Dragon COTS Demo Flight Briefing
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (1)
Transcript
0:02Josh ByerlyGood afternoon, everybody. From the Johnson Space center here in Houston, Texas, I'm Josh Beyrle. We'd like to welcome you to today's news conference as we take a look at the upcoming historic demonstration mission by SpaceX to the International Space Station.
0:14Josh ByerlyWe are joined by an entire panel today, which includes Bill Gerstenmayer, NASA's associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations. We also have Mike Suffredini, the Program Manager for the International Space Station.
0:26Josh ByerlyWe are also joined by Alan Lindemoyer, NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program Manager, as well as Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer and chief designer for SpaceX. And finally, we have Holly Ridings, who is the NASA Flight Director, who will be on console during the upcoming flight.
0:41Josh ByerlyWe'll start off with Bill.
0:43Bill GerstenmaierThanks, Josh. Today we did the flight readiness review for the SpaceX Dragon flight. This was not a shuttle flight review in the sense that we didn't really look at all the aspects of the launch.
0:56Bill GerstenmaierWe really just focused really on the ISS portion of the launch. This is very similar to what we've done in the past for the Automated Transfer Vehicle and also for the Japanese transfer vehicle, the htv.
1:08Bill GerstenmaierWhat we do in the review is we make sure that the station is ready to receive the vehicles, that the teams are trained, that the crew on orbit is ready, that we thought about all the contingencies that could occur, and we're really ready to go through the demonstration mission.
1:22Bill GerstenmaierAnd again, I think the teams are very well prepared. The SpaceX team gave us a nice kind of introductory review of what they've done and their preparations. It was a very thorough discussion by the SpaceX team.
1:35Bill GerstenmaierThey've done a tremendous amount of work getting ready to get to this point. They've done a lot of work in terms of both hardware, getting it ready to go fly, getting the software ready to go fly.
1:44Bill GerstenmaierI was very impressed with the overall work. Again, I think they've made tremendous progress as a team. They've got one more long simulation to go do, one more simulation to do, and Holly will probably talk about that some more.
1:57Bill GerstenmaierThere's still some work we need to do, some more software testing that needs to get done, some other activities. Everything looks good as we head towards the April 30 launch date, but I would caution us all that there's still quite a bit of work that needs to be done.
2:09Bill GerstenmaierThere's some things we've got to do on our side to validate some software and things after the Space SpaceX team completes and our teams will have to go look at that data and then make sure that it's all okay.
2:19Bill GerstenmaierSo I think there's a good chance to make the 30th. We'll continue to work through this stuff over the next week so. On the 23rd of April, we'll get back together again and just kind of assess where we are overall to see how things are moving forward.
2:32Bill GerstenmaierBut again, tremendous progress by the teams. I was very impressed with the discussion between the NASA teams and the SpaceX teams. When I hear the discussion back and forth, it's really one team, they're really focused on how do we deliver cargo to space station, how do we get ready for this next phase.
2:48Bill GerstenmaierAnd these teams have worked just phenomenally well together. So with that kind of attitude, I look forward to good activities as we move towards the launch. So thank you, Mike.
3:00Mike SuffrediniWell, good afternoon. We're always excited when we have a vehicle coming to iss, but this will be one of those historic launches with the first commercial vehicle coming to ISS to provide supplies not only for this particular flight, which is a demonstration flight, but really for the long term.
3:17Mike SuffrediniThis is the beginning of a long term effort to have the commercial vehicles supply the iss, which is a critical need for the program. As Bill said, we had successful flight readiness review.
3:30Mike SuffrediniAnd then prior to that, the program has what we call a stage Ops readiness review. And at that time, what we verify in this new world order is really safety of the vehicle within a Sphere around the ISS.
3:44Mike SuffrediniWe call it the Approach Ellipsoid. And it's about 2km by 4km around the ISS. And the requirements we levy on the SpaceX company and any of the vehicles that want to do a burn that enters them into or aims them to come into that ellipsoid requires that they meet our requirements.
4:04Mike SuffrediniAnd all of those requirements are built around safety of the vehicles and safety of the crew themselves. And so we have spent the last couple of years, several months with our SpaceX colleagues working through the verifications, all of the requirements that had to be met, the testing that was that we dictated, but also the testing they did on their own to validate the performance of the vehicle.
4:35Mike SuffrediniAnd then as this part of the process, as we get closer to launch, we're cleaning up our verifications, where they complete testing, they send the reports to say this is what occurred during the test.
4:45Mike SuffrediniWe review the reports, we review the data and confirm that the vehicle's ready to go. So at this stage of preparations, as we get close to a potential April 30 launch, we're in good shape.
4:59Mike SuffrediniWe still have some what we refer to as non standard open work and that just means there's some of the verification closures need to be completed. They're related to hardware in the loop type testing.
5:12Mike SuffrediniIt's where you get the hardware and the software together and make sure they operate the way you expect. So we have the last little bit of that testing to go and then our SpaceX colleagues will submit their reports to us based on the plan we have and we'll review those and assume everything's fine, we'll be ready for for the launch.
5:34Mike SuffrediniWhat is unique about this? However, as you notice, I didn't say we had any requirements for mission success. And that's what our SpaceX colleagues have been working on and Bill referred to.
5:44Mike SuffrediniSince we're not responsible for the ascent phase or even the early on orbit phase, this is the responsibility of our SpaceX colleagues and we've left it to them to define their requirements and then meet the requirements prior to launching.
5:59Mike SuffrediniAnd it's been a learning experience, I think for both NASA and SpaceX. We've really grown together as two organizations. And I would say not only is the logistics that this vehicle will bring, not only this flight, but in subsequent flights, important to this program, but I think the relationship between a company like SpaceX and NASA in terms of our design engineers and even us program managers have learned a lot from one another.
6:26Mike SuffrediniAnd so that's been a great benefit for us as a program. Quickly, the SpaceX will bring up this vehicle, even though it's a demo flight, will bring up 521kg of cargo to the ISS.
6:39Mike SuffrediniSo we are going to utilize the flight for real hardware that is necessary for iss. And in addition to that, and an important aspect, unique aspect of the SpaceX will be the return of cargo.
6:54Mike SuffrediniAnd we have about 660kg kilograms of cargo that will be returned. Some of it we would like to get back and refurbish for subsequent flights. And so this is a very important flight for us and we're utilizing it as such.
7:10Mike SuffrediniHowever, each piece of hardware that's going up and each piece we've put on there to come home. We did do an assessment, since this is a demo flight, we did an assessment and said if things didn't quite work out, is that okay?
7:22Mike SuffrediniAnd we didn't put anything on the vehicle, we didn't think that we could stand to not get home. But it is always an advantage to us whenever we can try to get additional information.
7:34Mike SuffrediniAnd that's what we focused on on this flight and the return manifest. Just real quickly, I want to talk about where we are in space station, on orbit relative to this flight and all the other work.
7:45Mike SuffrediniThe crew has been focusing on research as we've talked about a lot over the last several get togethers. And as we approach this period that includes the SpaceX launch and birthing, we have a number of activities going on.
8:01Mike SuffrediniWe have the 47P launch that's scheduled next on April 20th and it will dock to the ISS on the 22nd. Shortly after that, the crew will return home. Dan and Anton and Anatoly will come home on the 27th of April.
8:21Mike SuffrediniAnd then after that we'll prepare. Don and Andre will prepare for the birthing of the SpaceX vehicle. And prior to that time, I think Holly might touch on a little bit.
8:34Mike SuffrediniWe've done the prep work. The crew actually is getting additional training on orbit, but not only do they need to do that training for what's going to happen on the 3rd of May, but they also have to do all the work they need to do to get the the other crew ready to come home.
8:48Mike SuffrediniAnd also to have the docking of this 47 progress. And then after the SpaceX gets there, we have the next Soyuz that's going to come up and dock. And then after that we'll have the release and return of the SpaceX demo vehicle.
9:03Mike SuffrediniSo you can see that while we are going to focus on getting this new vehicle there, it is a workhorse for us. It is intended to be a logistics vehicle that gets to station, it delivers its cargo and then it departs so the next vehicle can take its slot or so that the crew then can focus on research.
9:19Mike SuffrediniAnd it will begin that way with the very first flight. We're not opening up a big hole and having this demo take effect. It's an integrated part of an overall plan and we intend to treat it as such.
9:29Mike SuffrediniAnd so we're looking very forward to that flight. And with that, I'll hand it over to Al Lindemore.
9:37Alan LindenmoyerOkay, thank you, Mike. Good afternoon everybody. So when the decision was made to retire the shuttle and continue our exploration program, we very much would have liked to purchase commercial services to resupply the space station.
9:53Alan LindenmoyerBut those capabilities just simply didn't exist in the US markets. So we decided to think like an investor. We wanted to become a consumer of services rather than a customer.
10:08Alan LindenmoyerRequirements that would be our more traditional approach rider requirements, go hire a prime contractor and develop the capability. But we believed that these capabilities were within the grasp of US Commercial industry.
10:24Alan LindenmoyerSo five years ago we set these objectives for the program. You could pull those up if you would. We had to learn to think like an investor. We wanted to place strategic financial investments to help stimulate, stimulate the commercial space industry.
10:41Alan LindenmoyerThen we put some structure around those investments where we developed the program to have the companies demonstrate these capabilities with the goal of achieving safe, reliable and cost effective services.
10:55Alan LindenmoyerWe were looking to help lower the cost of access to space. We believed that that would of course help us out and also be the key to opening up new markets in low Earth orbit.
11:10Alan LindenmoyerAnd the third thing we said is if we're successful in placing these investments and have solid commercial partners, well then it's important to be able to sustain that new capability, sustain the new market that's created and NASA would become a customer for those services.
11:31Alan LindenmoyerAnd by reducing the cost, we hope that this will also be sustained by opening up new markets by this lower cost access to space. Well, we came, we followed through on that promise in December of 2008.
11:48Alan LindenmoyerNot only had we awarded the Space act agreements for the development program for the new commercial services, but we also awarded the resupply contracts for the space station. So we certainly follow through our promise to become a very interested customer.
