Dragon Is About To Fly While Orion Is Still on Paper

Cosmonauts got used to hands-off ground control of Soyuz back in the 1960s and by 1980 the Soyuz-T model delivered fully automated rendezvous and docking.

IMHO American astronauts will fly aboard the Dragon. And BTW no astronaut will "land" Orion either. The days of piloted U.S. manned spacecraft are over until a lifting body runway lander is developed.

Not sure where the stick will be coming from to fly Orion. Early designs were not supposed to have any, the whole thing being automated. Also, the astronaut recruitment policy was supposed to change from hiring MS and Pilots to that of Operators (I believe the reference is in a Air&Space magazine). In essence if you want to explore Space you'll have to go with mostly automated vehicles even for re-entry.

Frank: This is also true for a lifting body. Remember that astronauts for the most part don't fly the Shuttle and that Buran did a fully automated flight years ago. So even such vehicles would most likely require very little human interaction.

The only situation I can see that happen is for a fail-safe type system but since it would mostly go through computers it is not even clear it'd be necessary.

FWIW.

Frank,

What I'm really curious about is who is going to make the decision at NASA whether to recommend cancelling Orion, Ares I, etc. and who will have more pull within NASA and with the White House, Bolden or the DA? Is the White House really satisfied with what this whole "study" exercise has dumped on its lap so far and what it is likely to do so soon?

If only you knew the re-entry controls issues behind lifting bodies, you wouldn't write that--not good.

Dragon is so untested as to render it nothing more than a pressurized boiler plate. I'm sure for LEO missions it will eventually evolved into a great manned spacecraft.

Does anyone here remember their fluid dynamics, that drag is the square of velocity? So heat friction from drag is thusly so. 17k mph vs 25k mph...which one do we think Dragon is designed for? The easy one, that being 17k mph.

Orion wasn't meant as a LEO spacecraft alone, but for missions far beyond LEO. People keep forgetting that. Which means that Orion's TPS is being designed for >25k mph re-entry.

But if Dragon gets the low-hanging business while NASA looses funding for building a craft that can re-enter from beyond LEO missions, we loose the Moon and beyond Moon missions. Which means we've given up the Shuttle for what? A smaller craft with no cargo hold. Am I the only one bothered by that?

I have to say that this is a very petty quibble to have. As Frank correctly points out, there is very little 'flying' to be done on blunt-based capsule spacecraft anyway. The astronauts will still need to be trained to do manual ascent, re-entry and rendezvous in case of a failure in the automatic flight control system (no matter how unlikely) and I'm sure that the exploration program will give the occasional challenge - automated approaches to a largely-unexplored multi-megaton spinning rocks are pretty difficult to code, after all.

I think that those who are so upset about the thought of flying on a commercial crew taxi should ask themselves this: If your only way into space is a vehicle that, in normal operation, is fully-automated, would this make you want to quit and find a different job? If the ~5 minutes of docking are that critical part of the experience for them, I think that they are going to have a lot of disappointments in life.

@ Jim,

The Dragon has broadly the same capsule geometry as the Soyuz which, as you may recall, was originally designed as a crew return vehicle for a lunar landing mission. Now, I do not believe in the slightest that this is in SpaceX's immediate plans but there is no fundamental reason why the Dragon spacecraft cannot be modified to handle interplaetary flights (the Moon or further).

Given the way Elon Musk talks about beyond-LEO goals, I do believe that such a capability is in his 'things to do' list. It wouldn't be cheap but, then again, what part of SpaceX's operations is?

Where in the article did they state that the manned Dragon is "about to fly"?

They don't have displays and controls yet...
"We'll do what makes sense from the point of view of using humans to increase the reliability of the whole system. To do that, we have to give them displays and controls."

They don't have an escape system yet...
"Much still needs to be done, says Max Vozoff, Dragon project manager. The biggest challenge is creating a launch-escape system that would jettison Dragon off of Falcon 9 in event of a disaster. SpaceX wants to design a liquid-fuel system, like everything else, in house."

And how is Orion only on paper? There is metal being bent, software being written, etc. Just like the Dragon.

But why are we comparing the two? They have separate requirements. Even SpaceX knows this.
"People are very worried [our] efforts are a threat to Constellation rather than an enabler," says Bowersox. "We don't want to compete like that. We want to enable. We want to provide a cheap way to get to station so you can spend money to do the exciting exploration things."

This article summary is pure FUD.

I have to agree with Waste. The headline for this link was: "Dragon Is About To Fly While Orion Is Still on Paper".

C'mon Keith. Really? That's the unbiased synopsis?

So the parachute drop tests, the ocean stability tests, the LAS testing, PA-1 on deck, the FULL SCALE GROUND TEST ARTICLE (not a mockup), and literally dozens of component level testing on sensors and propulsion elements constitutes "paper"?

Frank: I think you overestimate how little flying is actually done manually by the crew in the Shuttle over 90% of the entry profile. Flying around the HAC is the endgame. No human balances heat load, heat rate, max-g, and down range energy management to a target on the other side of the globe in their head to 'barnstorm' a manually piloted entry with a winged vehicle....not unless they've replaced TPS with forcefields.

