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SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule will be only the fifth American craft to be rated for human spaceflight in history. Clearing NASA’s certification process takes years.
Earlier this month, SpaceX engineers completed the 27th and final test of the parachute system that will soon be responsible for carrying astronauts back to Earth. When the four parachute canopies successfully unfurled over the Mojave Desert, it indicated that the company was finally ready to start sending humans to space after nearly a decade of relentless testing and dramatic setbacks. Now SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is on the cusp of becoming only the fifth American spacecraft to ever be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. But before that happens, the company has to pass a final high-stakes test: sending a pair of astronauts into orbit and bringing them safely back home.
On May 27, SpaceX is expected to launch NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts will be doing critical scientific work on the space station, but the upcoming Demo-2 mission is first and foremost about certifying Crew Dragon for human spaceflight. “Most of our human certification is being completed with this mission,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said during a press conference earlier this month. “We’re doing this to wring out the system. This is a test mission.” She estimated that the Demo-2 mission would account for about 95 percent of the human-rating certification process for the Crew Dragon capsule. //
The last time NASA certified a new spacecraft for humans was in 1981, during the maiden flight of the space shuttle. The shuttle program came to an end in 2011, which was the last time American astronauts launched to space from US soil. For the past decade, all astronauts bound for the space station have hitched a ride on Russian rockets. NASA awarded SpaceX and Boeing contracts to certify their own crewed vehicles only a year after the last shuttle flight, but building a human-rated spacecraft has proven to be a long journey. //
all human-rated spacecraft must be capable of being manually and remotely controlled, even if the spacecraft is usually almost entirely automated. //
Both companies successfully completed pad abort tests, which involve firing the escape thrusters on a crew capsule while it’s still on the launch pad. But only SpaceX conducted an in-flight abort test and jettisoned its capsule from a rocket during flight. Boeing opted to do simulations of an in-flight abort test based on its data.