A very important thing happened early the morning while you were sleeping. In a way, you can say, the future was born at on March 2nd 2019 at 2:49AM.
After years of work, NASA fulfilled the first test flight of the NASA Commercial Crew Development Program and launched a Falcon 9 with the all-new Dragon 2 capsule to the International Space Station, and then landed the Falcon 9 first stage on a drone ship. The launch was unmanned test flight (the manned launch is this summer) but is a final version of the Dragon 2 capsule, with a pressured capsule and fully furnished and manned-capable interior. It is carrying 200 lbs of cargo the ISS and a test dummy rigged up with sensors inside the SpaceX Spacesuit that will be worn by all passengers.
It restores independent manned launch capability to the United States for the first time since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in July 2011. It's been a long road, but patience has paid off in spades.
Skip to 53:29 to see the launch.
Pictures:
The SpaceX Dragon 2, is as you guessed, the second version of the SpaceX Dragon capsule. Though sharing the name with it's predecessor it is an all new vehicle.
"Dragon 1" was developed under the NASA ISS Resupply contract called "Commercial Orbital Transportation Services" (COTS). The purpose of COTS was to allow for ISS resuply and return payloads to the Space Station following the retirement of the Space Shuttle (which had unparalleled up and downmass for these purposes), and have payload greater than the Russian Soyuz/Progress was capable of. Since it's first launch in December 2010, it has been launched to the ISS annually at a rate of two to three times per year. Of all the vehicles currently servicing the ISS (SpaceX Dragon, Orbital Cyngus, Russian Progress/Soyuz) it has by far the greatest up and down mass payload capability.
Dragon 1 though was designed as a cargo vehicle. And though while in theory you bolt a chair or tie a person to the wall and it could send them into Space, it was designed with none of the saftey features requires by NASA for a true modern manned space vehicle. It was also very much representative of a learning step in SpaceX's evolution as a spaceflight company.
In 2010, NASA began the Commercial Crew Development program (CCDev). The goal was to buy manned access to low earth orbit as a service from two launch providers. While NASA would focus on the Moon, Mars and Beyond with the entirely different Orion capsule and Space Launch system and handle all construction and launch aspects of that program, the goal with CCDev was to develop commerical manned launch capabilities so NASA could simply by flights. There were three final entries: the SpaceX DragonV2, the Boeing Starliner, and the Sierra Nevada Corp Dream Chaser. After a series of milestones, NASA chose the DragonV2 and the Starliner. The Starliner, which is considerably different than the Dragon2 and launches on a man-rated Atlas V, will see its first two flights (unmanned then manned) over the next 8 months.
Several world events accelerated the need for CCDev. Immedietly upon retirement of the Space Shuttle, Russia massively jacked the cost of seats on the Soyuz, requiring NASA to pay an absolutely ridiculous amount to keep sending astronauts to the space station. And then in 2014, due to Russia's illegal invasion and annexation of Ukraine and War Crimes such as their shoot down of MH-17, relations with the United States soured and Congress directed NASA to basically end cooperation with Russia on space matters once existing programs were completed. Lastly, a series of technical challenges and accidents delayed the Space Launch System's progress, even though Orion has been mostly finished for some time.
Dragon2 is the culmination of years of work that go back to Dragon 1 development. It is mean to replace Dragon V1 as well while in a cargo configuration for Commercial Resupply Services for the second round of contracts (awarded in 2016) that begin this year.
Dragon2 is a big capsule. Far larger than Soyuz, Apollo, Shenzou or Dragon v1. Only the forthcoming Orion is somewhat larger.
This is is a diagram of Dragon2:
For NASA missions, Dragon 2 will carry 4 passengers, though it can be configured to 7. The Dragon 2 was originally envisioned landing on a pad with legs, via retropropulsion from its SuperDraco engines (also used for crew escape during launch), and having quick turn around. However this was found to be unecessarily complex for SpaceX's immediate goals, and instead it will land in the water with parachutes, before being retrieved, refurbished and flown again.
The rear portion of the vehicle is the trunk. The Trunk has a secondary unpressurized payload section, and acts as a cheap and disposable service module to ferry Dragon 2 from it's initial orbit to its destination. Half of the trunk is covered in solar panels. The trunk was one of the driving motivations behind the Dragon 2 design, as (if you look at the pictures above), the service module of Dragon 1, with it's fully extended solar panels, is significantly more complex and large, and thus more expensive. A goal of the Dragon 2 is to maximize reusability, and while it can't be reused, it's cheap enough to throw away. This brings SpaceX one step closer to full reusability with the Falcon 9 stack. While the upperstage is not reusable, if SpaceX chooses to continue down this technology path (rather than just swap over fully to Starship), presumably a resuable second stage on top of a Falcon 9 first stage would make the trunk the only disposable part of the entire stack.
