Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) Thursday unveiled its upgraded Dragon space capsule that company CEO and chief designer Elon Musk said will be capable of landing via propulsion anywhere on earth with the accuracy of a helicopter.
SpaceX formally unveiled Dragon V2 during a presentation at the company’s Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters. Dragon V2 will eventually be used as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, designed to taxi astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) by 2017. United States astronauts currently rely on Russia to get to ISS on Soyuz rockets. A U.S. astronaut was on Wednesday’s liftoff toward ISS.
Dragon V2’s nose cone opens when approaching ISS and is capable of berthing with the station both autonomously and via pilot guidance, Musk said, meaning it doesn’t need use of ISS’ arms to berth. According to an animation shown during the presentation, Dragon V2 flies horizontally and separates from its booster prior to re-entering earth’s atmosphere.
Dragon V2 will land upright via its propulsion system, which is key to Musk’s goal for reusability. Musk said Dragon V2, like the original Dragon space capsule, will have parachutes in case the propulsion landing system fails. Musk said Dragon V2 can lose up to two engines and still land safely. The company said in a statement Dragon V2 will have eight total engines. Dragon V2 lands on legs like the ones found on SpaceX’s old Grasshopper vertical takeoff-vertical landing (VTVL) prototype.
Dragon V2 was created with the intent of reusing it, part of the company’s quest to reduce the cost of launch. Musk did not say Thursday how much it would cost to launch Dragon V2, nor how fast turnaround time would be for the capsule. Emails were not returned by press time.
Additional upgrades to Dragon V2 include solar arrays that will be affixed to the side of the spacecraft’s trunk, instead of on fold-out wings, and a new launch escape system that will allow crew members to escape an anomaly at any point during flight, according to NASA.
Along with SpaceX,
Blue Origin, Boeing [BA] and Sierra Nevada (SNC) are competing under Commercial Crew. NASA said May 19 Boeing in April completed a critical design review (CDR), or its most in-depth evaluation, of the software planned to operate the company’s CST-100 spacecraft offering. The CDR confirmed the computer coding can be used in flight tests. Spacecraft are increasingly dependent on computers that automate systems and perform split-second commands, making the software one of the most crucial elements of the spacecraft.
NASA said SpaceX also conducted an integrated CDR in April to demonstrate major hardware and software elements of Dragon and its Falcon 9 rocket. The CDR, NASA said, took into account a host of previous reviews of the design of the vehicles along with the testing involved in verifying the systems. The company continues to develop hardware for a series of flight tests later this year that will put Dragon’s launch abort system through simulated emergencies to make sure it will perform for astronauts in the unlikely event of a mishap during launch or ascent into orbit.
SNC put models of its Dream Chaser spacecraft through rigorous wind tunnel tests as it refined the design by studying its reaction to the subsonic, transonic and supersonic conditions it will encounter during ascent into space and re-entry from low-earth orbit (LEO). NASA said several Dream Chaser scale model spacecraft were subjected to multiple wind tunnel tests in various configurations, including the integrated launch stack of Dream Chaser on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. SNC is preparing to share its results from a series of tests of the reaction control system motors for the Dream Chaser spacecraft at a subcontractor facility, and main engine motor tests at SNC’s Poway, Calif., facility.
NASA in April selected Kathy Lueders as program manager for Commercial Crew. She has served as acting program manager since October. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Boeing.