which heat interferes with radio signals, interrupting communications between astronauts and floor staff.
When the expected disturbances in the signs occur, the world will hold its breath until the voices of Behnken and Hurley return just before diving into the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. By the time the splashes occur on Sunday afternoon, a descent procedure that begins about 250 miles above Earth will have taken less than a day.
Despite the two months since The Demo-2 Takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center, his return is necessarily part of the project, and that remains a precedent for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, members of the family circle, other astronauts and many others. It is a focus of emotional attention on any project when humans have to traverse the environment thousands of miles per hour.
While the informal observer might think that takeoff, necessarily a gigantic controlled explosion, is the maximum harmful phase, the fiery decline through the environment is equally risky. This point was hammered in 2003 when Columbia’s round-trip area disintegrated, killing the seven astronauts on board.
The danger does not necessarily prevent when the capsule touches water. During the Mercury program in the early 1960s, the Liberty Bell 7 hatch of gus Grissom opened after landing in the Atlantic and the capsule took water. Grissom checked to get out of the capsule, but struggled to stay afloat with his area suit until a military recovery team sends him in a helicopter.
However, if all goes well and the post-landing controls seem favorable, the Demo-2 will have been completely successful, paving the way for Crew Dragon to download human area flight certification and advance with at least two manned missions that NASA is already performing. Planning. next year.
Before the Demo-2 took off in May, Musk said he could feel the weight of human spaceflight on his shoulders and those of his 18-year-old company. However, this became more real when he met the families of the astronauts.
“We did everything we could to make his father’s house okay,” Musk recalls, telling the young men of Behnken and Hurley.
Their wives, Megan McArthur and Karen Nyberg, respectively, are no strangers to spaceflight; nor are they former space shuttle astronauts. And as if that were written in the stars, McArthur is expected to fly on SpaceX’s Crew-2 project in 2021 in the Crew Dragon capsule her husband uses for this project.
“I think the argument that the comeback is more damaging in some tactics than promotion,” Musk told KSC reporters after the Demo-2 takeoff. “So we still don’t need to claim victory.”
Seconds later, Musk began to fight to finish his prayers.
“I’m drowning, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I can answer you any more than that,” he said. “We will do everything we can to make sure they get home safely.”
This is not completely new territory for SpaceX. The company has great joy back to school and warmth shields thanks to its Dragon 1 capsule, which has made dozens of round-trip deliveries to the ISS. The new Crew Dragon effectively completed its first autonomous demonstration flight last year and showed no disruption to the return process.
Garrett Reisman, a former Shuttle astronaut who later joined SpaceX’s Crew Dragon team and continues to advise the company, echoed Musk’s feelings and said that to launch, returning is an equally complicated process.
“What people, I think, don’t appreciate is going home as complicated and harmful as launching,” Reisman, also an engineer, told FLORIDA TODAY. “We are just a few days away from the end of the total mission. But for me, we’re halfway there.”
During takeoff, he said, a power movement is visually fluid for the thousands of people invading the beaches of the area’s coast to see the Falcon nine flight. Chemical energy, in this case, a rocket-grade propellant, is switched to kinetic energy, or motion, when the rocket jumps off the platform and enters orbit.
“But now you have to move the same amount of power in the opposite direction,” Reisman said of the re-entry process. “You have to take all that kinetic power, all that speed, and turn it into heat power. And then get rid of all that heat safely and end up sitting in the ocean just 40 or 50 miles from where you started.”
“Until we do all this safely, I’ll be a little nervous,” he said.
Reisman, who has been concerned about Crew Dragon’s design procedure from the beginning, said the 27-foot spacecraft had plenty of room to deal with the burning re-entry caused by high-speed interaction with Earth’s atmosphere. Its heat shield was designed for lunar missions that usually return at even faster speeds, so a flight from the ISS at an altitude of approximately 250 miles is within its limits.
And because SpaceX designs for reuse, he said, the parts are built and incorporated to make them mission-friendly.
“When you think about cooking a steak, you have an arctic trout on the surface. But when you cut the steak, you see that juicy red meat underneath,” he says. “The heat shield is a little the same. You can see how deep this coal penetrates so you can see how much margin it has.”
Crew Dragon is based on the design of Dragon 1, which made its first orbital flight in 2010 and flew 20 shipping missions to the ISS. It is not designed for manned spaceflight, but more than fulfilled its role as an autonomous refueling vehicle. A new shipping-only version, similar in design to Crew Dragon, will end with the company’s 21st refueling to the ISS at the end of October.
“When we recovered the first Dragons, we took fundamental samples,” Reisman said. “And we can take a look at the cylinder drilling and see how deep the tank has come. We saw that we had a lot of space.”
Simply put, all of this means spaceX is well-equipped to take care of all phases, from launch to back to school and irrigation. And floor teams, with the help of the Air Force, are equally prepared when it comes to making sure the equipment gets rid of the pills as temporarily as possible.
“They have fast boats, they know what they’re doing and they’ve practiced it many times. I am convinced that they will get Bob and Doug out of there and take them to this beautiful facility (in the rescue boat) and despite everything back to Houston,” Reisman said.
On Wednesday afternoon, NASA and SpaceX selected seven possible projection zones: off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Jacksonville, Daytona, Tampa, Tallahassee, Panama City, and Pensacola. The countryside is preferred, but serious weather situations mean that recovery can occur in any of the other six days or delays.
Whichever you choose, the spaces will be tens of miles from the coast, so splashes are unlikely to be visible from land.
“There’s a smart chance they’re on their way for a longer time,” Reisman said. “But it’s exciting to be at this last level of mission.”
Contact Emre Kelly at [email protected] or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram on @EmreKelly. Support his journalism by subscribing to floridatoday.com/specialoffer/.