But to be fair, final landing and final docking are two areas that it makes sense to have humans involved to respond to the unexpected and save the mission...or themselves. Just doesn't seem like people should be mucking around with ascent, bulk orbit change maneuvers, or most of entry.

$0.02

Perhaps a better title for this piece would be "Dragon Hoping to Fly a Manned Mission" - they are not close to ready to do so. Their cargo supply may be "ready" to fly, but they are not ready to put humans in it!

All I can say is, keep up that attitude, and the Dragon people may hire astronauts outside of NASA to fly thier craft.

So how many astronauts has Space X launched into to orbit and successfully returned them safely to the Earth over how many years?

We're still talking about a paper 'Dragon' until Space X finally has a history a-- manned-- space flight.

Is an assumption being made that the design of the Dragon launch escape system is not going to require a redesign of the capsule?

What level of analysis has SpaceX done to date on their proposed launch escape system?

How much supercomputer time is going to be required to analyze a problem which may be time dependent?

Can someone convince me that SpaceX is not going to go back to paper?

I would say that the assumption is wrong for one and one reason only - the crewed Dragon was always the final product. The cargo Dragon was merely an interim product to get USG funding for the project. So, it is reasonable to assume that SpaceX started with the design required for crewed spaceflight and then simply "did a Progress" and turned it into an unmanned cargo hauler.

As for supercomputer time... Well, I suspect that NASA uses a supercomputer because it can. On the other hand, I'm not sure that this is a necessity. The re-entry equations are public domain, so it wouldn't be that difficult for SpaceX's R&D staff to acquire them and plug the Dragon geometry and flight dynamic data into it.

That said, the design can't be finished yet and won't be until after a few flights of the cargo Dragon so that SpaceX can get real-world data on the Dragon's performance through ascent so that the required power of LAS motor and other factors can be verified.

SpaceX's slides from the June 17th meeting of the HSFP committee shows a Dragon with a launch escape rocket. For such a system, a higher order analysis (supercomputers) may be needed depending on the trajectory required to minimize the possibility that the capsule is damaged by fragments or that fragments (possibly very hot) burn holes into the parachute. There could be interactions with the LAS motor and the aerodynamics. Also, depending on mach number and angle of attack, the aerodynamics can be very non linear, even without a LAS motor firing. For example, as a rule of thumb, a cylindrical tower will start to build up a vortex sheet past 5 degrees angle of attack. The LAS plume will interact with this, and all of it will then interact with the capsule. Then add transonic effects on top. This must be taken into account when designing the GNC for the abort system.

Of course, if there is sensitivity to the plume, the LAS motor must be sized before doing the simulations. So, if they haven't sized it, there is a possibility they have not done the higher order simulations. Does anyone know if they have?

How much supercomputer time is going to be required to analyze a problem which may be time dependent?

Are you suggesting that a company run by Elon Musk is going to run into problems due to insufficient computational power? Seriously?

Also keep in mind that the desktop and workstation computers of today are equivalent to the supercomputers of a few years ago. There's also things like Amazon cloud computing for problems which parallelize well.

"Are you suggesting that a company run by Elon Musk is going to run into problems due to insufficient computational power? Seriously?"

I can't ball park what resources Elon Musk is going to need since I don't have the details. And I don't know what he can afford. If you can can describe to me the launch abort trajectory (angle of incidence, angle or roll, and Mach number time history) that would help. Also, confirm to me that they are going with the tower.

The advancement of computers has been wonderful! It's enabled me to develop and test CFD codes without a lot of investment in hardware.

I didn't realize that an export restricted and/or ITAR computer code could be placed on Amazon cloud computing. (Are the computers located in the US?) Something for me to look into.

Lets get this straight, this is not about Dragon or Orion. This is about two very different organizations doing business in very different ways.

Start with NASA, a vast government agency with tens of not hundred of thousands of employee's spread across the US and in fact around the world. It does things slowly and in costly ways. It's primary purpose is to benefit the contractors working for it. Now understand I'm jesting about this but in some ways it's true. NASA has spent $35 billion on CxP and yet only has one test rocket that may launch and some boilerplate Orions. The rest is on paper and .pps.

Now to SpaceX, which is building the Dragon. This is a company that is owned by a dotcom guy who thinks small, is fast moving. I think the latest figure was it had 700 employee's. It manufactures almost everything in-house, allowing for total control of the products it makes, and all of the thinking that goes along with it. It is now the largest rocket engine producer in the country in terms of number of engines in production.

The Dragon was designed from day one to be manned. The TPS is PICA, the same stuff used on the Stardust mission, which had a reentry speed of 28.9k/mph, which is faster then a lunar return reentry.

F9 was designed for the start to be 140% over designed for man rating, not the new NASA standard of 125% which CxP is using.

I thought that CxP was a bad plan from the beginning due to the fact that Apollo was designed to get men to the moon and back, not build bases, ect. Time for NASA to get the REBOOT.