12:05Alan LindenmoyerNext chart. So this is a summary of the new capabilities we're about to see demonstrated with SpaceX. We did sign the agreement with SpaceX in August of 2006. We monitored SpaceX's performance over the years through a series of pre negotiated milestones.
12:23Alan LindenmoyerAnd this is also a difference that from our traditional approach of regular contracting. In this case, we only made payments after the milestone was achieved. It was up to SpaceX to provide the necessary funding and resources necessary to meet each one of these incremental milestones.
12:45Alan LindenmoyerAnd then when they were successfully made, we made our incremental payments. To date we paid 37 out of a total of 40 for $381 million of investment out of a possible $396 million total on the agreement.
13:01Alan LindenmoyerAll the milestones are completed except for the last three. This upcoming demonstration flight. This is the second demonstration under our Space act agreement. The first demonstration flight was completed for our program in December of 2010.
13:19Alan LindenmoyerA very successful first flight of the Dragon spacecraft on the Falcon 9. An orbital demonstration and return.
13:32Alan LindenmoyerNext chart please. In addition, we also have a commercial partnership with Orbital Sciences. This is a very similar Space Act Agreement arrangement with Orbital. They started a year and a half later than our agreement with SpaceX and they're also making very good progress.
13:53Alan LindenmoyerWe'll See Orbital planning to fly later this year. They'll be starting with a maiden flight of their new launch vehicle, the Antares launch vehicle. This will be launched out of the brand new launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, off the eastern shore of Virginia.
14:10Alan LindenmoyerSo we're looking for that later in the year. They have five milestones left. The completion of the first stage assembly, the maiden test flight. Then they will complete the vehicle for the demonstration to the International Space Station.
14:28Alan LindenmoyerAnd that agreement will finish up with the flight to the station later in the year as well. Next chart. So this is a history of the performance of the milestones that we established in the agreement.
14:44Alan LindenmoyerUp top, you'll see SpaceX agreement starting in 06. It started with the series of design reviews, system requirements reviews, preliminary design reviews, moving into a critical design phase, then SpaceX moved on to the test and production phase.
15:02Alan LindenmoyerWe saw the maiden test flight in 2010. And then last year we requested and received funding for additional funding for our program to help improve the chances of mission success for our program.
15:17Alan LindenmoyerSo we worked together, SpaceX and I, and we came up with.
15:24Alan LindenmoyerA series of additional milestones to add additional testing to help improve the chance of mission success. This was primarily system level testing. Last year SpaceX completed system level thermal vacuum tests, electromagnetic interference test, acoustic testing, and all that was of very high importance to us.
15:48Alan LindenmoyerThere was a lot of learning going on and I think it is going to be very, very valuable to us. So that was completed last year and now we're moving into the finishing up our demonstration phase with the demonstration to the station.
16:07Alan LindenmoyerSo let's talk about the objectives of this flight. We call it C2. That stands for COTS 2. It's the COTS Demonstration 2 flight. This flight originally was to be a flyby to the station.
16:22Alan LindenmoyerThat is, it was to do a rendezvous with the space station and then it is to do a flyby beneath the station no closer than 2 1/2 kilometers or about a mile, a mile and a half.
16:35Alan LindenmoyerAnd during this period it is going to execute prerequisite maneuvers that are required before we give the final approval for the final approach and berthing with the space station.
16:46Alan LindenmoyerThese are the same type demonstration objectives that were accomplished with other visiting vehicles to the station. The ATV and the HTV all demonstrated before the final approach that they had the ability to do GPS navigation, relative navigation, absolute navigation, the ability to do abort maneuvers, the ability to free drift and hold for a while.
17:13Alan LindenmoyerThese are the requirements that must be achieved before the GO is given to do the final approach. That would be a very successful mission under the C2 program and then it would re enter and be recovered.
17:31Alan LindenmoyerSpaceX approached us last year and said they would like to attempt to also complete the birthing, the final approach in birthing to the demonstration on the upcoming flight. So after reviewing the proposal and doing the required safety analysis to be assured that the vehicle and the systems are ready to go, we agreed to give SpaceX that opportunity for actual completing the birthing demonstration on this flight.
17:59Alan LindenmoyerThat will also include demonstrating the LIDAR sensors. Those are the radars and the rendezvous sensors. That gives you the range and the range rate information as you approach the station.
18:09Alan LindenmoyerThey'll be doing some close in retreat demonstrations, hold demonstrations, and finally the vehicle will be captured by the robotic arm and then burst to the earth facing side of the forward node on the station.
18:26Alan LindenmoyerAfter about 18 days of demonstrating the transfer of cargo to and from the station, we'll see the Dragon unbirthed from the station and then return home. We call this mission C2+ it's the C2 mission the additional objectives of completing the C3 objectives on this flight.
18:50Alan LindenmoyerSo let's see if you run the video now. I guess we'll take a look at what we can expect to see targeting now for the end of the month we'll see the Falcon 9 lift off from a beautiful day at the Cape.
19:05Alan LindenmoyerAbout three minutes later we'll see the stage separation between the first and upper stages on the Falcon 9. Then about 10 minutes into flight, it'll be in orbit. The Dragon and its trunk will separate from the upper stage.
19:21Alan LindenmoyerAbout a minute later the solar arrays will be deployed and then it'll begin its phasing maneuvers to the space station. It takes about a day to get to the proper phasing and rendezvous with the station.
19:34Alan LindenmoyerThe second day will be used to complete the demonstration maneuvers I talked about. And if all goes well, SpaceX will re rendezvous with the station and on the third day we'll see the final approach and the vehicle will be captured by the arm and berth.
19:52Alan LindenmoyerThis operation takes about eight hours by the time you get into the final approach to the actual berthing with the station. After a few weeks on orbit, it'll be unbirthed.
20:09Alan LindenmoyerAnd then it'll be preparing for a deorbit burn and reentry. About two to four orbits later we'll see the Dragon reenter, parachute deploy and splash down off the coast of California.
20:25Alan LindenmoyerThat would be a very good day. I wanted to thank everybody. We're certainly very excited to be here this has been a great partnership between NASA and space. I want to thank my team.
20:38Alan LindenmoyerMike Hurkajuk, project executive, has been with us since the beginning, and his assistant, Warren, who's helped make available the vast resources at NASA to help SpaceX. So thank you.
20:53Alan LindenmoyerIt's been a great partnership. We're really excited and looking forward to the launch.
20:56Elon MuskElon all right, well, I'd just like to start off by saying thank you to NASA for giving us this opportunity. As you may have heard me say before, SpaceX wouldn't have been able to get started without the amazing work that NASA had done in the past, and we wouldn't have gotten this far without the help of NASA.
21:16Elon MuskSo I like to be real clear in expressing my appreciation for that. I'd also like to express my appreciation to the American public who are ultimately funding this and just want people to know that we've really done everything we can to make sure that this mission is going to go well.
21:34Elon MuskIt's been a huge amount of hard work by the SpaceX team in partnership with NASA, and I think we've got a pretty good shot. But it is worth emphasizing that there is a lot that can go well, a lot that can go wrong in a mission like this, because you got to have the success of the rocket and then you got to have success of the the spacecraft.
21:55Elon MuskNow, we've launched the rocket twice before, and we've launched the spacecraft once, but they're still relatively new. And then there's the whole proximity operations and birthing system, which is going to be tested for the first time in space.
22:11Elon MuskAnd so there's no space station on the ground. So our work today has been done with, done by a simulation and by approximating the circumstances that it would find in orbit and approaching the space station.
22:26Elon MuskSo I think that's just important to appreciate that this is pretty tricky. And I think also for the public out there, they may not realize that space station is zooming around the earth every 90 minutes and it's going 17,000 miles an hour.
22:47Elon MuskAnd so you've got to launch up, then you got to rendezvous and be tracking space station to within inches, really. And this is something that's going 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle.
22:59Elon MuskSo it's hard, but I think we've got a pretty good chance. But there's, like I said, I want to emphasize this, this is, as has been said by other people on the panel, that this is a test flight.
23:19Elon MuskSo if we don't succeed in berthing on this mission, then We've got a couple of more missions later this year that. And I think we'll succeed on one of those.
23:31Elon MuskAnd yeah, so I think we've got some videos of the preparation that we can show.
23:45Elon MuskThere. We have the rocket in the hangar at Cape Canaveral.
24:04Elon MuskDragon spacecraft.
24:14Elon MuskNow, one of the things that's worth noting about Dragon is that we've tried to design something that is very similar between cargo transport and astronaut transport. So we expect there to be relatively few differences between the two.
24:40Elon MuskThere's Dragon mount on Falcon 9.
25:00Elon MuskHere we're doing a wet dress rehearsal, which means we load the liquid oxygen and kerosene, the fuel of the rocket and just make sure everything's okay. And coming up soon, we'll have the static fire where we'll light the engines and shake things up a little, but keep the rocket held down and then see if everything's okay before.
25:23Elon MuskAnd we'll spend several days analyzing that information. And if that's looking good, then it'll be okay to launch the rocket in theory. Do we have another video? Pardon me.
25:37Elon MuskOh, cuts, milestones. We've got one more video to show.
26:03Elon MuskThey're just elements of the rocket and spacecraft being tested.
26:27Elon MuskAnd I think it is worth emphasizing that the Falcon 9 has flown twice before and Dragon has flown once. So I think a lot of people in the public may not be aware of that.
26:39Elon MuskSo the thing that's really being tested on this flight, hopefully, is the proximity operations and birthing system. And there are other things as well, like the solar panels and a few other things.
26:51Elon MuskBut it's worth noting the rocket has flown twice and the spacecraft has flown once. All right, well, with that.
27:01Holly RidingsAll right, well, good morning, actually. Afternoon, everyone. My name is Holly Ridings and I'm the lead NASA flight director for the SpaceX Dragon demo mission. I'd like to tell you guys today that the operations teams have been working extremely hard for multiple years, really preparing for the launch and leading up to this day so that we could come and explain to you exactly what we've built together.
