Space News by Jeff Foust — October 30, 2019
Boeing and SpaceX are on schedule to perform two critical tests of their commercial crew vehicles in the next week with hopes that both vehicles will be ready to carry astronauts by early next year.
In an Oct. 30 presentation to the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations committee, Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said that Boeing was still working towards a Nov. 4 pad abort test of its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft that the company announced three weeks earlier.
In that test, at the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico, the Starliner will fire the abort engines in its service module to simulate escaping a launch vehicle on the pad. The Starliner will fly about 1.5 kilometers high, landing 1.5 kilometers downrange 90 seconds later.
“The vehicle is stacked up on the stand, getting ready to go,†Lueders said. “We, right now, are on the range at WSMR for next Monday morning to do this check-out. It’s a huge, huge test for us.â€
Besides testing the abort motors themselves, she said key areas of interest for the test will be the separation of the Starliner’s crew module from its service module after the motors shut down, as well as the deployment of parachutes for the crew module.
More:
https://spacenews.com/boeing-and-spacex-preparing-for-commercial-crew-abort-tests/
