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Dragon_parachute_test

As SpaceX tries to perfect reusable rockets, it's also working on another important project — manned spaceflight. SpaceX and Boeing are both part of NASA's Commercial Coiffure Program to fly manned missions between Earth and the International Space Station. Sending unmanned cargo modules to the station is one affair, but at that place are a lot of test that demand to be completed before any people volition be climbing into the Dragon v2 sheathing. SpaceX has accomplished an important milestone objective with the successful examination of Dragon's parachute system.

The design of the Dragon v2 isn't completely terminal, and this test was only focused on the effectiveness and reliability of the parachutes. Thus, it'due south not a Dragon spacecraft tethered to the parachutes — that's a "weight simulant" that stands in for a fully loaded crew module. 4 parachutes were rigged to the mock spacecraft to slow its descent just as they would the real affair.

This wasn't a existent mission (or real spacecraft), so it had to be flown to distance over Arizona by a C-130 cargo airplane. When it reached the desired location, a drogue chute pulled the test organization out of the plane and deployed the four main parachutes. All iv chutes deployed properly and will exist examined by engineers to evaluate any potential damage. This successful test gets SpaceX one step closer to NASA blessing to ferry humans to infinite, ending our reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach orbit.

The dummy standing in for dragon landed safely in the Arizona desert, but the offset manned SpaceX flights will utilise the parachute system to execute h2o landings, just like the onetime Apollo plan. That hasn't been office of NASA's manned missions for decades — the Space Shuttle landed on a runway like a plane, but that was complicated and expensive.

The first flights of the Commercial Crew Programme is expected to take place in tardily 2017 or early 2018. SpaceX hopes to somewhen be able to country the Dragon v2 sheathing vertically, but like it plans to practice with the Falcon 9. It recently tested that system, which uses the sheathing'due south eight SuperDraco engines to gently lower the craft downwards. In that test, a mockup of the Dragon hovered in place for several seconds. These are besides the engines that volition power the emergency abort organization, capable of wrenching the crew module free of a doomed rocket.

NASA is putting both SpaceX and Boeing through extensive testing before information technology certifies them for crewed missions, but everything is going equally planned. SpaceX has merely had ane catastrophic launch failure of the Falcon 9, but fifty-fifty in that instance, the company believes information technology would have been able to save the Dragon capsule if the abort and parachute systems had been in place at the time.