27:31Holly RidingsThe first part, of course, is when you incorporate a new team, a new partner, in this case SpaceX, our first commercial partner into the space station. There's a lot of technical things you do, the nuts and bolts, make sure that we can talk back and forth between the two control teams, the control team in Hawthorne and California at the SpaceX facility, and of course, our team here in Houston commanding back and forth telemetry back and forth, as well as information that can pass all the way from their facility in Hawthorne up to the space station.
28:06Holly RidingsSo we put that infrastructure in place to incorporate them as a new partner. We move on from there, really, to build the framework of how we're going to fly.
28:15Holly RidingsThis takes multiple years, really, for their team to learn about the space station, for us to learn about the Dragon. It's really a partnership. They are certainly the experts in the Dragon, we're the experts in the space station, and we treat it as one team.
28:30Holly RidingsIt's two dynamic vehicles flying in space together. And it's extremely important that you communicate and understand each team's roles and responsibilities. As was alluded to earlier, our role here in Houston is really the safety of the crew onboard the space station, the space station itself, and then the SpaceX Dragon team is responsible for the mission success.
28:52Holly RidingsAnd we've built a framework, working together, where we should be able to get both of those items successfully accomplished. We write documentation, procedures, flight rules, the things you're familiar with with the other vehicles that NASA has flown in space, and we make sure that the teams are trained to use all of that information.
29:15Holly RidingsSo we practice using our simulation capability, learning how that process is going to work, coming up with failure scenarios, and talking through how we're going to react and recover from those.
29:28Holly RidingsAnd again, as was alluded to earlier, we've performed a series of those for all the different phases of the flight. The last simulation, just the final clean run for the Polish before we go and fly here shortly, will actually be next week.
29:44Holly RidingsAnd so we're really looking forward to doing this run one last time on the ground before. Before we get on orbit. The other big piece of our operations team, of course, is our space station crew, since they will be performing the grapple of the Dragon vehicle, the birthing to the space station.
30:03Holly RidingsAnd so that team, our crew team, has been working hard to prepare for this mission as well. The timeframe that we're discussing launching in is one in which we've got two crew members available to perform the Dragon operations.
30:20Holly RidingsAnd so we've spent a lot of time communicating with them, Don Pedro and Andre Kuipers, making sure that they understand exactly what will be expected of them. They, of course, were trained on the ground, but they have been on orbit for a while, while we've continued to work down here and learn new things.
30:39Holly RidingsAnd so we spend a lot of time communicating all of that information to make sure, really, as the third piece of our operations team, they're ready to go for us.
30:48Holly RidingsSo now we're going to kind of walk through the mission that we've put together. So if I could have the first still, please. You can see the different phases of the flight.
30:57Holly RidingsSo we've got our launch, followed by the phasing, where the Dragon's still far away from the space station, as was mentioned earlier. Come up and do a fly under of the space station all the way around.
31:09Holly RidingsWe've got some demonstration maneuvers followed by all of the new activities in the rendezvous and proximity operations, the birthing, finally the departure, re entry and recovery. And I've got some graphics in a minute.
31:21Holly RidingsBut before we leave this slide, in terms of roles and responsibilities, you know, really the launch and the phasing piece is again, SpaceX responsibility. Until they get close to the space station, that operations team is taking care of the Dragon and designed all of that independently.
31:43Holly RidingsWe have understanding of exactly how that will go, but certainly that's their responsibility. When we come up close to the space station, then the interaction with the NASA team begins and we've got some gates and some process in place where we make sure that the safety of that space station, our space station, is protected.
32:04Holly RidingsAnd again, once the Dragon has left after departure, the SpaceX team takes over again and works with the FAA colleagues and brings the Dragon home and performs the recovery.
32:18Holly RidingsAgain, certainly that has NASA cargo, so we're interested in it. But from an operations sense, the Dragon team performs that function in terms of the departure and the recovery.
32:29Holly RidingsIf we go to the next slide, please. So one of the things that I mentioned was the demonstration objectives. These were touched on a little bit earlier. We do have some demonstrations to really talk about the abort capability.
32:43Holly RidingsThat's one of our primary sort of pieces of our safety infrastructure is the capability to always safely perform an abort where if there was an issue, the Dragon could fly away from the space station to prevent having any type of collision.
33:00Holly RidingsAnd so that's a very important aspect of our safety framework. Different pieces of navigation, as you get closer to the space station, you have to be able to navigate more accurately.
33:10Holly RidingsAnd so we make sure that all of those pieces work correctly. Communication, of course, to dynamic vehicles in space need to be able to talk to each other. And then just the general controllability in terms of the guidance and navigation, you know, how the engines work.
33:25Holly RidingsThose type of this has all been tested extensively by the SpaceX team on the ground, had NASA folks as well involved in the verification. But these are really the very important critical pieces that we want to validate on orbit.
33:40Holly RidingsLook at that capability before we use it in a safety Critical situation. So it's really a building block approach where we execute a demonstration objective is what we call it.
33:52Holly RidingsSo a piece of functionality of the spacecraft, make sure it works and then later in the mission we will need that capability. Let's see next page. So here's our mission profile.
34:04Holly RidingsThis is obviously a two dimensional representation of two dynamic vehicles moving very quickly in space, as Elon alluded to. But if you look at the red arrow down in the bottom right hand corner and think about the Dragon moving in that direction over time, you can see down on the far right hand corner, that's really the phasing time frame.
34:26Holly RidingsIt's not to scale. So that timeframe could be a day or two or three, depending on exactly how long the Dragon's gonna take to phase to the space station.
34:37Holly RidingsSo that capability again is the function of the Dragon control team. So the Dragon will come up, finish its phasing and where the red arrow is kind of pointing at the green line, that's about 10 kilometers underneath the space station.
34:54Holly RidingsAnd it'll perform what we call a burn. So turn on its engines, maneuver the spacecraft and head up that green line towards the space station, ready to perform a fly under of the space station at two and a half kilometers.
35:08Holly RidingsAnd so that fly under is very important to us because it's the first time the Dragon and space space station will communicate with each other. An absolute requirement for proximity operations.
35:18Holly RidingsIt's the first time that the crew on board the ISS will send a command to Dragon and get response. This is just a test command. So it's a light on the Dragon, but it's leading towards the crew potentially needing to see to send more invasive commands such as a hold or retreat or even an abort later and command the Dragon when it's at the capture point.
35:41Holly RidingsWe're also gathering navigation data. So the way the two vehicles navigate together is relative, where you get pieces of information from both vehicles and you do a calculation and then they know exactly where they are in space relative to each other.
35:57Holly RidingsAnd so we're gathering information to make sure that navigation system works. So we're flying to the space station, gather all that information. The Dragon's going to head back into down to about 10km below and then do a big lap around the space station called the fly around, where it comes up the left hand side of that graphic.
36:16Holly RidingsIt's phased fairly far out in front of the space station by then greater than 200 kilometers. And so it'll perform again a burn, another turn on the engines and Move the spacecraft headed up and over the space station, come across the top of the space station station and then down the backside relative to the graphic, again, fairly far out from the space station beyond 200 kilometers.
36:41Holly RidingsSo that entire process should take just about a full day on the order of 22 to 24 hours to complete. Let's see, next slide, please. So now we're kind of back where we started at our red arrow roughly again that day later, and we're headed again back up to two and a half kilometers below the space station.
37:03Holly RidingsRemember, that was the distance that we did the fly under the day before. You can see the green dot. That's where we cross into what we call integrated operations.
37:12Holly RidingsAnd so I mentioned earlier sort of the responsibilities of the different team members. Our responsibility in Houston being the safety of the space station and the crew onboard the space station.
37:23Holly RidingsAnd so when we're inside of integrated operations, which is in close proximity to the space station, the team here in Houston has authority over the mission. Of course, again, we're working as a team and in partnership and communicating with the Dragon team.
37:37Holly RidingsBut we do have the final authority so that we can keep that safety at the very top of the priority list. We've come up to two and a half kilometers inside of the integrated operations.
37:49Holly RidingsAnd now we're going to head up to 1.4 kilometer. The little dots, the little red dots again represent burns. Or again, a time war. Dragon will fire its engines and adjust its height relative to the space station so it's headed up closer to the space station.
38:06Holly RidingsSo now we're flying under at 1.4km. Again, next red dot. This is our approach initiation. So this is the burn that will take the Dragon on an intercept trajectory with a position directly below the space station.
38:23Holly RidingsWe call it the R bar. So it's the radius of this between the space station and the Earth. If you drew a line from the center of the space station to the center of the earth and 350 meters below the space station, you put a little Dragon.
38:36Holly RidingsThat's where it's headed. So it's going to end up in that position. And eventually we'll get to 350, move another hundred meters and actually pause automatically at the 250 meter hold point.
38:52Holly RidingsNext page. So now we're up again on the r bar at 250 meters. The Dragon is holding and we've got some more of our demonstration objectives that we need to complete.
39:04Holly RidingsThese involve the crew with some of the commanding. So you can see the green Dragon represented on the slide will approach from 250, so it starts moving towards the space station.
39:19Holly RidingsThe crew will then command a retreat. And so it will turn and head back towards that 250 meter hold point. The graphic has all of the Dragon pictures spread out on the left so you can see the up and back.
39:32Holly RidingsBut they actually all will happen if on that R bar line, just forwards and backwards is just hard to represent on the slide. So now we've gone to the command of the retreat, we're headed back to 250.
39:45Holly RidingsThen the dragon team and Hawthorne will send the Dragon again towards the space station. The crew will tell the Dragon to hold. That'll be at about 220 meters. And so that will be the last of our go no go objectives.
39:59Holly RidingsIn terms of the demonstration demonstration objectives, we do have go no go criteria and that's our terminology that we use in our flight rules where here in Mission Control, Houston, and with Mission Control in Hawthorne at SpaceX, we take a poll and make sure that all of the systems onboard the iss, all the systems onboard the Dragon, any type of failure detection, you know, the robotic arm, the cameras, basically everything you need in order to do that next step of the mission is in the configuration you expected.
