SpaceX In-Flight Abort Test Successful
NASA, SpaceX Complete Final Major Flight Test of Crew Spacecraft
“NASA and SpaceX completed a launch escape demonstration of the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket Sunday. This was the final major flight test of the spacecraft before it begins carrying astronauts to the International Space Station under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The launch escape test began at 10:30 a.m. EST with liftoff from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to show the spacecraft’s capability to safely separate from the rocket in the unlikely event of an inflight emergency.”
Keith’s note: This is the question I had hoped to ask via the dial-in line but PAO only took a couple of questions from offsite media: “For Jim Bridenstine: you just made a full throated push for overt commercialization. OK – are you really going to go all the way to make – to allow – this emerging market to grow – like airlines do? By this I mean are you ever going to stop buying government-provided Soyuz seats from Russia? Will NASA barter seats between its commercial providers and Russia? Can NASA’s commercial providers re-sell extra seats on their spacecraft not only to private passengers but to other governments?”
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SpaceX, NASA Gear up for In-Flight Abort Demonstration
“NASA and SpaceX are preparing to launch the final, major test before astronauts fly aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. The test, known as in-flight abort, will demonstrate the spacecraft’s escape capabilities — showing that the crew system can protect astronauts even in the unlikely event of an emergency during launch.”
Update: Crew Dragon Launch Escape Test
“SpaceX is standing down from today’s in-flight Crew Dragon launch escape test attempt due to sustained winds and rough seas in the recovery area. We are now targeting Sunday, January 19 from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This test, which does not have NASA astronauts onboard the spacecraft, is intended to demonstrate Crew Dragon’s ability to reliably carry crew to safety in the unlikely event of an emergency on ascent. Sunday’s six-hour test window opens at 8:00 a.m. EST, or 13:00 UTC. A backup test opportunity is available on Monday, January 20.”
Revised Launch time: 10:00 10:30 am EST Watch Live
I’ve seen some reports that NASA might trade seats with Roscosmos. We occasionally fly an astronaut on a Soyuz, in exchange for letting a kosmonaut fly on a Dragon or Starliner. I suspect that would be on a no exchange of funds basis.
That’s what it was, I remember about a year ago hearing Kirk Shireman say they would still use Soyuz sometimes. Later I questioned my memory because I thought but wouldn’t NASA get lambasted for spending any money to purchase Soyuz seats once they have U.S. capability. But if it’s a swap then that makes sense. I’m guessing part of it is to keep relations nice and to not appear to thumb our noses at Russia, but it’s also a good way to maintain familiarity with their operations since Soyuz will still be a backup in the unlikely event that both Starliner and Dragon are grounded at the same time.
I’ve seen that, too. The rationale would be the same as it was when Shuttle was flying: so that during crew rotations there would always be at least one astronaut and one cosmonaut on the station to be responsible for their respective sections.
Similar to fcrary, my understanding is that NASA astronauts will continue to fly on Soyuz, and cosmonauts on Dragon and Starliner, in a barter type situation similar to the many other types of barter exchanges in the ISS program. In fact the cash charges to take NASA astronauts to space on Soyuz is the exception in the ISS program, most other contributions have been by barter. Also, I think that is the over-all safest method, with all ISS flight personnel familiar with all systems of getting them home in case of emergency. Personally, if I was a career astronaut, I think it would be awesome to experience all three methods of launch!
Hopefully all goes well.
Postponed until Sunday (1/19) due to bad weather, apparently.
Moved to Sunday, bad ocean weather for capsule recovery.
Great test! Great success! Brings pride back to American human spaceflight. Looking forward to the first crew launch in a few weeks.
All complete and looked nominal. The Falcon-9 booster very nearly made it but had to be FTSed in the end.
However, the point of the flight was the aerial abort and it seemed to go perfectly. Dragon-2, you are go for orbit!
It certainly looked like the FTS in action. Has SpaceX confirmed?
Yes. It did look like the booster survived the capsule separation in one piece. The capsule accelerated ahead and the booster seemed to be detonated on purpose. Awesome test. I guess they also ran through the process of emergency extracting 2 manequins from the capsule. I hope to see more photos and video.
