Dragon returns to Earth

Early this morning, SpaceX's Dragon capsule separated from the Space Station and began its trip home. After its reentry burn, Dragon began feeling the atmosphere around 8:30 AM Pacific time, and splashed down at 8:42.

NASA aircraft were able to pick up the descending Dragon capsule using infrared, as shown on NASA TV:

When the drogue parachutes deployed, they didn't give much of a visual impression:

...but the main chutes are unmistakable, even in infrared:

As of this writing, the recovery vessel has almost reached the capsule to lift it out of the water.

Try to get your head around this. Only ten years after SpaceX was founded, they have:

• developed and successfully flown two types of launch vehicles
• launched two satellites into orbit
• developed a recoverable space capsule, something only three nations have done in the past
• demonstrated successful reentry
• rendezvoused and berthed with the Space Station
• brought their capsule safely back to Earth, carrying 1,300 pounds of cargo from the Station

Congratulations to them. And good news for space.

The history of New Space (part 1 of a series)

The unloading and reloading of the Dragon capsule at the International Space Station, currently ongoing, is a clear reminder that things have changed in the space business. New Space has arrived. A private company, and a relatively small one at that, was able to build the rocket, build the capsule, and arrange for a successful rendezvous and berthing--and they're about to bring the Dragon back to Earth as well.

This milestone embodies one of the hallmarks of New Space:

• people working in space who didn't or couldn't before
• new missions and technologies that weren't possible before
• new reasons to be in space at all

New Space began to emerge in the late 1990's. One center of thought leadership was at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--which earlier sponsored the work that resulted in the Saturn V rocket, the Internet, and the Stealth fighter and bomber. Also at this time, some radical ventures that had sputtered along were starting to experience some successes. And there were some small centers of discontent within the NASA complex who were arguing for bolder initiatives.

The context in which New Space was emerging was, of course, Old Space. After the Apollo moon landings, manned space flight had been restricted to low Earth orbit--Skylab, Mir, the Shuttle and the Space Station. Scientific missions had had some spectacular successes, those most in the public eye being the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. Perhaps the most important humanitarian function performed from space was weather, especially detection and tracking of hurricanes. The military continued to use satellites, classified and unclassified, to augment some of their capabilities--communications, imagery, missile launch warning, and weather. Commercially, the most successful space missions were for TV broadcast and data transmission around the globe. However, the biggest economic impact was from GPS, which began as a US military capability but turned into a critical piece of the global infrastructure. The number of space launches worldwide was 100 per year or less.

Question #1 for the "new space" thought leadership: what else can we do?

One of the striking things about Old Space was how expensive it was. (And this continues to be the case today, with some encouraging trends but no price breakthrough yet.) Launch costs tended to drive all the rest of the costs up as well. NASA claimed that Space Shuttle flights were a few hundred million per launch--but that didn't count infrastructure costs, which arguably made the real price over a billion dollars per launch. Unmanned rockets were less expensive but $5,000 per pound to low Earth orbit was common. And this forced the costs of the spacecraft to be even higher--you had to make sure that your payload would survive the launch, operate for years without any maintenance, and deal with the peculiarities of the space environment. No one could afford to "launch something and see how it works." Everything had to be tried and true; innovation was the enemy of reliability, and low reliability was unaffordable.

New space question #2: how do we bring down costs?

Old Space had one other unattractive characteristic: it was OLD. Space launch and space operations--the missions, the technologies, the procedures--didn't look much different than they had twenty years earlier, when the Space Shuttle started flying. Actually many of them didn't look much different from the 1960s! And this was the era when the Internet was starting to take off, cell phones and GPS were in everyone's hands, industries were becoming roboticized, and fiber optics were becoming ubiquitous.

New space question #3 in the late '90s: how can we leverage these incredible terrestrial technologies to enhance space capabilities?

In the next installment, we will look at some of the systems, technologies, missions, and lines of reasoning that emerged during this fruitful period.