40:32Holly RidingsAnd then after you've had that communication between the two teams and everything is in the proper configuration, then the go is allowing the Dragon to proceed and continue with the next step of the mission.
40:44Holly RidingsSo when we use go no go terminology, that's exactly what we're talking about. So at this point we're 220 meters below the space station. We've completed all of our demonstrations again, the controllability, the navigation, the abort.
40:59Holly RidingsWe have taken the pole and made sure that we've got all of the functionality we need and we're headed on up towards the space station. Again, we're going to cross into what's called the keep out sphere.
41:14Holly RidingsSo it's a 200 meter circle around the space station, which we kind of use as a line of demarcation for us to know that we need all of that functionality checked out before we head past that point.
41:27Holly RidingsWe're going to head all the way to 30 meters. If I could have this slide back please, might be easier. Thank you. So we're going to head all the way to 30 meters and the dragon again will automatically stop at 30 meters.
41:40Holly RidingsWe're going to perform another one of those go no gos. So a pole to make sure we have all the functions. At this point, the crew is heavily involved with us.
41:49Holly RidingsThey've been monitoring the Dragon certainly throughout those demonstration objectives where they were sending several commands and also as the Dragon headed towards the space station with the capability, if necessary, to go ahead and take action.
42:06Holly RidingsAlthough the Dragon vehicle itself is designed by the SpaceX team to really be very automated and to take care of itself, the crew is really there kind of as a safety net.
42:16Holly RidingsCertainly with the first flight of the demonstration capability, we really would like to make sure we've got all of the crew involved as well as the vehicle itself. So we're at 30 meters.
42:29Holly RidingsWe've taken our pole. Now we're going to head up to the 10 meter point. You may also hear this referred to as the capture point. The Dragon will hold again automatically 10 meters from the space station.
42:41Holly RidingsAnother pull to make sure we've got all of the technical capability required. And then we give a final go for capture. We tell the crew that we are ready for that capture.
42:52Holly RidingsAnd then they really take over from that point. They have a command to inhibit the thrusters on the space station, so those will not fire. They'll take the Dragon to what we call free drift.
43:03Holly RidingsSo again, where the thrusters do not fire, and then they will drive the robotic arm, the ssrms, out and capture the Dragon. Obviously you don't want thrusters on either spacecraft firing when you've got your robotic arm connecting the two until it's had an opportunity to rigidize, otherwise you might harm it.
43:22Holly RidingsSo that process will be taken care of by the crew. Now we've captured the Dragon successfully. The next couple steps, we are headed towards doing a birthing of the Dragon.
43:37Holly RidingsWe do some system configuration to make sure it's ready to be birthed. We'll make sure that the common birthing mechanism, the passive side that's on the Dragon is clean of any type of debris.
43:51Holly RidingsAnd then we'll head on in robotically with the crew flying the robotic arm to birth the Dragon to the node to nadir position again, the Earth facing position. All of that activity from coming up the two and a half kilometers all the way up the R bar takes place in one day.
44:12Holly RidingsIt's a fairly long day. It's about seven and a half hours for that rendezvous and proximity operation. The next morning we'll get up and open the hatch for the first time and perform the very first cargo transfer.
44:27Holly RidingsWe're going to perform roughly 25 hours of cargo transfer, both unpacking and then packing the Dragon while it is on orbit. And then several weeks later, we'll get the Dragon ready to come on home, if I could have the next slide.
44:43Holly RidingsAnd so here's our re entry and recovery in terms of space station operations. We take the robotic arm and unbirth the dragon from node 2 nadir, unbirth it from the cbm.
44:56Holly RidingsWe'll hold it out on the end of the robotic arm, make sure it's got all of its navigation capability up and running. And then we release the Dragon. It performs a series of burns again maneuvers.
45:08Holly RidingsThere are three of them. So one you can see where the green Dragon is. A second one at kind of the end of that half circle and then a third one at the end of the second half circle.
45:21Holly RidingsSo a series of three, we call them departure burns. And then the Dragon will head away from the space station. We check that it is on a safe trajectory away from the space station.
45:32Holly RidingsAnd then as I mentioned earlier, the operations team in Hawthorne then is in control again of course of the Dragon in terms of outside of integrated operations. And so they will make sure that it's ready to deorbit and come on home, splash down in the Pacific.
45:52Holly RidingsAnd then they've got their recovery operations that they are going to run out to bring the Dragon on into Long Beach.
46:00Josh ByerlyWe're going to start with questions here in Houston. Then we'll go down to the Kennedy Space center and then we'll go to the phone lines. We have quite a number of people, so we're asking that you stay with one question, one follow up and we'll come back here and go back around one more time.
46:11Josh ByerlyWe'll start off with Mark.
46:13Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)Thanks, Mark Carot, for Aviation Week and Space Technology. And I wanted to go back to the software validation work. Could you elaborate some on that? And if I understood correctly, you'll have a follow on to this FRR on about the 23rd.
46:32Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)If you could sort of bridge
46:35Elon Muskwhat
46:36Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)happens after that to the launch point.
46:41Bill GerstenmaierI can do a piece of it. And then Mike and the others can also chime in. There's still some software work that's going on. Some activities are completing in Hawthorne where they're doing hardware in a loop testing to make sure that the software works for right with the hardware.
46:57Bill GerstenmaierThen when they complete those results, they provide test reports and test analysis of that activity back to the NASA team. And the NASA team looks at that to make sure that it all fits and works the way it was supposed to go work.
47:08Bill GerstenmaierThey'll also do some testing with the actual vehicle down in Florida. Well, they'll do the same kind of thing where they actually run through the software with the flight vehicle.
47:16Bill GerstenmaierAnd again, those reports come back to the NASA team. We'll take a look at it. We will not do a formal review like we did today of that activity.
47:23Bill GerstenmaierWhat we'll do is we think that'll all be okay, but we'll get a report back from the individual teams, the safety folks, the software folks, et cetera. They'll tell us on the 23rd that everything went as planned, there was no surprises, nothing unique there.
47:36Bill GerstenmaierAnd then we'll just continue on then towards the launch. And some of the activities that occur towards the launches will be flight readiness, firing of the engines. There'll be hydrazine loading in the Dragon capsule.
47:47Bill GerstenmaierA lot of activity occurring occur in kind of that final week. SpaceX also does their own internal flight readiness review, and they'll do that On Sunday the 22nd, just in front of this review.
47:57Bill GerstenmaierSo that'll be one chance for them to go through to make sure all their individual components and systems are ready to go forward. So I would say today we had enough assurance that everything is moving in the right direction.
48:07Bill GerstenmaierWe're heading towards the 30th. We're not completely there. We want to go ahead and get these final checks from the SpaceX team. After those checks are complete and we understand where they all sit, then we'll say collectively this is the right thing to head forward.
48:20Bill GerstenmaierSo we got enough assurance today that the 30th is the right day to head towards. But we still reserve the right to take a look at the data, see what the software does, and see what the teams find as they go.
48:29Bill GerstenmaierDo a more in depth review.
48:34Eric Berger (Houston Chronicle)Eric Berger with the Houston Chronicle. Quick question for Alan, then a follow up for Elon. First of all, Alan, is it accurate to say that NASA is invested $381 million so far in the commercial cargo capabilities for SpaceX?
48:47Alan LindenmoyerYes. That is the total of the 37 milestone payments we've made to SpaceX to date.
48:53ReporterOkay.
48:54Eric Berger (Houston Chronicle)And then for Elon, you're in Texas today and it's possible that dragons could launch from Texas in the future. I'm curious what the state and maybe the federal congressional officials need to do to make this an attractive place for you to build a spaceport.
49:09Elon MuskBut I don't want us to get too off topic because this is really about the upcoming mission to the space station. But we are pretty interested in the possibility of a Texas space launch site.
49:23Elon MuskAnd I think there's a lot of good action being taken by the local authorities in the Brownsville area in particular. Not that much at the state level. We certainly appreciate more help at the state level and then at the federal level.
49:41Elon MuskIt's not really, you know, I think the federal level is relatively different as to what state we launch from. But we thought it was important to look at having a third launch site, just to make sure in the future that if we have a lot of missions taking place for commercial satellite launches, as well as launches to the space station for cargo and potentially crew and then potentially Defense Department missions, that we didn't encounter a launch site constraint.
50:12Elon MuskBut I should point out also that we're also looking at potentially using one of the shuttle pads at the Cape for crewed flight. So we just want to make sure that we don't in the future encounter launch site constraints.
50:29Elon MuskThat's really what we're after with that element.
50:33Holly RidingsHi, Kevin quinn with KTRK ABC 13 here in Houston.
50:38Mike SuffrediniAnd maybe this is a question for Elon.
50:40Holly RidingsI'm not sure, maybe it's a NASA
50:41Mike Suffrediniquestion, but can you describe, please, specifically,
50:43Reporterweather restrictions that could affect launch and
50:46Holly Ridingshow those would compare, say, to that
50:49Bill Gerstenmaierwhich was out there for the shuttle program? Are these tighter restrictions or are there lesser restrictions?
50:58Elon MuskThey're probably comparable. We definitely want to err on the side of caution, particularly since these are initial flights, but I think they're probably comparable. And I'm not entirely certain, but I think similar.
51:12Elon MuskI think.
51:13Bill GerstenmaierI would say they're pretty comparable. You see it even in our expendable launch vehicles, we have a lot of trigger lightning rules. Those rules will be the same. We have basically the same visibility rules for the ground observers that are watching the rocket fly, those kind of things.
51:26Bill GerstenmaierSo those are all pretty similar. The winds aloft might have been a little more restrictive for Shuttle than they are for the Falcon 9, but other than that, I think they're pretty comparable overall.
51:40Josh ByerlyJeremy.
51:41Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)Jeremy Diesel from khou. Question for Elon. If this is all successful, everything goes exactly as planned.
51:49Elon MuskThat would be awesome, right?
51:51Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)What becomes the next step, the next timeline, the possibility of seeing a crewed flight?
52:00Elon MuskWell, you know, assuming this is successful, then we look forward to a steady stream of cargo flights to the space station under our CRS contract. That would be really super great.