Considering that there was no mention of FTS in the post test news conference, and since FTS was not planned, I would say that is pretty much confirmation that it did not occur.
I’m actually shocked F9 lasted as long as it did with no Dragon 2 “nose cone” on top.
I wonder if NASA will require SpaceX do seven more successful flights of the booster in a row since this one “failed”.?? Of course with the quickening pace of Starlink deployments that might only take a few months to accomplish…
Actually, it appears that it was the second stage that survived, almost all the way to the ocean apparently. The explosion was the F9 first stage blowing up, and the second stage almost entirely survived that. It doesn’t appear that any safety termination was ever done.
As usual, a great video about this by Scott Manley:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Success! Now, Boeing, Do the right thing.
Congratulations! A really great flight! Go SpaceX!
Why doesn’t Boeing have to do an IFA test?
As Cessna Driver noted, such a test was not a requirement. But Boeing was taking a risk by not putting one into their proposal. A test program which satisfied NASA was required. Boeing guessed (correctly) that their other tests and development process would satisfy NASA. If they had been wrong about that, they wouldn’t have gotten the contract. But they did guess right and since an in flight test wasn’t in their proposed test plan, they don’t have to do it. SpaceX felt such a test would be necessary to convince NASA and put that in their proposed test plan. Since the IFA test was part of their selected proposal, they had to do it.
So…was that a failed flight safety detonation…since the second stage survived long enough to smack the ocean and burn? Anyone?
I don’t think they had a second stage. Probably just a machined cylinder to stand in where the 2nd stage would be.
Ballasted properly. =)
They used a real, fueled 2nd stage with an inert mass substituting for the engine (no sense in blowing one of those up).
Thank you. It does make sense.
The 2nd stage does not have a termination system, does it?
No, it does not. There is some information out there from when they were planning to implement the automatic range safety system that mentions a line of primer cord on the first stage opening it up to aerodynamic forces and tearing the fuel tanks (and then the BOOM).
So the 2nd stage was the burning piece that hit the water? I see it now.
There were no plans to detonate either stage since they would both be unpowered at the time of the abort and already be far offshore. The tremendous momentum that they had by that point carried them even farther away from land after the abort.
The only time FTS would have been used is if the first stage engines did not shut down as commanded as that could have in theory allowed the booster to head back towards land, even though it is doubtful that it would have made it in that non-aerodynamic condition. The second stage booster meanwhile, although fully fueled with kerosene and LOX had ballast weights in place of engines.
Musk gave some interesting details about the abort sequence during the post test news conference which hinted at the sophistication of the abort system. He also seemed to indicate that the abort itself was triggered by the vehicle reaching a certain speed. At least that’s how I interpret his statement:
“as part of the abort sequence, if the system detects that things are severe enough to initiate an abort, in this case obviously we set the abort triggers to be super low, such that they would occur at a very specific sort of velocity”
I interpret this to mean that one of the abort triggers is overspeed, i.e. faster than planned for any particular portion of the flight. Such as might occur if the engines were throttled too high, or if the vehicle was going out of control. For this test they apparently set the speed triggers to the speed that would be attained during nominal flight near the point of MaxQ.
What he said next was especially interesting:
“as part of the abort sequence one of the things that is done is to issue a command to the engines to shut down. But you don’t wait for them to get fully shut down, you issue a command to shut down, then you pressurize the SuperDraco abort system, there’s a lot of these things happening in parallel, so you’re not waiting for one thing to occur after another, a lot of them are occurring in parallel. But it’s saying shut down main engines, cut thrust, pressurize the abort system, fire up the abort system …. and it’s going”
This seems to indicate that since in many abort scenarios they assume they might still have some control of the booster, then essentially at the same time that the abort system is preparing to fire the SuperDracos it also sends a command to the booster to shut down its engines. Musk indicated that all of this happens within milliseconds. So this would explain why the first stage engines were shut down at the time of the abort, which I had previously thought seemed to make the test less realistic, when in fact it was apparently testing the way that the system naturally works. Musk was asked at a different point what would happen if the engines did not shut down, he said the SuperDracos are powerful enough to pull the capsule away even if the engines are still firing.
