Through the descent, the capsule’s heat shield experienced temperatures higher than 3,500 levels Fahrenheit as it utilised the environment as a brake to reduce its velocity from 17,000 to just 350 miles for each hour. The moment the capsule was about 3 miles higher than the surface—half the cruising altitude of a passenger jet—it deployed its modest drogue parachutes as added brakes. When it was only a mile higher than the waves, the capsule deployed its major chutes and drifted lazily to the surface.
“After splashdown, what I consider of as the ‘SpaceX Navy’ go in and recover the crew,” Benji Reed, the director of crew mission administration at SpaceX, stated through a push meeting very last week. SpaceX deployed two boats—Go Navigator in the Gulf of Mexico and Go Searcher off the jap coastline of Florida—to guide the restoration effort and hard work each individual boat is staffed with additional than 40 crew associates from SpaceX and NASA.
The moment Behnken and Hurley are safely onboard Go Naviator, they will be subjected to a extensive medical screening. In just 4 hours of splashdown, a helicopter will fall them off at Kennedy House Centre wherever they’ll board a airplane to fly to NASA’s astronaut headquarters at Johnson House Centre in Houston, Texas. As for the capsule by itself, it will be restored at a SpaceX facility in Florida and utilised once again for an additional crewed mission future spring. “We ought to be ready to have Dragon refurbished and prepared to go in just a make any difference of a few months,” Reed stated. “Almost all of the vehicle is entirely reused and is built for at minimum 5 reuses, potentially even additional.”
Behnken and Hurley are now the most recent associates of an special club of just seven astronauts who have at any time check-piloted a new spacecraft. And when NASA has experienced a prospect to overview the knowledge from the Demo-two flight, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule is expected to come to be only the fifth American—and initial commercial—spacecraft to at any time be accredited for human spaceflight. It’s a large offer, but NASA’s Industrial Crew Application is just getting started off.
Assuming that everything checks out from the Demo-two mission, SpaceX is expected to begin consistently shuttling astronauts to and from the place station as early as September. “The essential point just after landing will be to overview all the knowledge from this flight,” Stich stated through a push meeting very last week. “We’ll go by way of that knowledge methodically and make positive we’re prepared to start operational flights.”