52:14Elon MuskAnd then, you know, because we've designed the spacecraft and rocket to be very similar between crew and cargo, we're in the process. We'll be accumulating a lot of knowledge about how, you know, how potential crewed flight might work.
52:29Elon MuskAnd if there is an issue, I think this a good chance we'd uncover it. On a cargo flight rather than potentially put crew at risk, which is, I think, pretty helpful.
52:40Elon MuskAnd then we do have a separate contract with NASA for adding in the elements necessary for crew transport. And then there's. But there are a bunch of additional steps that have to take place there.
52:54Elon MuskBut we're optimistic that at some point Dragon will be carrying astronauts and that would be really great.
53:00Mike SuffrediniTwo years, three years, five years, eight years.
53:03Elon MuskOh, well, you know, there's a lot of variables between here and there. Perfect world. Oh, perfect world. Well, it's probably like three years, maybe a little less than three years.
53:14Elon MuskYeah, two and a half. Yeah. Okay. David.
53:20ReporterDavid Hirsch, an educator, Mrs. Sufferedini first in the Given that the ISS is an international collaboration, I wonder if you could give us a sense of what the importance of the international partnership as far as this entire project and the role of international partners in the FRR today.
53:37Mike SuffrediniIt's twofold. One is the partnership. The entire partnership does benefit from these vehicles and in fact, all but our Russian colleagues leagues rely on it. We utilize a suite of vehicles in the future to provide UPMASS to ISS and its progress.
53:59Mike SuffrediniThe jaxa, htv, the ESA ATV, and then the two commercial vehicles that we're talking about here today. And the lion's share of the UPMASS will be provided for the USOS segment.
54:10Mike SuffrediniThe lion's share of the UPMASS will be provided by these commercial vehicles. So it's very important to the, the partnership this fr, just like every FR has, all the partner agencies are represented, and so it's important to them and they worry about not only the fact will it bring it up, but there are safety implications.
54:26Mike SuffrediniThere's plume impingement issues, there's emi, there's all sorts of things that we have to prove to the entire partnership that we meet those requirements. And all of our requirements are meant to protect us from that.
54:40Mike SuffrediniAnd our partners participate in the safety review boards and the analytical process of determining that we're not causing any harm to the rest of the spacecraft. And in fact, part of the responsibility of the US is to ensure the integrated spacecraft is okay, but they would like to see the data.
55:00Mike SuffrediniAnd so we provide the data that's necessary to make them feel comfortable that their element is also safe from those aspects
55:10Josh Byerlydown here.
55:12Mike SuffrediniNo question.
55:13Josh ByerlyOkay, let's come over here.
55:18NHK reporterHi, my name is Kenski Owara from nhk. I hope I can make myself understandable in English, but I would like to ask a question to Mr. Kirstenmaier and Mr.
55:26NHK reporterMusk. Everything pretty much Seems familiar for reporters reporting for htv. And I would really like to ask what is the connection between this new challenge of SpaceX with the Japanese HTV approach and Rendezvous docking?
55:42NHK reporterIn other words, was there any improvements or what kind of implications have you had added to this approach for SpaceX and to Mr. Musk is, I think safety is the priority.
55:54NHK reporterBut as a commercial company, what could, what kind of aims have you tried to implicate into SpaceX's new launch vehicle? And how would this challenge, this new challenge would in a sense, add to your overall, I would say, pursuit for that aim possible.
56:17Bill GerstenmaierFirst of all, for your first question, I think we learned a lot from the HDV act. We did a very similar approach when HTV flew the first time it flew up and it did a series of gates very similar to what Holly described in a lot of detail here earlier.
56:33Bill GerstenmaierSo the same kind of approach where we verify a capability before we commit to using that capability, that was done with the htv and it was a good chance to see how that process worked, how it worked as a team, I would say.
56:45Bill GerstenmaierAlso Holly's team and the flight control controllers, they got familiar with getting that data from an international partner. In the case of jaxa, they took that information, they could then digest it, analyze it, compare it and work with them.
56:59Bill GerstenmaierSo I think working with the international partners gave us a lot of experience of working with a different community that we don't work with every day. That allowed us to learn how to exchange data back and forth, how to communicate and how to develop the basic procedures.
57:13Bill GerstenmaierThat allows us to learn incrementally, that allows us to get into the birthing box to be picked up with the SSRMs. And I think also that the birthing box concept and using the SSRMs to pick up the Dragon, that's very similar to what we did with htv.
57:28Bill GerstenmaierAnd again, that HTV kind of paved the way of seeing how the crew would use the arm, the overlays, they used, the camera ops, they used a lot of that was kind of proven the first time through with the HTV flights that are coming up.
57:42Bill GerstenmaierSo we learned a lot from our international partners and we applied it to the commercial sector and to Dragon, and it made it a lot easier when we come into this flight.
57:49Bill GerstenmaierIt wasn't the first time around. We've seen this stuff, we've seen the basic process and procedure. Although the vehicle is very different than the Japanese transfer vehicle.
58:02Elon MuskI think we're grateful for the prior work of the HTV as well, you know, because it made things easier for SpaceX to, you know, approach the space station because of some similarities in the way things are done.
58:17Elon MuskSo that was great. That was quite helpful. The way in which Dragon is most significantly different is that it returns to Earth rather intact. You know, it's got a heat shield and everything things so you can return cargo to Earth.
58:32Elon MuskSo that's probably the biggest difference. And I touched on this briefly earlier, but because of there's so many similarities between the cargo version of Dragon and the crew version of Dragon, we're learning a great deal about crew transport when we do a cargo mission.
58:54Elon MuskTechnically, if you got a little oxygen bottle and you stowed away on Dragon, you in theory be okay. You could go to the space station if you tucked away in there.
59:06Elon MuskAnd so it's, you know, it's kind of neat in that respect and come back to so. And then, you know, there's sort of a larger context of SpaceX where we want to keep upgrading the technology and making improvements so that ultimately there can be journeys beyond the space station.
59:30Elon MuskSo that's, that's obviously a topic for another day, but I think there's a lot of excitement about that and we're going to keep improving the Dragon technology. So we have an upgrade plan and everything.
59:44Josh ByerlyOkay, I think that's it from here for now. Let's go down to the Kennedy Space center and fly Florida and take questions from there.
59:51Marcia Dunn (AP)Hello, this is Marcia Dunn of the Associated Press with a question for Mr. Musk. There's still a fair number of people not totally on board with commercial, the commercial side, especially regarding crew transport.
1:00:02Marcia Dunn (AP)And I'm wondering if you feel a lot of pressure as you go into this last two weeks before launch to succeed and how important is it in your mind to launch successfully into birth on this flight?
1:00:16Elon MuskWell, there's no question that there's going to be some people who will put too much weight on this flight because it is explicitly a test flight. And indeed we may not succeed in getting all the way to the space station, as I articulated earlier.
1:00:36Elon MuskBut I think it would be a mistake to put too much weight on the space flight because there are hopefully going to be two more flights later this year to the space station, which will be almost identical configuration.
1:00:47Elon MuskSo if this one doesn't succeed in getting to space station, I'm confident that one of the other two will, and we'll work with NASA to resolve any
1:00:56Mike Suffrediniissues
1:00:59Elon Muskand figure those out and then get to the space station. But there should be no doubt about, about our resolve that we will get to the space station, whether it's on this mission or on a future one.
1:01:13Elon MuskAnd I don't think that if this mission doesn't get all the way there that it should be taken as a verdict on commercial crew transport. I think that just wouldn't be right, although there will be some people who try to do that.
1:01:33Marcia Dunn (AP)Thank you. And if this does go well, what is your timeline for those next two flights?
1:01:39Elon MuskWell, that's something we have to work with NASA on. But, you know, I think it's there'll probably be one in the summer and one at the end of the year, but that timing remains to be worked out with NASA.
1:01:55ReporterThis is Philip Sloss with NASA Spaceflight.com, i believe this is from his writings. Can you talk about for an April 30 launch, when would the red arrow that you talked about on the slide for the racetrack that you're doing, about what time after liftoff, sort of mission off time, would that begin?
1:02:16Holly RidingsOkay, so for an April 30 launch, launch is 11:22am Central Daylight Time. And you get to the right before the red arrow is on the order of 38, 39 hours.
1:02:30Holly RidingsSo if you were using shuttle nomenclature, which the NASA folks still do, it'd be a flight day three, fly under. So flight day one, launch, Flight day two is really we call it far field phasing.
1:02:44Holly RidingsFlight day three, fly under. So 38, 39 hours. The fly under itself is on the order of three or four hours where we're gathering that data. And then if you remember kind of from the red arrow all the way around, roughly 22 hours.
1:02:58Holly RidingsAnd so you're coming back the next day really for a flight day four, birthing rendezvous and berthing. So I'll go through it one more time slower. Flight day one, launch.
1:03:10Holly RidingsFlight day two, phasing flight day three, fly under, which is May 2nd in our scenario. And then flight day four, proximity operation rendezvous and berthing. So May 3rd, the capture itself, kind of early morning Central Daylight Time, 7:30.
1:03:30Holly RidingsOf course, crew day, that's kind of midday crew day. So the activities will start pretty early in the morning Houston time and even earlier in the morning California time.
1:03:42Holly RidingsBut the capture would be about 7:30am in the morning is what it would be planned for on that May 3rd.
1:03:53ReporterThanks. And I believe there, if I understand this correctly, there's the primary opportunities on April 30th and then there's a secondary opportunity on May 3rd. Can somebody explain why there are not there isn't a daily launch opportunity for this mission.
1:04:12ReporterAnd is this just a mission specific thing? Thanks.
1:04:19Holly RidingsYeah, so I'll talk about it a little bit. So some of it is mission specific because of the demonstration, you know, as Elon talked about, this is definitely the demonstration.
1:04:29Holly RidingsAnd so there's a lot more things on this flight that the fly under is one of them. Some of the objectives that we're performing, the analysis that needs to be performed of the data that's gathered on orbit.
1:04:41Holly RidingsSo the fly under is unique to this demonstration mission. And so that really kind of helps figure out exactly what the launch dates are. The SpaceX team's also reserving some margin that they can talk about, Elon can talk about a little bit, just for contingencies.