I wonder if any previous abort systems had the ability to send commands to control the booster.
That sounds about right. The Falcon 9 (not the Dragon) also does autonomous range safety detonations if it’s off course or out of control. The same system can (and should) be used to signal the Dragon to do an abort. But I doubt if any past abort system was this sophisticated. Autonomous range safety is something new with the Falcon 9 (and not the early versions). The last abort system anyone developed would have been for Apollo, or possibly updates to Soyuz. The computers at the time wouldn’t have been up to this sort of autonomous fault protection.
Thanks for the quotes. And too bad text quoting excludes Mr. Musk’s charming delivery 🙂
I’ve wondered if his speech actually includes a stutter (I’ve suffered from a bit of stuttering my entire life), or if he’s trying to coordinate a blazing brain with a pokey mouth. Something to learn, for sure 🙂
I actually edited out a bit of repetition from my transcription. I am sure it’s your latter reason, for example as I transcribed his statement there was one point where he said the word “we” seven times, but it was quite clear that he was just repeating the word while he was thinking of the sentence about setting abort triggers. In general I think he does a really good job of breaking down complex subjects into something understandable for the less technical, and that is not easy to do on the fly. I wonder if he talks more smoothly when conversing with engineers.
I wonder how he talks with women 🙂
One of the key tests for any LES is a max Q abort. It’s pretty standard – Orion did one July 2, 2019.
I was referring to what technically triggered the abort which is what there were a lot of questions about both before and after. I.e. even though they wanted the abort to occur at MaxQ, it could have been triggered several different ways such as aborting at the calculated altitude when they would be at MaxQ, or at a specific time after launch when they would be at MaxQ. If I parsed Musk’s statement correctly the trigger was the calculated velocity when they would be at MaxQ. Although it may have been more complicated than that and Musk was just giving a simplified explanation to get the general idea across. After all he did mention triggers plural.
But more important in his answer is that while many people had thought they had maybe somehow hard coded the flight computer to initiate the abort at a certain point in the flight, it sounds like instead they used unmodified software and simply changed one or more settable parameters to cause the abort to initiate at the point that they wanted it to. Which would certainly be a better test of the software than hard coding something just for the test.
This also answers the question many had about why the engines were shut down, wondering if they programmed the engines to shut down at a certain time and this is what actually initiated the abort. Musk answered no when asked that specific question, and when asked to elaborate he made the statement that I quoted above about simply using lower abort trigger values. And also explaining or at least inferring that engine shut down is the normal action that occurs when an abort is triggered, which was especially interesting as this seems like something new in the world of LAS.
Well yes, but they did not do an “all up” test. The capsule was a “boiler-plate”, or in other words a mass simulator with the same aerodynamic shape as an Orion capsule. Once the LES solid rocket booster pulled the “Orion” off a rocket that I presume was supposed to mimic an Atlas, the test was finished. Yes, it established that the LES rocket was able to pull Orion off a failing booster, but in my opinion it did not demonstrate that the parachutes would deploy properly – you can see that when the LES rocket finally jettisoned from the capsule, it was upside down, for instance. This was a test of the LES rocket, not of an actual abort that Orion would have to deal with. By the way, anyone can see the test for themselves by searching for it in YouTube. The capsule was spinning so violently before impact with earth that I would assume any astronauts would have blacked out prior to that.
Based on flight performance I’ve seen so far it appears that the capsule/booster separation was akin to a stage separation with a non-thrusting booster. Worst separation cases might be during a booster explosion (Challenger?), a thrusting booster, or a sudden booster pitch over.
Challenger as an example broke up because the orbiter could not withstand being turned sideways or at least far off-axis in a high speed airflow. The same can be said for pretty much any aircraft, we can think of examples like the accidents with the XB-70, Tu-144 and X-15. Capsules on the other hand would seem to be more tolerant of getting knocked sideways. I’m not sure what their limitations are however. The Dragon trunk might create a problem but possibly it would tear off in that situation, hopefully not damaging the capsule too badly.