The design of the capsule itself is part of this. Every other capsule ever built has utilized a disposable launch escape tower (that doubles as a cover for the airlock port). If you're unfamiliar with what these are, they are the long spires with small rockets at the top of most manned space vehicles. Their purpose is to rapidly pull away the capsule from the rocket in the event of a failure of the first stage. However they don't function above a certain altitude, so are always disposed of above that. By integrating these launch escape rockets directly into the body of the capsule, and putting the cap for the airlock on a hinge (so it doesn't seperate from the capsule), SpaceX has solved a key part of bringing down the cost of a reusable capsule. Absent these, SpaceX would have to spend millions to build a launch escape tower every launch, which would increase the price. Furthermore as previously stated, the SuperDracos can function in other roles, including decent engines.
The heat shield also bears mentioning. The shape of the capsule, which you'll notice is different than the Orion or Apollo capsules, is optimized for low earth orbit crew return. The heatshield on the bottom of it is made of a compound known as "PICA-X v3", or Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator. It is the Space-X proprietary version of the NASA developed heat shield used on the Stardust mission in 2006. Unlike other heathshields, this formulation is reusable without maintenance for hundreds of uses. It costs less and is more reliable than the alternative, specifically AVCOAT used on Apollo capsules and the forthcoming Orion. NASA chose AVCOAT because it is familiar with it and believe it is more proven, even though it is more expensive and the new version only good for 10 flights before replacement.
All of this is to drive costs as low as possible to increase rate of flight and open up space travel to new customers. Launches of "new" Falcon 9s cost $61 million. Launches of pre-flown Falcon 9s are substantially cheaper (estimated around $30 million).
So what's the big deal from all of this? Tonight's launch also landed on a drone ship. While these initial tests command a premium, the NASA now has in its hands, exclusively from SpaceX, a partially re-usable manned-capable launch vehicle that can send astronauts to the ISS at a fraction of the cost of a Soyuz?
How much of a fraction? The initial flights of Dragon 2 will cost $20 million per seat. This is what NASA paid Russia for Soyuz seats back in 2007. Today, they're paying $81 million per seat. For the price of one Soyuz seat, they can now send four astronauts to the ISS.
https://www.businessinsider.com/spac...t-soyuz-2016-9
This shouldn't be that surprising. Russia's space program is in a real bad way and in the midst of it's decline it's been profiteering left and right wherever it can. In fact, the world over, SpaceX's Falcon 9 is putty pretty much everyone not named China out of business. China maintains a robust launch market due to government subsidies and cheap military-sourced rockets. But all US and European class rockets in the same weight class as the Falcon 9 are scheduled to be decommissioned over the next 6 years. Nobody wants to fly on a rocket that takes 48 months to build at a cost of $350 million, when SpaceX can get you there in 9 months at the cost of $61 million. Russia especially has seen it lose enormous market share... market share that it depended on.
Technologically, the Dragon2 is a tour-de-force. But that is only to enable the economics of the entire enterprise. This is especially important in, you might have guessed, competing against Boeing with the Starliner.
The United States government always likes to buy from two vendors if possible, just in case some kind of failure forces the grounding or retirement of one. Boeing and SpaceX took very different paths.
Most notably, the Starliner is going to be launched by an Atlas V. Even in its cheapest configuration, which this won't be, that'll be more than twice as expensive as a Falcon 9. But NASA trusts Boeing a lot more than they trust SpaceX. Institutionally, NASA and Boeing have been deeply involved for over fifty years while SpaceX's "start-up" culture has been viewed as a source of risk by NASA. And simply put, Boeing, through it's various space ventures, simply does have vastly more experience than SpaceX in building Space vehicles and keeping up a production line.
But right now, Boeing is well behind the technology curve. The Atlas V flies on Russian engines, RD-180s (a kind of post-Cold War business deal). And Boeing is banned by the US Government from buying anymore, which means that in the next five years, the Atlas V is gone, to be replaced by a new rocket called Vulcan-Centaur, which is powered by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin BE-4 engines. The problem with that is that the Vulcan-Centaur is a new rocket, and will not share Atlas V's historic reliability and safety record. Meanwhile the Falcon 9 has launched 69 times and landed 34 times, with 18 Falcons having reflown. Boeing is a decade away, minimum, from replicating what SpaceX has now.
But the Starliner is going to be an impressive vehicle in its own right.
Regardless, 2019 was projected to be a major year for American Spaceflight, and this is just the first of many major events. By the end of this year, the United States will go from zero manned launch vehicles to two separate ones with capabilities far eclipsing Soyuz, with the Space Launch System and Orion set to debut in mid 2020, which will take Americans and their European partners beyond Earth orbit in the decade ahead.
Pictured: Flown Dragon v1 at left, flown Orion test capsule in center, Starliner test capsule right.