1:05:02Holly RidingsAgain, it's a demonstration and they want to make sure they've got enough margin if they, if they need it on orbit. We're also always working on the ISS trajectory.
1:05:14Holly RidingsSo we've got Soyuz flights coming and going, we've got progress flights coming and going, we've got ATV activities as was our earlier. And so the ISS trajectory is influx as well.
1:05:27Holly RidingsSo when you add up all of those different components, you end up with these kind of smattering of launch dates in the early May time frame after the demonstration is complete and we look at all the data, potentially we'll be able to find those back to back type things that you were used to with shuttle.
1:05:46Holly RidingsBut we've got to gather a bunch of data before we can get to the point where we understand that in detail.
1:05:53Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I can say in future missions they'll probably be more something closer to daily opportunities. But for this mission we want to have a really optimal launch.
1:06:05Elon MuskSo we're minimizing propellant usage, getting to the space station, and that tends to occur roughly every three days. So we just want to have as much propellant available in case something goes wrong and we need to make adjustments to the mission.
1:06:23Elon MuskYeah, so that's why the three days.
1:06:28James Dean (Florida Today)Hi, it's James Dean from Florida today and just following up on that topic, I wondered if. I understand, I guess, that you have April 30th and May 3rd as the first couple of opportunities.
1:06:39James Dean (Florida Today)Just wondered if you could elaborate any further on if there are any scrubs or anything like that. Are there any blackouts due to the range or the Soyuz launch or any other issues?
1:06:49James Dean (Florida Today)And so when do the opportunities fit into the rest of that schedule?
1:06:55Holly RidingsSo I can go ahead and take that one as well. So there's actually a little bit of all of those things there's certainly range conflicts. There are always range conflicts.
1:07:05Holly RidingsThere are some Beta cutouts in terms of space station. There are some ground rule and constraint type cutouts where we don't want a Soyuz vehicle and the Dragon vehicle exactly on top of each other.
1:07:18Holly RidingsWe've got to make sure we get one activity completed before we start the next one. The Dragon has some constraints as well for their recovery, where, at least for this demonstration, they'd like to land in daylight to help them out with the recovery operations.
1:07:33Holly RidingsSo there's multiple construction constraints on the table that we need to line up in order to find an optimized launch window for this demonstration mission. So the answer to your question is kind of all of the above.
1:07:51James Dean (Florida Today)Okay, thanks. And then for Elon, this flight, of course, of course, not unusual for things to slip a little bit, but you were targeting November at one point and then February.
1:08:00James Dean (Florida Today)And just wondering, you know, what has proven to be most difficult for you to get to the point where you're ready to go? You know, if any aspect of this was a surprise to you at how hard it was.
1:08:13James Dean (Florida Today)And just as a slightly unrelated question, I was wondering if there are any plans to recover the first stage.
1:08:19Elon MuskOh, sure. So. Well, I should point out that the rocket is definitely not. The constraint, I mean, is we could have launched several rockets, Falcon 9 rockets last year, if it had just been the rocket.
1:08:34Elon MuskAnd it obviously wasn't the elements of the Dragon that had been tested before, the Draco thrusters or the heat shield or parachutes or anything like that. The tricky part was really related to the proximity operations and berthing system.
1:08:51Elon MuskSo that there's the lidars, for example, just kind of like laser radar, thermal imagers, the communication system, making sure that we can communicate effectively with the space station, with the ground, and with the NASA Tedros system.
1:09:10Elon MuskSo there's a lot of basically electronics, new electronics on the spacecraft. And so it's the first time we're flying the. The solar arrays and the radiator system. So those are new elements to mix.
1:09:29Elon MuskBut the thing that really drives the schedule is the software testing, development and testing, and how that interacts with the hardware. That's where the phase hardware in the loop, testing, that's what it refers to, is when does the software always do the right thing in a particular circumstance?
1:09:54Elon MuskAnd when you've got 18 engines and you've got sort of six flight computers and a whole bunch of other systems, the test matrix of that is enormous. And a lot of people don't realize that Dragon is autonomous.
1:10:10Elon MuskI Mean, it's really, it's a robotic spaceship and it's going to go and do this complicated maneuver where it's going to both with the space station. It's not as though there's somebody flying it with a joystick or that there's somebody on board that can make kind of real time corrections.
1:10:28Elon MuskDragon is kind of making lots of decisions all the time to optimize the probability of success. So it's, there's quite a lot, there's a lot of intelligence on board, on board the spacecraft and all of that has to be tested thoroughly.
1:10:43Elon MuskAnd that's, that's the biggest driver of the timeline.
1:10:49Josh ByerlyOkay, I think that's it at the Kennedy Space Center. We're going to go to the phone lines now. Let's start off with the Washington Post and Ryan Vastag, are you there?
1:11:02Josh ByerlyAll right, let's try Wired magazine with Jason Parr.
1:11:07Elon MuskYeah, I don't know if this might be for Holly. Early on I talked about some of the work that's being done or the training that was done for the crew on orbit.
1:11:17Elon MuskA lot of that took place on the ground. You said, I'm curious, what sort of preparations are being done while in orbit. I mean, is there any way for them to practice any of the maneuvers?
1:11:27Elon MuskWhat type of, I guess what type of training is done while they're on orbit?
1:11:33Holly RidingsOkay, so the answer is yes, there is the capability for them to practice on orbit. They practice with the actual robotic arms. So the SSRMs, they do some grappling practice.
1:11:49Holly RidingsAgain, sort of line up and pretend that the Dragon is there. And so they know exactly, looking out the window and looking at their computer screens, what the arm half of that equation is going to look like when the Dragon arrives.
1:12:04Holly RidingsThey also have a simulator that they practice with because certainly the robotic arm is a significant resource. And so we do have an internal simulator that they can practice.
1:12:18Holly RidingsSo they can do multiple runs, some very complicated contingencies that we wouldn't want to put our robotic arm in or that can't be done without the Dragon. Actually there some abort type scenarios.
1:12:30Holly RidingsSo again, they know exactly how to react. So those are their two primary methods of training. They also do some scenarios where they set up all their computers and all their cameras, more of the familiar type training to make sure they have quick reference marks, they can find all the data they need rapidly and then they do some self study as well.
1:12:52Holly RidingsSo again, kind of that building block approach to hardware use, all the way to the self study with the procedures and talking to the folks on the ground,
1:13:07Elon Muskthe whole demonstration maneuvers and the graphic you showed with the dragon going from 250 to 220 and then 230, 10 meters. If any of those particular rehearsal maneuvers don't go correct the first time, is there the ability to retry the demonstration or is it sort of a one shot attempt?
1:13:32Holly RidingsSo the answer is a little bit of both. The demonstration, some of them occur. You were talking about the ones on the R bar. Some of them occur early in the mission, shortly after Dragon gets on orbit, those activities will take place.
1:13:46Holly RidingsThe data will be gathered, it'll be submitted from the SpaceX team to the NASA team. Certainly if we did not see something that everyone agreed to was acceptable, the SpaceX team might have the capability to retry those as part of their phasing plan.
1:14:04Holly RidingsThat would be somewhat dependent on the margin they have before they get close to the space station. If we were flying under the space station and were unable to gather the data we needed, it could be done again, but it would require going all the way around and flying under again.
1:14:20Holly RidingsBut certainly that would be an option if we had enough propellants to do that. And the ones on the R bar that you mentioned, those, in order to go ahead and complete the berthing that day, need to go pretty quickly.
1:14:35Holly RidingsSo if they. Mostly because sitting again on the R bar is not a very good place to stay for a long time in terms of your propellant usage, you use a lot of propellant sitting in that area, holding your position underneath the space station at about 250.
1:14:50Holly RidingsSo if they didn't go well, it would not immediately mean the mission was over, but it would definitely mean you could not continue at that point in time. So it might be that the Dragon would go off and potentially start another fly around and we would talk about maybe coming back and trying those demonstrations again the next day.
1:15:09Holly RidingsSo it's absolutely a gate to come on in. If it did not go well, we would look at the consumable resources and work with the Dragon team and see if there was anything we could do to potentially repeat or gather additional data that might help us understand the problem that we'd seen the first time.
1:15:29Elon MuskOkay.
1:15:29Josh ByerlyScott Powers with the Orlando Sentinel.
1:15:34Elon MuskActually, I think my question has been resolved, but thank you very much. I appreciate it.
1:15:39Josh ByerlyMike Wall with Space.com?
1:15:43Elon Muskhi. So I was interested. Elon talked a little bit about what some of the challenges were from the SpaceX side for, for this. I'm just curious, I mean, what have some of the biggest challenges been for on the NASA side.
1:15:56Elon MuskSince this is such a new mission for you guys and you're not responsible for the entire thing from start to finish, what sort of difference has that made for you guys and sort of.
1:16:06Elon MuskWhat are some of the biggest hurdles to overcome with this one?
1:16:11Mike SuffrediniWell, I'll go ahead and answer that one. To begin with, it's just getting used to the idea that we're not worrying about the entire phase of the flight is an adjustment to begin with.
1:16:24Mike SuffrediniProbably the biggest difference, once you settle on that aspect of it, probably the biggest difference is we're verifying a system based on requirements we gave for performance. But in terms of developing the hardware, the design of the hardware, how individual boxes are laid out, the design concept, the components that were used, that's not the kind of information we have access to.
1:16:51Mike SuffrediniAnd so it's been kind of an adjustment for our engineers to create requirements and validation steps that give you confidence in the robust nature of the design that's being flown.
1:17:03Mike SuffrediniAnd so that was probably the biggest adjustment that we made. It's been, as I mentioned earlier, it's been. And it's been really kind of a fascinating process because you begin with this group of engineers that have been doing this business for many years who have gotten information passed on from the engineers before them that have done this job a certain way with a complete push towards safety and mission success because each flight was so very expensive that while safety was critical, mission success was very important.
