The Falcon 9 rocket that will carry astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit fired its engines in a ground test at 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT) on Friday, May 22. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now
After a two-day readiness review, NASA managers gave a green light Friday for SpaceX to proceed with final preparations for launch next Wednesday, May 27, of a commercial spaceship carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station on the first orbital spaceflight from U.S. soil since 2011.
Hours later, SpaceX test-fired the 215-foot-tall (65-meter) Falcon 9 rocket that will boost Hurley and Behnken into orbit aboard the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The Flight Readiness Review’s conclusion Friday kicked off a busy Memorial Day weekend at the Kennedy Space Center. The Dragon astronauts will put on in their SpaceX-made flight suits Saturday and ride in a Tesla Model X automobile to launch pad 39A, where the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon capsule were placed on their seaside launch mount Thursday.
Hurley and Behnken — both veterans of two space shuttle flights — will climb aboard the Dragon capsule with the help of about a half-dozen SpaceX crew technicians, practicing the steps they will take on launch day.
On Monday, SpaceX will convene a Launch Readiness Review to go over data and results from the test-firing Friday and the crew dress rehearsal Saturday. If all looks good, preparations will proceed toward launch of the first orbital crewed mission from the Kennedy Space Center in nearly nine years at 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT) Wednesday.
Assuming the mission takes off Wednesday, the Crew Dragon is scheduled to glide to an automated docking with the International Space Station around 11:40 a.m. EDT (1540 GMT) Thursday. Hurley and Behnken are slated to spend one-to-hour months on the orbiting research outpost before coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Flight Readiness Review began Thursday and ran into overtime Friday. NASA officials anticipated ahead of time that might happen, given the volume of data to discuss for the first crewed flight on a brand new spacecraft design.
“We had a very successful Flight Readiness Review, in that we did thorough review of all fo the systems and all the risks,” said Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s associate administrator, who chaired the review meeting. “And it was unanimous on the board that we are go for launch.
“It is really exciting to be launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil — from Kennedy Space Center — for the first time in nine years,” Jurczyk said in a press conference Friday. “I know it’s been a long, really challenging road, and I just cannot say how proud I am of the NASA-SpaceX team for all their talent, hard work, dedication and perseverance to get to this point of five days from launch.”
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirms the Flight Readiness Review resulted in a GO to proceed toward a May 27 launch date for the Crew Dragon test flight, the first crewed orbital mission from US soil since 2011. https://t.co/Y9pANccivZpic.twitter.com/sEAaNdz4FM
“Today, we got a go to launch, but really it’s a go for the mission,” said Benji Reed, SpaceX’s director of crew mission management. “There will be lots more data, lots more reviews in the next few days. There will be constant vigilance and watching of the data and observations. As we go through the mission, there will be other reviews and conversations to make sure we’re go for each aspect, including go to come home.”
NASA managers received briefings from agency and SpaceX engineers during the Flight Readiness Review, including presentations on topics that garnered widespread attention over the last year, such as the Crew Dragon’s parachutes and an abort propulsion system problem that led to the explosion of a capsule during a ground test in April 2019.
“We established a little while ago that the original chute design did not have adequate margin, based on some knowledge we had gained through testing of how the chutes deploy, and the loading on the chutes,” Jurczyk said. “So SpaceX stepped up and did a new chute design, and we had to qualify that new chute design to higher margins than we had the previous chutes.
“The NASA-SpaceX team did an amazing job laying out a test program and executing that test program,” Jurczyk said. “However, it’s fewer tests than we normally would see on a parachute qualification program. So we took a long time in a couple of presentations during the review to have the team walk us through the design, the changes, the qualification testing, and the margins on the chute to make sure that everybody was good with how those chutes were qualified. And we had very high confidence that they will function as we need them to when Bob and Doug return from the International Space Station.
The Crew Dragon uses a series of pilot and drogue chutes during descent, then unfurls four main parachutes to brake for splashdown. At the end of a typical mission, the Crew Dragon spacecraft will splash down in the Atlantic Ocean around 24 nautical miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral.
The capsule’s abort system was also a topic of extended discussion during the Flight Readiness Review. In the event of a major problem during fueling of the Falcon 9 rocket, or a launch failure during the vehicle’s climb into orbit, the Crew Dragon can fire eight SuperDraco engines to push the capsule off the launch vehicle and propel the astronauts to safety.
The SuperDracos consume a high-pressure mix of hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. A Dragon spacecraft that completed an unpiloted test flight to the space station in March 2019 was destroyed during a ground test-firing of the SuperDraco engines last April at Cape Canaveral.
Investigators traced the cause of the explosion to a leaky valve inside the capsule’s high-pressure abort propulsion system. The leak allowed nitrogen tetroxide to leak into the propulsion system’s helium pressurization lines, which are designed to rapidly prime the SuperDraco thrusters to fire up in quick response to a launch emergency.