Two become one

Astronaut Don Pettit used the Space Station's robot arm to capture the Dragon capsule, which was completed right about 6 AM Pacific time. This picture from NASA TV shows the result of years of work by the SpaceX team, and by NASA:

Dragon obeys its master

This morning's planned berthing of Dragon at the Space Station began with testing the ability of the Station crew to be in control: sending abort and hold commands. Prior to this, all commands had come from the SpaceX mission control center in Hawthorne, California.

Like yesterday's fly-by, today's flight began at 2.5 kilometers below Station. The distance was reduced to 1.4 km, then to 800 meters. Interestingly, the crew did not seem to acquire Dragon visually until it was within a kilometer, as opposed to yesterday when it was sighted several kilometers away. Here was the first image shown on NASA TV, several hundred meters away:

While the ISS cameras and crew were looking down on Dragon, it was looking back up with its thermal imager:

 

A safety zone of 250 meters (one WalMart) was maintained around ISS, shown here in NASA's ISS Mission Control:

 Dragon approached to 250m and held while awaiting approval to go ahead with the abort test. When passing into Earth nighttime over the Southern Ocean, the vehicle looked very bright by contrast at that range:

 If you use your imagination, you might be able to see the plumes from Dragon's thrusters firing. The plumes were actually quite clear on the video image, but were too short to capture reliably.

At about 2:30 AM Pacific time, Dragon and ISS passed over us here in Los Angeles--but it was cloudy.

The camera on ISS's robotic arm was getting good images, which is important since the arm will be capturing Dragon later today:

Once in the sunlight, the abort test proceeded, with astronaut Andre Kuipers sending the abort command when range had decreased from 250m to 235m. That small change in distance wasn't discernable visibly, but you could imagine it:

The abort test and hold test both went flawlessly. The sands of Morocco provide a nice backdrop:

At this moment, Dragon is holding at 235m while NASA evaluates some sensor data. The report just came in that all sensor data met expectations, so we can expect the capture and berthing to proceed.

By the way, here's a detailed explanatory video of the actual berthing mechanical operations. Thanks to friend and classmate Dan Nelson for the link.

Tonight's plan for Dragon

After that spectacular fly-by, Dragon went into an orbit that went above the Space Station. Tonight, the capsule will once again be brought to 2.5 km away. At that point, a shift in the command structure occurs. Up to this point, Dragon has been commanded by SpaceX. "Integrated operations" will start at the 2.5km point, where NASA will be making all the go/no-go decisions. Here is a diagram from NASA TV of the approach plan:

 

The next thing will be a detailed test of abort response: "will it back off if we tell it to?" Here's a diagram  of those demonstration maneuvers:

Assuming all goes well, Dragon will then be allowed inside the safety zone. It will hold at 30 meters. Then, finally, it will approach to a point only 10 meters away. There, astronaut Don Pettit will grab Dragon with the Station's robotic manipulator arm. Here's a picture of what that will look like, from SpaceX's press kit:

Remember, you can watch the whole thing LIVE on NASA TV beginning at 2:30 AM Eastern time. Space is better than sleep! But if you can't stay up, I'll let you know how it went in the morning.

Meanwhile, in Washington...

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon capsule are fantastic achievements of the private sector. The latest mission to ISS has gone flawlessly. So, naturally, what do you think the politicians are doing?

They are cutting its budget in order to kill the program.

Many of the pols HATE the commercial space program. They would love to see it fail. Why? Because they have NASA centers in their districts--centers with tens of thousands of employees dedicated to flying the Space Shuttle.

"The Space Shuttle? But that's not flying anymore." Right--but the jobs are still there. And the pols, who could care less about New Space, about exploration, about expanding humanity into the solar system, are doing the one thing they are good at:

Getting re-elected.

And the centers are looking for new things to do. Perhaps in a future post, we can look at some of the make-work things that are going on.

New Space is going to win out. In the long run, it's not going to rely on government funding, except perhaps as one of many customers. It's going to win out because it is safer and less expensive than using astronauts for everything. It's going to win out because the resources that it will mine from the Solar System are valuable.