1:17:43Mike SuffrediniAnd everything from the procurement of triple E parts all the way up to the integrated performance testing of a system and how you're going to put it together and how it's going to react to anomalies, all that was something that you spent many, many years your mind perfecting.
1:18:04Mike SuffrediniAnd then to go sit with another company and say, this is your requirement, and then have that group of very, very clever engineers, many of whom maybe don't know that much about space, many of them who did, but all of them very young, have them say, well, why?
1:18:26Mike SuffrediniAnd instead of the NASA engineer being able to say, well, this is how we did it, the question was, why do you do it that way? When that exchange took place, it was quite enlightening experience for us both, because once it was clear to the SpaceX engineer what it is that the NASA engineer was trying to protect against, then the light bulbs would come on and go, oh, okay, well, in order to solve that issue, this is how I'd do it with my design.
1:18:53Mike SuffrediniAnd then the NASA guys would learn from that and so the biggest piece of it, I think from my perspective, and it's not a bad thing, it's just an adjustment.
1:19:01Mike SuffrediniAnd I think actually it's been good for both sides is that we've learned or we kind of had our eyes opened up to different ways of tackling similar problems.
1:19:10Mike SuffrediniAnd in that respect it's been very beneficial. But I would tell you that it's an adjustment not to have the very detailed design data that we're used to when you actually design the hardware.
1:19:23Mike SuffrediniAnd we're more looking at it from a performance standpoint.
1:19:26Bill GerstenmaierAnd I would add one thing too, a little bit, is that the space station team got to see a piece of this as we put modules onboard space station.
1:19:33Bill GerstenmaierAgain, the international partners built to a set of our requirements, but they accommodated those requirements in a potentially different way than we did. So in a non maneuvering vehicle kind of standpoint, this space station team got a chance to see how to work with a set of with a partner that essentially answers the how to our requirements.
1:19:53Bill GerstenmaierAnd Mike's discussion was very good about how both teams have really learned from each other. I get a chance to kind of sit back and watch both teams learn from each other.
1:20:00Bill GerstenmaierAnd it's been a tremendous learning experience for both of us. I think we've learned new things on the NASA side. Some things we've always done a certain way. And then when we get asked now why do you, you really do that requirement, it's really forced our folks to go think about it and we're starting to kind of internalize it.
1:20:16Bill GerstenmaierHey, there may be another way of doing some things that are better. So we've definitely learned some things from SpaceX and hopefully I think they've learned some things from us as we go through.
1:20:24Bill GerstenmaierSo as a good partnership, you'll learn from each other and you end up with a much better product coming out the other side.
1:20:32Josh ByerlyOkay, how about Michael with Popular Mechanics?
1:20:37Elon MuskI wonder if someone could break down more specifically what cargo is going to be on the flight, what sorts of hardware and also, are there going to be any crew provisions on there too?
1:20:48Mike SuffrediniWell, in fact, primarily it is crew provisions. We're flying quite a bit of food, crew provisions, some replacement consumable type components. We have one Nanorex payload that's got some, has a number of student experiments on it.
1:21:12Mike SuffrediniThat's the lion's share of it. A lot of it is food, but the majority of it is actually food and crew provisions.
1:21:19Elon MuskWhat's the total weight again? Going up and then coming down again,
1:21:22Mike Suffredini521kg of cargo up and 660kg down, and the down manifest is not completely finalized. One of the things that happens once you get to orbit is you sort of agree on the mass down and the biggest drivers of that mass, knowing that once you get there you might change that a bit.
1:21:42Mike SuffrediniBut as I mentioned earlier, we do have some. While we kept away from putting one of a kind orbit replacement units or, you know, major components on the, the assent side, we actually did put some orus on the return side in hopes of getting them home so we could refurbish them.
1:22:06Mike SuffrediniThey're not required, but in a couple of cases, if we can get them home and refurbish them, it'll save us money because otherwise we would have had to procure that spare.
1:22:16Mike SuffrediniThat's certainly in our plan and our budget is procure the spare. But, but the, this was a chance to try to get some home and save some money. So we actually do have some orus coming home on the down manifest.
1:22:28Elon MuskWhat are orus?
1:22:30Mike SuffrediniThose are the replacement spare components to replace components on board. We have a pump, a couple of multi filtration beds that were in the water processor, and our JAXA colleagues have a power supply box for, for their communication system on orbit.
1:22:48Mike SuffrediniThat's also coming home.
1:22:50Elon MuskGreat, thanks a lot.
1:22:51Josh ByerlyOkay, Lisa Grossman with New Scientist.
1:22:59Josh ByerlyLisa?
1:23:01Elon MuskOkay.
1:23:02Josh ByerlyJason Davis with Planetary Society.
1:23:05Elon MuskHi guys. You had talked about some of the gates and specific checkpoints that the Dragon would be required to go through during each stage of the approach. And I just wanted to know who holds the final authority to make decisions during a contingency.
1:23:21Elon MuskHas that already been planned out in advance or are there situations where a single party, either NASA or SpaceX, would have to make a decision on how to proceed?
1:23:30Holly RidingsThanks, I'll take that one. So it certainly depends on where you are in the mission. If it's very early in the fall flight and the launch and that far field phasing where the Dragon is not near the space station, then it's the responsibility of the dragon team and SpaceX.
1:23:51Holly RidingsBut once Dragon arrives near the space station, and near is kind of defined by my graphic, it's coming up about 10 km below the space station. Then there are.
1:24:05Holly RidingsAnd actually during the fly around there are go no go points. Again, I defined that earlier as we take a poll and make sure we've got all the capabilities and all of those go no go points, the team here in Houston, per our documentation, holds the final authority.
1:24:21Holly RidingsThere's also a couple other cases if we do have an abort, something that is unexpected, that the Dragon needs to, to leave the proximity of the space station, and then the Dragon team can figure out that issue and put the Dragon back on a trajectory to potentially make another attempt.
1:24:40Holly RidingsThat process. Houston has authority over that process. And then if anything were to go really unexpectedly wrong with the space station, even if the Dragon is fairly far away from us, we would exert some authority in the sense of telling them we're absolutely not going to be ready for you anytime soon.
1:24:59Holly RidingsSo we don't want you to come up too close to us. And so there's kind of the very specific predefined items. Again, those go no gos that are in our flight rule that are those height adjust again, the burns, the maneuvers the Dragon performs as it comes increasingly closer to the space station.
1:25:16Holly RidingsThere are those points predefined as it flies around the space station and then those points predefined as it comes up to do the final rendezvous and the berthing and the proximity operations.
1:25:27Holly RidingsAnd then there's those generic catch alls for if something goes unexpected. And all of that has been discussed with the team in Hawthorne and our team here in Houston and is all written down in our documentation that we fly with our flight rules.
1:25:45Josh ByerlyOkay, Jean Louis Centini from Agence France.
1:25:53Josh ByerlyHow about kelly sheraton?
1:25:58Josh ByerlyOkay, Eric with Nature magazine.
1:26:05Josh ByerlyI'll keep going. Steven Clark with Spaceflight Now. Maybe they got tired of the music. Ann Walters with the German press agency.
1:26:20Josh ByerlyHow about Irene Klotz?
1:26:23Holly RidingsThanks, Josh. I am here. I have a couple questions for Elon. The first is, including that 381 million from NASA, how much more money has SpaceX spent to get to this point in the development?
1:26:37Holly RidingsAnd overall, what do you think the odds are that this mission will be completely successful in terms of docking at station and successful retrieval after splashdown?
1:26:52Elon MuskI don't have the exact number that SpaceX has spent, but we have raised several hundred million dollars in venture capital, the initial part of which came from me. And then there's been ongoing payments for other milestones that have been achieved for NASA and for other customers.
1:27:12Elon MuskI think probably the total amount spent cumulatively would be somewhere around a billion dollars. So that's cumulative over the life of SpaceX. And in terms of the probability of success, I have some hesitation about giving exact numbers since they're pretty big.
1:27:35Elon MuskThere's a pretty big range, I think. Think. But
1:27:41Alan Lindenmoyeryeah,
1:27:43Elon MuskI personally hesitate to give an exact number. But I mean, I think that the likelihood that the rocket works is pretty good since it's worked twice before. Likelihood of the spacecraft, the non birthing or portion of the spacecraft that have been flown before working is also quite good.
1:27:59Elon MuskBut then there's much more of a question mark around the proximity operations and birthing system and solar arrays which are being tested for the first time
1:28:11Holly Ridingsfor either Bill or Alan. Could you just refresh my memory and tell me what it would cost approximately based on. I think GAO did a report if NASA had developed a similar capability under a traditional cost plus award fee contract.
1:28:32Alan LindenmoyerWell, there were studies done that said if you use our traditional modeling and our traditional approaches and assumptions, it could have been anywhere from four to 10 times higher under a traditional NASA development.
1:28:48Holly RidingsThanks very much. Good luck.
1:28:50Josh ByerlyOkay, thanks, Irene. Is there anybody else on the phone line that did not get a chance yet? I would like to ask a follow up.
1:28:58Elon MuskHey Josh, Bill Harwood with cbs.
1:28:59Josh ByerlyHey Bill, go ahead.
1:29:01Elon MuskOh, thank you a lot. Two quick ones for Holly. If the atlas stays on the range where it is, and if Soyuz stays where it is, which they will, and if SpaceX doesn't get off in those first two attempts, when would this guy slip?
1:29:15Elon MuskHow far would it slip? I'm assuming after Soyuz. And it wouldn't be a way to get it in between atlases, is that right?
1:29:22Holly RidingsYeah. So I mentioned earlier there's quite a few variables in general. Yeah, there's a window kind of this late April, early May, which is when we've been talking about with the 30th and the third, and potentially some options.
1:29:34Holly RidingsI know the atlases in there. And then there's an after Soyuz window kind of in the mid to late May timeframe. And mentioned earlier, a lot of the variables and all of those need to line up, but those are the two windows that are the high probability ones that we've been looking at right now.
1:29:55Elon MuskOne more quick one for you and this will do it for me. Josh, can you give us a little bit better sense of what sort of issues you guys have been working on the last couple of months with SpaceX?