As the pressurization system activated during the ground test last year, a slug of nitrogen tetroxide was forced back into the faulty titanium valve, triggering an explosion. Experts spent months studying the physics of the accident, and learned new information about how titanium components used in aerospace vehicles might ignite under certain conditions.
SpaceX replaced the suspect valve in future Crew Dragon spacecraft with a single-use burst disk designed to rupture during activation of the SuperDraco abort thrusters, which would only occur during a launch failure.
The fix was tested during a second ground firing in November, then again during a high-altitude launch escape test in January over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Last April, I probably wasn’t thinking I was going to be flying (crew) in a year, but you can never sell this NASA and SpaceX team short,” said Kathy Lueders, managers of NASA’s commercial crew program. “They have always accomplished miracles for me, and I’m very, very proud of them right now.”
Jurczyk said NASA officials also discussed a recent “performance shortfall” during a test of the Crew Dragon’s internal fire suppression system.
“That’s a system tat suppresses any fire or any equipment underneath the floor of Dragon,” Jurczyk said. “The team … analyzed both the hazards there, as well as the ability to suppress a fire, and we’ve deemed the risk to be very low there.”
Jurczyk took the place of Doug Loverro, the former head of NASA’s human spaceflight directorate, for this week’s Flight Readiness Review. Loverro, who was due to chair the FRR, abruptly resigned effective Monday, May 18.
In a letter to NASA employees, Loverro wrote that he resigned due to a “mistake” he made earlier this year. Multiple sources said Loverro violated a procurement rule during a competition to select contractors for NASA’s Human Landing System for the Artemis program, which aims to develop crewed moon landing vehicles to carry astronauts to the lunar surface.
Jurczyk, NASA’s most senior career civil servant, stepped into the role as chair of the Flight Readiness Review.
The Crew Dragon’s debut flight with astronauts has been nearly a decade in the making. NASA first awarded SpaceX funding to work on a human-rated spacecraft in 2011.
Funded and led by billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has won a series of NASA contracts and funding agreements over the last nine years for work on the Crew Dragon project. To date, NASA has agreed to pay SpaceX more than $3.1 billion to develop the Crew Dragon, and then fly at least six operational crew rotation missions to the space station.
NASA also awarded Boeing a similar series of contracts for development and flights of the Starliner crew capsule. The Starliner’s first test mission without a crew ended prematurely in December without reaching the space station, and Boeing will re-fly the unpiloted demonstration mission later this year before the Starliner is cleared for its first launch with astronauts.
The first operational Crew Dragon flight will follow the test flight set for launch next week, which is officially designated Demo-2, or DM-2. It follows the first Crew Dragon test flight to the space station last year, which did not carry any astronauts on-board.
SpaceX has also completed two major tests of the Crew Dragon’s launch abort system — a pad abort in 2015 and the in-flight escape demonstration in January.
Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, signs a human rating certification package during Thursday during the first day of a Flight Readiness Review for the Crew Dragon Demo-2 test flight. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
According to Jurczyk, this week’s FRR doubled as an “interim human-rating certification review” for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
“What I mean by interim is that we’ve validated that this system meets the human-rating certification requirements for the Demo-2 mission, and those requirements feed forward to future missions, including the Crew-1 mission (the Dragon’s first operational crew rotation flight),” Jurczyk said. “We will have a final human-rating certification review after Demo-2 and before the Crew-1 mission, just to certify the relatively small set of design changes between the Demo-2 system and the Crew-1 system. And at that point, we’ll deem the system human-rating certified.”
NASA also determined the Crew Dragon meets the agency’s risk requirements for the commercial crew program. When NASA established requirements for the new commercial crew spaceships, agency officials set the program’s safety threshold at 1-in-270 odds of an accident during a 210-day mission that would kill the astronauts on-board
Lueders said Friday that SpaceX meets that risk requirement, with the help of advanced design modeling and inspections to guard against the threat of micrometeoroids and orbital debris while docked at the space station.
But determining the loss of crew, or LOC, probability for any given flight is tricky. The number hinges on a number of factors, including numerical and statistical inputs, many of which are grounded in assumptions.
Bill Gerstenmaier, who led NASA’s human spaceflight programs from 2005 until last year, said in 2017 that at the time of the first space shuttle flight in 1981, officials calculated the probability of a loss of crew on that mission between 1-in-500 and 1-in-5,000. After grounding the loss of crew model with flight data from shuttle missions, NASA determined the first space shuttle flight actually had a 1-in-12 chance of ending with the loss of the crew.
Regardless of the fickle numbers, officials agree that a test flight of a new spacecraft is risky.
“Right now, we are trying to identify any risk that we know of that’s out there, and continue to look at risks and buy them down,” Lueders said. “But we also cant fool ourselves. Human spaceflight is really, really tough, and it’s why we continue to look for risks and do additional assessments. We never feel comfortable because that’s when you’re not searching.
“Our teams are scouring and thinking of every single risk that’s out there, and we’ve worked our butt off to buy down the ones we know of,” she said. “And we’ll continue to look and continue to buy them down until we bring them (Hurley and Behnken) home.”
NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, the Crew Dragon’s Demo-2 joint operations commander, discusses his view on the risk of the upcoming test flight to the International Space Station. https://t.co/Y9pANccivZpic.twitter.com/49Q3VeYSFS
In their final pre-launch press conference Friday, the Dragon astronauts said they were comfortable with the risk.
“We’ve had the luxury over the last five-plus years to be deeply embedded and understanding the trades that were made,” said Behnken, the Demo-2 mission’s joint operations commander. “There are often cases where a hardware change can be implemented, or there can be an operational change that reduces that risk, or manages it in some way.
“I think we’re really comfortable with it, and we think that those trades have been made appropriately,” he said. “As far as insight goes, we’ve had probably more than any crew has (had) in recent history.”
In addition to the tests of the Crew Dragon spacecraft itself, SpaceX has launched 84 Falcon 9 rocket missions since the first version of the launcher debuted June 4, 2010. Eighty-three of the flights successfully reached orbit.
A Falcon 9 rocket exploded during the final minutes before a ground test-firing at Cape Canaveral in September 2016. SpaceX said that failure was caused when a helium pressurant tank suddenly ruptured on the Falcon 9’s second stage.
After introducing design fixes, SpaceX has logged 59 straight successful launches using Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
“It wasn’t a long history (on the Falcon 9) when we started this program, but it has panned out to have quite a number of flights under its belt, and its evolution has become more and more safe as it’s been operated,” Behnken said. “Thats something that we really do appreciate. It’s remarkable to see all the other missions that have contributed to the human spaceflight program by being, in some sense, a test mission for us before we have a chance to fly on the Falcon 9.”
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
The European Space Agency is fast-tracking a new mission called Ramses, which will fly to near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it comes very close to our planet — closer even than the region where geosynchronous satellites sit.
Ramses is short for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as its name suggests, is the next phase in humanity’s efforts to learn more about near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and how we might deflect them should one ever be discovered on a collision course with planet Earth.
In order to launch in time to rendezvous with Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanctioning and appropriation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November of 2025. To arrive at Apophis in February 2029, launch would have to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is a big deal because large asteroids don’t come this close to Earth very often. It is thus scientifically precious that, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within 19,794 miles (31,860 kilometers) of Earth. For comparison, geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s surface. Such close fly-bys by asteroids hundreds of meters across (Apophis is about 1,230 feet, or 375 meters, across) only occur on average once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. Miss this one, and we’ve got a long time to wait for the next.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid known, being classified as having the potential to impact with Earth possibly in 2029, 2036, or 2068. Should an asteroid of its size strike Earth, it could gouge out a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, flash heating and earth tremors. If it crashed down in the ocean, it could send a towering tsunami to devastate coastlines in multiple countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit became more refined, however, the risk of impact greatly went down. Radar observations of the asteroid in March of 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from hundreds of kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally removing any lingering worries about an impact — at least for the next 100 years. (Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot with any accuracy, but there’s currently no suggestion that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So, Earth is expected to be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis comes through. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis responds by coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
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“There is still so much we have yet to learn about asteroids but, until now, we have had to travel deep into the solar system to study them and perform experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” said Patrick Michel, who is the Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, in a statement. “Nature is bringing one to us and conducting the experiment itself. All we need to do is watch as Apophis is stretched and squeezed by strong tidal forces that may trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material from beneath the surface.”
The Goldstone radar’s imagery of asteroid 99942 Apophis as it made its closest approach to Earth, in March 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/NSF/AUI/GBO)
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, and sticking with it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in prime position to conduct before-and-after surveys to see how Apophis reacts to Earth. By looking for disturbances Earth’s gravitational tidal forces trigger on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity and composition, all of which are characteristics that we would need to first understand before considering how best to deflect a similar asteroid were one ever found to be on a collision course with our world.
Besides assisting in protecting Earth, learning about Apophis will give scientists further insights into how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system, and, in the process, how planets (including Earth) formed out of the same material.
One way we already know Earth will affect Apophis is by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is categorized as an Aten-type asteroid, which is what we call the class of near-Earth objects that have a shorter orbit around the sun than Earth does. Apophis currently gets as far as 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million km, or 85.5 million miles) from the sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational nudge that will enlarge its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million km, or 102 million miles), such that its orbital period becomes longer than Earth’s.
It will then be classed as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses won’t be alone in tracking Apophis. NASA has repurposed their OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu, in 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), won’t arrive at the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after the close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will initially perform a flyby of Apophis at a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the object, then return in June that year to settle into orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
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Furthermore, the European Space Agency still plans on launching its Hera spacecraft in October 2024 to follow-up on the DART mission to the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART impacted the latter in a test of kinetic impactor capabilities for potentially changing a hazardous asteroid’s orbit around our planet. Hera will survey the binary asteroid system and observe the crater made by DART’s sacrifice to gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition post-impact, so that we can place the results in context.
The more near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis that we study, the greater that context becomes. Perhaps, one day, the understanding that we have gained from these missions will indeed save our planet.
