Elon Musk's biggest worry about SpaceX's first astronaut mission isn't the rocket launch — it's the spaceship's return to Earth
CAPE CANAVERAL — SpaceX is poised to rocket its first people into space on Saturday, resurrecting human spaceflight in America after a nine-year hiatus in NASA astronaut launches. The mission, called Demo-2, aims to launch NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley atop a Falcon 9 rocket, orbit Earth aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship, and.
After staying for up to 110 days, the crew will depart inside Crew Dragon, reenter Earth's atmosphere, and splash down in the ocean. The launch, scheduled for 3:22 p.m. ET, is not without risk. NASA has estimated a 1-in-276 chance of losing the crew, but it's not the part of the mission that most worries SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. "The part that I would worry most about would be reentry, which won't happen, hopefully, for a few months from now," Musk During reentry, the Crew Dragon must hurtle back through Earth's atmosphere — a process that burns up spacecraft that aren't designed to survive the heat. Musk added that while the threat was low, his "biggest concern" about the new spaceship was the capsule's asymmetric design, which is driven by its emergency escape system. While screaming back to Earth at 25 times the speed of sound, the capsule's heat shield will deflect and absorb the energy of superheated plasma — but the forces of atmospheric reentry have a slim chance of causing catastrophe. "If you rotate too much, then you could potentially catch the plasma in the super Draco escape thruster pods," Musk , adding this could overheat parts of the ship or cause it to lose control . "We've looked at this six ways to Sunday, so it's not that I think this will fail. It's just that I worry a bit that it is asymmetric on the backshell." An illustration of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship returning to Earth with a blaze of plasma ahead of its heat shield.
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