1:30:04Elon MuskI mean, obviously they wanted to launch in February and it slipped a bit and I've never heard any good details about what sort of things everybody was trying to get resolved that took the extra time.
1:30:14Elon MuskIf you could give me some sense of that, I'd appreciate it. Thanks. Okay.
1:30:20Holly RidingsWell, I can certainly tell you from an operational perspective, a lot of the capabilities that the SpaceX team wanted to work on were their mission success capabilities. Things that Elon can probably tell you are very important.
1:30:36Holly RidingsTo them. So when they came with those capabilities that obviously were requires a joint sort of review and determination. One of the ones we talked a lot about was recovering from abort type scenarios.
1:30:52Holly RidingsThose capabilities are complicated and difficult and we'd done some preliminary work, but we really took this extra time to make sure that we've got a real solid plan so that we've got a higher probability of being able to work together to accomplish their primary objective, which of course is the success of the mission.
1:31:12Holly RidingsAnd so we made our teams here, the operations team, as well as other teams available to really talk through some of those items. That's my example. And I don't know, Elon, if you have others, that's really the one we've spent probably the most time on in the operations world talking about.
1:31:30Holly RidingsBecause it's very important. We want to be able to. To do that as a team in the event that we need that capability.
1:31:38Elon MuskYeah, I think it's like I said earlier, it's really just about the hardware loop testing and validation of the software that's the biggest driver. I mean, there are other things that were done in that time, but just testing a vast amount of intelligence that's occurring in the software and making sure even in highly unusual situations that the mission is successful, at least in the simulation, that that's what's taken the most amount of time.
1:32:12Elon MuskAnd it's just a very, very complex system.
1:32:17Josh ByerlyOkay, thanks, Bill. Is there anybody else on the phone lines? All right, let's come back here to Houston and start back over here with Mark.
1:32:26Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)Thank you, Mark Carot, for Aviation Week. I guess I'm a little hazy on whether there's an MMT authority during the flight or if that is the space station immt.
1:32:40Mark Carreau (Aviation Week)That sort of is the big picture supervision.
1:32:44Mike SuffrediniIt's the space station immt.
1:32:46Elon MuskThank you,
1:32:49Eric Berger (Houston Chronicle)Eric Berger again with a great chronicle. A quick question for Bill or Mike. Could one of you address the feeling inside the space program with this launch coming up?
1:32:58Eric Berger (Houston Chronicle)Because this is an American company and obviously there's been a lot of heat on NASA the last couple years relying on the last year relying on Russian rockets for humans.
1:33:08Eric Berger (Houston Chronicle)And this is a potential way out of that. So is it something that a lot of people are looking forward to or how would you characterize drives the mood sort of leading up to the launch?
1:33:21Elon MuskYou want to do mood or do I do mood?
1:33:23Alan LindenmoyerYou can do mood.
1:33:25Mike SuffrediniThanks.
1:33:31Mike SuffrediniWell, you know, from our perspective, what you're referring to is probably a combination of perceived emotions. Way back when, when we started down this road because it had to do with, with getting out of the space shuttle business and getting into a commercial venture.
1:33:49Mike SuffrediniAnd that probably played a little bit of the role of a misconception and perhaps not everybody being completely behind this effort. But I can tell you from a program perspective, and those are the people that I see and talk to every day, we couldn't be more pleased with what we're off to go do.
1:34:09Mike SuffrediniAnd the reason is a it, it provides indigenous capability within the US to supply the iss, which we think is very important. It does have implications to human transport again to iss.
1:34:23Mike SuffrediniIt's commercializing, if you will, helping commercialize a low Earth orbit, which we think is a very important need and something that NASA is responsible for. And some of us, and in particular myself, believe this is a very important step for us to take.
1:34:41Mike SuffrediniIn order for us to do exploration in the future, NASA needs to develop and, or encourage a capability and help the development of a capability, of a commercial capability to support low Earth orbit, both in terms of cargo and humans and other capabilities, robotic servicing, things like that.
1:35:00Mike SuffrediniAnd NASA needs to start focusing on, on human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. And so those of us who are looking forward to the next step for NASA really are very excited about this next step for the Space Station.
1:35:16Mike SuffrediniAnd we believe this is. In order for space station to be successful, these systems have to be there for us. And so we look on it very favorably and they're very excited about this pending launch.
1:35:30Bill GerstenmaierI think I'd add just a little bit. You know, this is absolutely critical to Space Station. We really need this cargo capability to be able to get to station.
1:35:38Bill GerstenmaierAnd the return capability that Dragon provides is truly unique of any one of the cargo providers, including the Russians and Soyuz. The amount of cargo we can get back with Dragon is just phenomenal from a return standpoint.
1:35:50Bill GerstenmaierSo we absolutely need this capability for iss and we're really rooting for the teams to come through. I think it's also been encouraging to see SpaceX to work hard issues.
1:36:00Bill GerstenmaierYou know, they had some EMI electromagnetic interference issues that they worked and they spent some really good engineering time to resolve those issues and get them resolved. They had some engine delamination concerns and again, they were very rigorous.
1:36:15Bill GerstenmaierThey tested some things that maybe you didn't absolutely have to go test, but they wanted to go test and to make sure that they were right. That's really encouraging.
1:36:22Bill GerstenmaierSo I can really, you know, get behind somebody that's doing that extra work to get ready to go fly. But as Elon said, this is really a tough flight.
1:36:31Bill GerstenmaierI mean what we're asking them to go do on this demonstration flight is amazing. When you look at all those things that Holly talked about on her charts in the many hours that all this hardware has to work and all the software has to interact and the six computers and the 18 thrusters and all this has to work as a nice combined set to get into this precise box to be picked up by the ssrms.
1:36:53Bill GerstenmaierThat is no easy task. So this will be a very demanding mission and we need to look at it as a test flight. It's what it should be. We'll see how well the test works out.
1:37:04Bill GerstenmaierBut there was. They've really done a good job in getting ready for this test. So as a NASA team, we're ready to watch, participate and help and, and when we truly need this capability for iss.
1:37:14ReporterDavid, and just to get a more detailed sense of where we are technically today, as of this meeting, the hardware in the loop issue that you were describing a little bit earlier, does that relate specifically to something on the timeline that Ms.
1:37:26ReporterRidings was taking us through earlier, a specific element there? Or is that as you're saying, maybe something that's more generalized over the entire mission?
1:37:33Elon MuskYeah, this. Well, so Harvard and Lieute means give a little more color on that. Essentially we have a complete replication of the Dragon's avionics system on a bench and then it flies a simulated mission and it actually, it's like sort of like a brain in a tub thing.
1:37:57Elon MuskIt actually thinks it flew to the space station and it does. And we watch to see what it does. Does it do all the right things on the way to get there?
1:38:06Elon MuskAnd if it doesn't, then where did it go wrong? And what happens if we unplug certain devices, essentially simulating failure at the worst possible moment? Does it then take the proper steps?
1:38:20Elon MuskAnd then what happens if you fail several simultaneous things? And what if you fail something and then restore it? There are many. The cross product of all those things is a huge number of tests.
1:38:34Elon MuskSo there's just. You're introducing failures, we introduce failures. Yeah.
1:38:38ReporterSo there's nothing along that timeline just to move it along because I know it's getting late here in Ms. Riding's timeline that you're specifically focused in as far as a mission element that might be problematic.
1:38:49ReporterYou just need to introduce more failures and troubleshoot that and see how the system's going to react.
1:38:53Elon MuskRight, exactly. In fact, the recent, say in the last month or so, the tougher things have been to deal with false aborts where it actually initiates a mission abort because it was too sensitive to the parameters.
1:39:10Elon MuskSo things were actually okay. But Dragon got too worried and aborted the mission. He's from la, you're right. So it's, you know, you don't want to have, it needs to, it definitely needs to abort if something's wrong, but sometimes it may think something's wrong, but it's actually okay.
1:39:31Elon MuskAnd there are all sorts of, all different types of failure. Like I said, you can have something fail and stay off. You could have something fail erratically, it goes off and comes back and sort of oscillates.
1:39:44Elon MuskYou can have multiple things fail at the same time time and the system has to be able to deal with all of those contingencies.
1:39:52Josh ByerlyOkay, is that it here in Houston? Okay, before we finish up, we're going to take a look at our launch and mission coverage that we have upcoming here on NASA television.
1:40:00Josh ByerlyComing up at L minus 1, there will actually be a pre flight, pre launch news conference from the Kennedy Space Center. And then on Monday, April 30th at 10:00am Central Time, that is when our launch coverage will begin.
1:40:11Josh ByerlyAnd once again launch actually scheduled for 11:22am Central Time right now. And then at 1:00pm Central Time we'll have a post launch news conference from KSC as well. On flight day two, which right now should be Tuesday, May 1, we will not have any live coverage here on NASA television, but we will have an update during our typical daily ISS update show here at JSC which will air at 10am Central Time, 11am Eastern.
1:40:36Josh ByerlyAnd then on Wednesday, May 2nd at 1:30am Central Time. Very early in the morning we'll have our fly under coverage from here at the Johnson Space center inside Mission Control Houston.
1:40:46Josh ByerlyAnd at 9:00am Central Time, we will have a mission status briefing here at JSC as well. And then finally Thursday, May 3rd at 1am Central Time. That is when our rendezvous and birthing coverage will begin here at the Johnson Space Center.
1:40:59Josh ByerlyOnce again from Mission Control Houston. And then at noon Central time we should have a mission status briefing again here at jsc. Of course, all these times are subject to change.
1:41:09Josh ByerlyTo see all of this and to also see any of the slides that you saw today from our participants, just log on to www.NASA.gov SpaceX all lowercase. It's important that you do that.
1:41:22Josh ByerlyIf you look on the right hand side of the page, down at the bottom there's a media resources section, you can find all these slides as well as the press kit once we get it finished up and posted there, as well as the NASA TV schedule.
1:41:34Josh ByerlySo just log onto there to get all of the latest. I want to thank all of our participants for joining us today, and we'll see you back here in a couple of weeks for the SpaceX mission.
1:41:42Josh ByerlyThank you.