But for now, the Old Space government-political complex will throw as many rocks as it can, preserving the obsolete rice bowl.

Fantastic fly-by

As promised, I stayed up to watch the Dragon capsule pass the Space Station within one and a half miles. Awesome.

The events of the last few hours are all on this NASA graphic: (all images are screen captures from NASA TV):

 

The early morning events all happened on the green line across the bottom. Dragon executed two burns, one near the red arrow and one after the curved part, to put it on an orbit 2.5 km below ISS. Then Dragon's relatively higher speed (lower orbit = higher orbital velocity) allowed it to pass by ISS without further maneuvers.


Here was the camera view when astronaut Andre Kuipers first reported seeing Dragon. Can you see it?

Slowly, very slowly, the craft advanced under ISS. Here, looking nearly straight down, Dragon is seen as it and ISS cross the coast of South Africa--the country of origin of SpaceX's founder Elon Musk.

As the craft approached nadir (or "rbar crossing" in NASA-speak), you could finally make out details of Dragon--at least the fact that it's not just a dot:

 Good thing that I caught that one: just a moment later, ISS and Dragon passed into the Earth's shadow ("eclipse") and the capsule was no longer visible.

Congratulations to SpaceX and NASA on yet another milestone in this brilliant flight. By tomorrow, when Dragon has actually BERTHED at ISS, this fly-by will be a dim memory--but for now, it's amazing.

Dragon closes in on the Space Station

Yesterday morning, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted its Dragon capsule into orbit. Since then, Dragon has been conducting tests to ensure that it is functioning safely, so that it can approach the ISS. This morning, NASA's ISS Update announced that all of the required tests had been completed satisfactorily. Some of the tests were of aborts--how the Dragon will move away if things don't go well.

Meanwhile, engineer-astronauts Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers have been practicing the maneuver they'll need Friday--grasping the Dragon with the Station's long manipulator arm.

Dragon is in essentially the same orbit as the Station, following it. Beginning tonight, it will perform a fly-under. You can watch it on  NASA TV beginning at 2:30 AM. If you don't want to stay up, I'll let you know how it went tomorrow at a decent hour.

SpaceX has prepared a truly excellent press kit that has all the details and schedules of this significant mission. Right now the point in the schedule is at the top of page 10.

Waking up on a "New Space" day

At 07:44 GMT, a Falcon 9 rocket flew out of Cape Canaveral and put its Dragon capsule in orbit.. Watching on NASA TV, the excitement of the team was shared with everyone. Launches are nerve-wracking; just three days earlier, the launch had to be scrubbed because of a minor engine malfunction. Relief burst out when the Dragon was in orbit and its solar panels deployed successfully. On TV, the CEO of the rocket's builder was seen running around the control room giving out hugs. I did a little air-pump and went to bed.

There's more to the story than just a successful launch, though. This Dragon spacecraft is headed for the International Space Station--the first non-government vehicle ever permitted to rendezvous with ISS. Dragon's approach to the ISS will start on Thursday.

When I woke up this morning, I realized that it was important to start talking about how we got here--and what is coming. I've been developing "New Space" concepts and hardware for over ten years. Most people have no idea of the revolution that is upon us. CNN had an article on the launch this morning, but unless you were a space geek like me, you didn't know you could watch it. They're talking about commercial space flight as the "new paradigm." But let's also talk about robots, about refueling on orbit, about adaptable space systems, and about using space to help humanity with its resource challenges.

New waves in the human experience happen because there is an economic driver. After Columbus' voyages to the Western Hemisphere, people only returned for gold and more room to expand. Living off government expenditures is not the recipe for success--in space, or anywhere else. "New Space" will combine technologies and put them to work for economic growth and the common good. This is "Rule Number One" of New Space.

With cooperation between governments, industry and science, we'll also be able to do MORE science missions and MORE exploration than we ever could do before--because growth in the sector will make it possible. First there were cars; THEN there were gas stations; THEN there were interstate highways.

It's exciting to be on this ride.