As for aborting while the main engines are still firing, Musk said that the SuperDracos are powerful enough to still get Dragon away. He also mentioned that if the booster exploded underneath it the heat shield should help protect the capsule from heat damage.
Second? I count four. From the last Apollo to the first Shuttle flight, the stand down after Challenger, the stand down after Columbia and from the last Shuttle to the first Dragon 2 (or Starliner, but it looks like Dragon will be first.)
Gap is normally used to refer to the time between programs, not when a continuing program has been temporarily suspended.
Actually although not as long as the other two, there was nearly a two year gap between Mercury and Gemini. The gap between Gemini and Apollo was just short of one year.
Gemini to Apollo was Nov66 to Oct68, just about 2 years.
Thanks for correcting my late night math. Interesting that if Apollo 1 had flown as scheduled in February of 1967 there would have been a gap of only three months between Gemini and Apollo. Two years must have seemed like a long time back then in the middle of the space race.
Okay with some help from the Excel date function:
Mercury to Gemini – 1 year, 10 months
Gemini to Apollo – 1 year, 11 months
Apollo to Shuttle – 5 years, 9 months
And for an estimate I will use Shuttle to May 2020 which would be 8 years, 10 months
Considering that rushing things instead of thoughtful design and management was the root cause of the Apollo 1 disaster, a longer gap might have saved time in the longer (but still within the decade) run.
The great thing about Commercial Crew is that it is designed to address BOTH kinds of gaps going forward.
The real shame is that nothing with the capabilities of the venerable Shuttle is even on the drawing board. The wide variety of missions it could perform was impressive. It’s unfortunate NASA “leadership” chose abandonment instead of looking for any design fixes for its vulnerabilify. Perhaps it is too much to hope that we won’t see leadership like that again.
Starship is beyond the drawing board, it will be way more capable than the Shuttle and I think it fixes all the STS problems. NASA decided to kill the Venturestar test vehicle which is about as close as they got to a Shuttle replacement.
The biggest missing element in Starship compared to the Shuttle is the lack of an arm for doing assembly of structures.
Given the adaptability of the Starship design and SpaceX’s willingness to be flexible I wouldn’t be surprised to see an arm, or two, added to a Starship if they are needed for orbital construction or satellite capture. Indeed, such a version of Starship would be ideal for the disassembly and return of the ISS to museums on Earth when the ISS partners decide to replace it.
And Hubble hopefully.
Yes, and Kepler. Or even better, return them to Earth, upgrade them, and then return them to service.
I imagine that is also a capability the NRO would be interested in, especially if SpaceX hits its launch price targets.
I was listening to “The Orbital Mechanics” podcast recently as they went on and on about Dyna-Soar, a program with a once very-bright future that was cancelled. So many NASA programs appear to have been cancelled when they were approaching solid performance, often due to a single problem (which is probably quite technical). That’s the nature of research, one supposes.
I believe Dyna-Soar was a military program, but your point stands. There was the Reusable Launch Vehicle program, and the Next Generation Launch Technology program which led to… basically nothing at NASA as far as I can tell. Although TRW’s TR-106 engine developed under the NGLT appears to have influenced early SpaceX Merlin engine design. Not surprising since SpaceX’s CTO of Propulsion was one of the lead engineers on that engine.
Dyna-Soar was Boeing via Air Force.
Wasn’t Dyno-Soar canceled because it was a solution (fly to landing) without a requirement?
Partly. In a general sense, space access hardware uncertainty remains. Stepping back from the glory of STS in favor of a capsule was seen by many as a huge fall back. Similarly, McNamara asked if a Gemini-like capsule or Dyna-Soar were preferable. Time has shown, I think, that there is a place for both approaches, depending on mission parameters.
And that was as you point out part of the cancellation, though lack of clear goals hasn’t always dissuaded USAF or NASA. This was a case in my opinion where just a bit more leadership would have taken the US in a dramatically different, and fruitful, direction.
Maybe NASA doesn’t have a program, but down Texas way SpaceX is building a replacement that exceeds the capabilities of the Shuttle system.
