NASA Approves SpaceX's Crew Dragon For March 2 Unmanned Flight To the ISS

NASA and SpaceX have agreed to move forward with the first unmanned test flight of SpaceX's new passenger capsule, the Crew Dragon. It is set to launch on March 2nd out of Cape Canaveral, Florida. "If the capsule successfully makes it to orbit, SpaceX will be one crucial step closer to putting the first humans on board its spacecraft," reports The Verge. From the report: This flight, called Demonstration Mission-1, or DM-1, is a major milestone for NASA's Commercial Crew program, an initiative to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard private vehicles. Since the Shuttle program ended, NASA has relied on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low Earth orbit -- an expensive arrangement that limited the types of missions NASA could run. But soon, US astronauts could be launching on US-made vehicles once again, as NASA did during the Space Shuttle era.

For the program, both SpaceX and rival company Boeing, have been developing new capsules to transport NASA astronauts to and from low Earth orbit. NASA wants the two companies to send these vehicles to space first, empty, before putting people on board. Boeing's vehicle, the CST-100 Starliner, is set to fly uncrewed for the first time this April. But SpaceX's Crew Dragon has been at Cape Canaveral since December, ready to fly. SpaceX even tested out the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket it plans to use to carry the capsule to orbit. The company just needed NASA's approval to make it happen. NASA tentatively set the March 2nd date a few weeks ago, and now that the okay has been given, SpaceX is just a week away from the big flight. The capsule is set to fly at 2:48AM ET from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida -- an early morning launch time dictated by the International Space Station's position in orbit. If the Crew Dragon gets off the ground then, it'll stay in orbit until early morning on Sunday and then attempt to automatically dock with the space station. It will then remain at the ISS for a week before detaching early Friday morning and returning to Earth to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.

Re:

[Aighearach]

I can haz rocket? I can haz science?

I can haz engineering??

I can haz big NASA hat too???

No. Bad kitty. Stay off keyboard.

Re:

[joh]

What is a "normal backup system"? It has three pairs of redundant computers (3 x 2) doing the same things, that's quite a lot of redundancy. NASA seems to be OK with it.

The only time a capsule crashed into a space station was a Soyuz into MIR - and this Soyuz was manually controlled.

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why do you need to crew a spacecraft?

Mostly because 1) things break (often in a way not too difficult to fix manually) and 2) speed of light is insufficient. That seem to be the overwhelming reasons.

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[Aighearach]

Where do you humans think you are going?

Up. And then back down, hopefully.

Better spent improving life here

How would you know? If you've never done it, you don't know how it improved people's lives. Many people believe that "YeeHaw!" is the highest possible aspiration for life. Are you quite sure that whatever better thing that you apparently know about is better? And why aren't you doing it? And that's before even thinking about the engineering advancements and other externalities.

Humans are error prone and make emotional decisions that cost lives.

Who are you to spend my life? Let them invest their own lives as they see fit, at least until they

Hell Yeah!

[turp182]

This will be exciting. I miss watching Shuttle launches on CNN (never in person).

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[Aighearach]

Seemingly there is no reason for these extraordinary intergalactical upsets

Only Doctor Hans Zarkhov, formerly at NASA, has provided any explanation

This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm

"Flash, Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!"

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[c8663]

I never got to see a Mercury, or Gemini, or Apollo launch (was a child for the first, and teenager for the last). But I just happened to be in Orlando when a Space Shuttle was launched, so I was able see to that. It was pretty awesome.

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[Megane]

I had to settle for seeing a flyby of a Shuttle on the SCA back in the '90s. It was a flight that had to stop in San Antonio for the weather and was double-delayed, so the whole office went outside and got to see it make a slight bank turn on the way out of town. It was probably Endeavor or Atlantis, but I don't remember which. I've tried to look it up, but couldn't find good enough records of Shuttle return flights.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to see a Boca Chica launch soon. There's a state park across th

I can't wait for this

[WCMI92]

It will be fantastic for Americans can get into space from the United States instead of having to ride with the Russians.

This will be a better, cheaper, and SAFER vehicle than the shuttle ever was.

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[Megane]

I don't know if you've heard, but NASA is buying a few more Soyuz seats. [arstechnica.com] I've read scuttlebutt that Boeing's previous test of the capsule abort system messed it up enough that they're going to have to scratch it from further testing and use the unmanned demo capsule instead, which could put them a capsule behind for the first manned flight, delaying it while they make another capsule. So it looks like we may be riding with the Russians for a bit longer, even if it isn't every time.