Photo: SpaceX
Announced with big fanfare not so long ago, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program has slowly lost its way in a labyrinth of delays and snags. By now, we should have seen American astronauts taking off from American soil onboard home-grown, private spaceships, but that reality is yet to come.
There are now three spaceships in the works in the U.S. First, there’s NASA’s own Orion, a craft “built to take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before.” Then, Boeing’s Starliner, and of course SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.
Of the three, only the Crew Dragon is in a more advanced state of testing, having flown to the International Space Station and back earlier this year. The other two are yet to conduct such long successful flights, each of them having experienced their share of setbacks.
But the Crew Dragon is behind schedule as well, especially after the ship that traveled to space exploded during a pad test in April.
Sometime in December, at a date that is yet to be announced, the Crew Dragon will undergo its first major test after the incident. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the spaceship will undergo an in-flight abort test, one of the last major hurdles before the American space agency can give its big thumbs up for crewed tests.
“As part of the test, SpaceX will configure the spacecraft to trigger a launch escape shortly after liftoff and demonstrate Crew Dragon’s capability to safely separate from the rocket in the unlikely event of an in-flight emergency,” the agency said in a statement.
This is the same type of test the Boeing capsule aced at the beginning of November, taking off from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Unlike the Crew Dragon though, the Starliner is yet to fly into space.
Hopes are that first human flights aboard these new vessels will now take place next year, provided nothing else unexpected happens.
Of the three, only the Crew Dragon is in a more advanced state of testing, having flown to the International Space Station and back earlier this year. The other two are yet to conduct such long successful flights, each of them having experienced their share of setbacks.
But the Crew Dragon is behind schedule as well, especially after the ship that traveled to space exploded during a pad test in April.
Sometime in December, at a date that is yet to be announced, the Crew Dragon will undergo its first major test after the incident. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the spaceship will undergo an in-flight abort test, one of the last major hurdles before the American space agency can give its big thumbs up for crewed tests.
“As part of the test, SpaceX will configure the spacecraft to trigger a launch escape shortly after liftoff and demonstrate Crew Dragon’s capability to safely separate from the rocket in the unlikely event of an in-flight emergency,” the agency said in a statement.
This is the same type of test the Boeing capsule aced at the beginning of November, taking off from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Unlike the Crew Dragon though, the Starliner is yet to fly into space.
Hopes are that first human flights aboard these new vessels will now take place next year, provided nothing else unexpected happens.
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