Well, an almost complete redesign would have been needed to address Shuttle’s key vulnerablities, and that would have been extraordinarily expensive – not least because the tech was a few decades old at that point.
In any case, it’s time NASA got out of the launch vehicle business, and operated as a customer.
The Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser was orinally planned to be man-rated and maybe it can be following successful SSF flights.
Also the Boeing X-37B could be the basis for aman-rated vehicle.
Dream Chaser is an elegant bit of engineering that is being developed for both crewed and non-crewed missions. And despite NASA’s underwhelming support, SN chugs along.
Most of the vulnerabilities (or flaws) in the Shuttle were a result of the variety of missions it could preform. The design was driven, hard, to satisfy a huge number of requirements, many of which were never actually used. That led to all sorts of design choices that later caused problems. We’ve currently got (or at least will soon have) a mixed fleet. Cargo can go up on launch vehicles which don’t have to worry about crew accommodations or safety. Crew can go up in vehicles which are optimized for carrying crew, without being oversized with a big payload bay. I don’t see any problem with that, anymore than the fact that few people commute to work in a tractor-trailer.
Would those include the “capabilities” of risking the lives of five to seven incredibly capable human beings just to launch a payload that could be launched by a 100x less expensive, reusable, unscrewed LV? The best that could be said for the Shuttle was that was good for repair and ISS construction missions, but you could do both of those kinds of tasks without a Shuttle Orbiter.
Unfair. At least partly; and a judgement that gained credence with time but wasn’t quite as obvious in the early years. At worst, your point is a straw-man. Nobody sees ‘trading’ lives.
Still, from the POV of the STS design window, imagining such a capable and muscular vehicle was seen to have benefits; time and experience provided difficult lessons, not all unforeseen, I grant you.
We’ve learned quite a bit. One critical lesson, as Dr. Crary points out, is the need for specialization in vehicles.
I didn’t write “trade,” which I assume no one meant to do, I wrote “risk,” which many people involved in the design and management of the program were concerned with, although perhaps with less of a system view of the risks than we could wish with 20-20 hindsight.
I was not involved in any of those efforts, so I don’t know what capabilities and “muscularities” might have overriden common sense, although I’m given to understand that cross-range capability was strongly desired by DOD. After the Challenger disaster, the DOD decided it didn’t need manned, cross-range capability after all. At least not for the next three and a half decades.
Is rocket-powered space flight now ‘safe’?
It’s a perhaps-grisly question, but a relevant one that is no doubt well-considered by SX, and NASA, and Russia, and everyone else.
What a question, I know. Like many, I’m sure, I cringe every single time a rocket lights up on the pad, SX or any other rocket. And why not? There is a hell of a lot of potential energy sitting there, every single time.
Have SX/NASA/Boeing made rocket launches safe? Now that there’s a way out of even the most energetic part of the profile? (And not meaning to slight the Russians, who recently demonstrated an unplanned escape, albeit in different circumstances).
Have we done the seemingly impossible? Returning Americans to space, and lapping every other program with very high levels of safety at the same time?
Putting the question another way – and indeed it’s a question for the much more technical and learned denizens hereabouts – what is left? What could happen to the rocket in normal flight that is not escapable?
The benchmark that is often used is passenger airlines, but even with all of the efforts spaceflight is far from that level of safety. One big advantage that commercial aviation has, besides the fact that they fly subsonic and at relatively low altitude, is a flight rate in both testing and in operation that is astronomically higher than spaceflight. This allows continuous and relatively fast learning and modifications to occur.
Just think of how many different types of passenger airliners have been built worldwide just in the jet age. Meanwhile you can count on two hands the different types of human spacecraft that have been built in the same time period. And then compare the number of human spaceflights with the number of jet airliner flights that have occurred in the last sixty years. The much slower pace and flight rate for space travel makes learning and developing safe systems much harder.
Depends on how you define “safe.”
Safer than the Shuttle? Safer than Apollo, Gemini, or Mercury? The answer is unquestionably “yes.”
