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SpaceX and NASA teams continue to prepare for the inaugural launch of the crew of Crew Dragon (Demo-2) to the International Space Station (ISS) scheduled to take place – but probably not – before the end of the year.
On Tuesday, an official NASA Twitter account released footage of SpaceX and Space Agency teams performing a full rehearsal of crew retrieval and retrieval procedures, including NASA's astronaut duo first fly aboard the next generation SpaceX spacecraft.
The rehearsal took place in the Trident Basin of Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard GO Searcher, one of the two recovery vessels on the east coast that SpaceX uses for the recovery of Crew Dragon.
A high fidelity model of Crew Dragon was used to better familiarize all members involved with the safe extraction process of SpaceX space shuttle astronauts. This is the first time that several SpaceX and NASA teams are fully integrated to work aboard the ship and simulate the recovery process. The teams trained to help the astronauts get out of the capsule and simulated receiving medical attention that might be needed during an eventual emergency return from the ISS.
This training session follows a recent dress rehearsal and flight preparation rehearsal at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. As a result of this rehearsal, SpaceflightNow.com announced that a newly installed emergency escape system had been tested at Launch Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Where the DM-2 crewed mission would be launched.
The launch of Crew Dragon's Demonstration Mission 1 (Demo-1) offered SpaceX an opportunity to refine its capsule recovery practices, but SpaceX teams did not practice astronaut extraction from of the capsule. that is dummy) nicknamed Ripley. Tuesday's rehearsal was used to familiarize the teams with extracting the astronauts from the capsule once it was found on board GO Searcher while it was still moored.
On Thursday, August 15, two days after the above capsule extraction rehearsal, NASA again released photos of GO Searcher-related rehearsal operations, this time involving an exercise in which astronauts were to be airlifted immediately to land-based medical facilities. According to local observers and official NASA photographs, a helicopter landed on GO Searcher's dedicated helipad before leaving quickly with a medically sensitive cargo. Searcher has his own medical facilities on board, but they are only able to deal with fairly routine problems, mainly aimed at helping astronauts who spend six months in microgravity on Earth's gravity.
Although there are still many milestones to go before Crew Dragon can take flight for the second time, these many repetitions of critical launch and recovery procedures are extremely important because they allow SpaceX and NASA to perfect their working relationship as they prepare to take a new step. of the commercial crew program. Col Bob Behnken, a Demo-1 astronaut, summed up the situation in these terms: "Each of these exercises brings us closer to NASA's mission to bring Earth astronauts back to the United States."
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