Safer than Soyuz? Harder to tell, but it has the promise. Of course, Soyuz has a pretty good record as a space vehicle over the past four decades or so (albeit with declining QC in recent years).
Reaching “airliner safe” is going to take a lot more time.
Perhaps the issue of defining “safe” is closer to the issue, as you point out.
A very brief internet search, and staying mostly with rounded approximations, posits 8-10,000 airplanes taking off in the world, per hour. Call it 9×10^3, or 2×10^5 per day, or 7.3×10^7 per year. Yikes. IATA says about half that number, carrying 3 Billion passengers. The Guardian reports about 86 accidents per year over recent five years; 20% of which involved fatalities. They also report hull loss rate of 0.41/ million miles.
So. As Steve point out, airplanes have the benefit of frequency, and an enlightened attitude towards improvement.
The key statistic to me is about one airplane per two million miles. I can’t think of a way to relate that to rocket travel. A ‘hull loss’ for SX/ Boeing wold be 9 or fewer people. In the realm of capsules, it is possible that we are already approaching airline safety. For Starship, there are many more passengers, of course.
Which gets back to the original question: where are the weak points that remain? Does anyone know? (surely yes).
>> Which gets back to the original question: where are the weak points that remain? Does anyone know? (surely yes).<<
One weak point is humans. Throughout the process, from writing requirements to getting the crew out of the vehicle safely after landing.
>> Is rocket-powered space flight now ‘safe’?
It’s a perhaps-grisly question, but a relevant one that is no doubt
well-considered by SX, and NASA, and Russia, and everyone else. <<
It depends on how “safe” is defined. Is commercial air travel safe? Are students riding in a school bus, without seat belts and air bags, safe? Is riding a bike in a marked bike lane, while wearing a state-of-the-art bike helmet, safe? I am not being flippant. The core question about safety is: What risk is acceptable?
“Is riding a bike in a marked bike lane, while wearing a state-of-the-art bike helmet, safe?”
No, not with all the blind-when-it-comes-to-bikes drivers around the US, just safer than riding while not wearing a helmet. All safety measures are about reduction in risk, but the only way to reduce the risk of any activity to zero is not to engage in it. In other words, someone has to designate what an acceptable level of risk is, as NASA does with launch go-no go decisions.
Keith wrote:
Which raises a few questions, and observations.
Recent discussion about how Boeing has captured the FAA comes to mind while watching the so-called space journalists at a news conference, who appear to be afraid of asking any sort of challenging question. That not being true, actually, of our host.
And question: is it a fact that SX cannot sell seats on the open market? This fact is unknown to me. Maybe NASA controls Florida, and the AF Vandy; but Texas? is there something in US law that precludes SX from selling seats to Mexico, say?
As I understand it, SpaceX can sell Crew Dragon flights commercially. I think their contract with NASA also lets them sell off an extra seat on a Crew Dragon flight to ISS (although it may only be Boeing who got that written into their contract.) Of course, flying an extra person does raise the question of what the passenger would do on arrival. Presumably, NASA retails full control of who is allowed to board ISS, how long they can stay and what they can do there.
As far as owning the facilities, the Crew Dragon only launches out of LC-39A, which is NASA property under a long-term lease to SpaceX. But it’s the 45th Space Wing of the US Space Force which provides much of the non-SpaceX launch support. I suppose they, or a couple other government agencies, could drag their feet if they disapproved of an all-commercial Crew Dragon flight, but that’s different from it being illegal.
Could they fly foreign nationals? I’m not aware of any law against that. If the passenger was in an extra seat on a NASA flight, then NASA might insist in fluency in English for safety reasons. The passenger would have to get to the pad, and that would take some paperwork and security checks. I think that would preclude people from listed countries like Iran and North Korea. Regrettably, I think that also applies to people born in listed countries, and that applies to someone born in Hong Kong, even if they have another citizenship and haven’t lived there since they were kids.
I would think they will follow the precedent set with the previous tourists. They seemed to be allowed to hang out on their own during the day in the Unity module, and presumably required escort to visit the other modules especially when astronauts were working in them. Although they didn’t have the Cupola back then so I’m guessing they will be allowed to hang out in there, unless there is a restriction on how long the shutters can be left open per day. But I think the other astronauts and cosmonauts were usually pretty accommodating with the tourists when it didn’t interfere with their own work.
NASA has currently set the maximum stay on ISS for commercial passengers at 30 days, and has said they will initially allow two per year. This will work if crew rotations for Dragon and Starliner use the direct handover method where the new crew flies up prior to the departure of the old crew, like they used to do on Soyuz back when they had tourist flights. Soyuz now uses indirect handover which is one reason why they haven’t done tourist flights in a long time because even if there were an empty seat a tourist would have to remain at the station for several months until the next time a Soyuz departed the station. Although a few months ago they did have a third seat available on a direct handover flight, the first in a long time, but Russia sold the seat to UAE to fly their first astronaut.
My understanding is that direct handover is currently planned for Dragon and Starliner, it has the advantage of the new crew being able to spend some time with the outgoing crew. Although what to do when a new crew flies up on say Dragon and the old crew returns on Starliner, which I would assume will happen much of the time. Either that makes a tourist flight not possible for that rotation, or else I guess the tourists will have to be trained by both companies with payments going to each. Presumably Space Adventures or whoever will be acting as the tour operator will be handling all of the arrangements with SpaceX, Boeing, as well as NASA who has already set an itemized list of prices for services provided for a stay on ISS which works out to about $35,000 per day.
SpaceX could if they wanted to launch non-NASA Dragon flights and carry a few tourists to orbit for a few days, I wouldn’t think anything in the 39A lease prohibits that. NASA has all along supported and encouraged the commercial use of hardware developed for ISS flights. Although I tend to doubt that SpaceX will fly dedicated tourist flights on Dragon as they would likely see that as something for Starship, and it probably wouldn’t be worth the distraction of doing something like that with Falcon. They might be willing to carry passengers to a commercial space station, but again by the time that happens Starship will likely be flying.
My point was simply that NASA owns its side of the station, and therefore can set the rules for any tourists coming up on a Dragon for a visit. The current rules you describe sound reasonable, but if NASA wanted to change them, that would be up to NASA. (Well, unless higher authorities stepped in.)
There are some interesting dynamics and negotiating that are likely involved here that we may never know about. From what I remember NASA was supposedly against Russia bringing up tourists, but ultimately allowed it. I think it’s a little more complex than just they can do what they want on their side of the station and we do what we want on ours. Interestingly, although I’m going from memory because the last tourist flight was ten years ago, but I seem to remember the Soyuz tourists spending most of their time on the U.S. side, I don’t think they were confined to the Russian side all day, and in fact I got the impression that they didn’t spend that much time on the Russian side, although I’m not really sure. I’m pretty sure however that they slept on the Russian side. Meals as far as I know are always taken together by the whole crew.
I’m suspecting that while NASA now accepts having tourists and other commercial visitors to ISS and now seems to even encourage it, they may still draw the line at having more than one at a time. For example they may insist that the two sides coordinate their visitors so that there would not be a Soyuz tourist and a commercial crew tourist on the station at the the same time. But what if Russia doesn’t like that restriction and wants to be able to bring someone up anytime they want to.
Over time NASA may decide that having multiple tourists and private researchers on board at the same time is okay, although they may only allow that when or if an additional module is attached that is dedicated to commercial spaceflight participants. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I wonder if NASA will make SpaceX wait until Boeing can catch up.
I have to admit the same thought crossed my mind.
Watching the Crew Dragon accelerate away from the F9 rocket was a thing of beauty. I have watched other abort tests using a solid rocket abort motor atop the capsule, and it is always such a violent event, there is no doubt that it is an emergency maneuver. In this case, the capsule was soaring above and beyond the rocket in a matter of a second or two, and accelerating smoothly the whole time, then reaching apogee, curving over and jettisoning the trunk at about a horizontal attitude (I re-watched the pad abort, and that was the same), then orienting itself and descending, all like some carnival ride. Kudos to SpaceX, you have set the new standard on sub-orbital flight!