“A little bit less Gs, but a little bit more alive is probably the best way I would describe it.” “It was not quite the same ride the smooth ride as the space shuttle was up to MECO (main engine cutoff),” Behnken said. But Dragon was huffing and puffing all the way into orbit. “The space shuttle was a pretty rough ride heading into orbit with the solid rocket boosters, and our expectation was ,as we continued with the flight into second stage, that things would basically get a lot smoother than the space shuttle did. “We were surprised a little bit at how smooth things were off the pad,” Behnken said. On a space shuttle launch, astronauts said the ride became smoother after burnout and separation of the twin solid rocket boosters, once the shuttle’s liquid-fueled engines took over the primary propulsion role. “It was a much smoother ride, obviously, because it was a liquid engine ascent,” Hurley said of the Falcon 9’s first stage. The Merlin engines generated about 1.7 million pounds of thrust at full power, consuming a mix of super-chilled kerosene and cryogenic liquid oxygen propellants. The first stage with Falcon 9 were the nine Merlin engines.” “Those burned very rough for the first two-and-a-half minutes. “Remember, shuttle had solid rocket boosters to start with,” Hurley said. The shuttle orbiter used smaller thrusters to reach a stable orbit around Earth. The shuttle’s engines continued burning after booster separation, and fired more than eight minutes until engine cutoff after placing the vehicle on a preliminary suborbital trajectory. The solid-fueled boosters burned for more than two minutes, firing concurrently with the shuttle’s three hydrogen-fueled main engines. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after their arrival at the International Space Station on May 31. The space shuttle launched with two solid rocket boosters, which provided more than two-thirds of the shuttle’s total thrust at liftoff. The Crew Dragon astronauts said the ride on the Falcon 9 rocket was smoother than the space shuttle for the first couple of minutes. Air Force and was a flight test engineer on the F-22 fighter jet before becoming a NASA astronaut.īoth have accumulated thousands of hours of flying time on more than 25 types of aircraft. Behnken, who earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Caltech, is a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps colonel, flew F/A-18 jets as a test pilot before his selection as a NASA astronaut. You could tell just by how the rocket felt, so it’s a very pure flying machine.” “We didn’t even need to look at the speed. “The next thing you know, the call was made (as we exceeded the speed of sound),” Hurley said. You could definitely sense that as we broke Mach 1. “What I thought was really neat was how sensitive we were to the throttling of the Merlin engines. “From the time the engines lit, the first two-and-a-half minutes to staging was about like we expected, except you can never simulate the Gs, so as the Gs built you could certainly feel those,” said Hurley, the Dragon’s spacecraft commander. spaceport since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.Įach astronaut launched on two space shuttle flights before flying on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. Around 19 hours later, their Crew Dragon capsule autonomously docked with the International Space Station to complete the first trip to the orbiting outpost from a U.S. Hurley and Behnken became the first people to ride a Falcon 9 rocket into space May 30 after lifting off from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA TV / SpaceXĪstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken say SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was a “very pure flying machine” as it sped their Crew Dragon spaceship into orbit, but they said they were surprised by the rougher-than-expected ride on the Falcon 9’s powerful upper stage. Astronaut Doug Hurley is seated to the left of Behnken. NASA astronaut Bob Behnken is seen in the foreground. A view inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft during launch May 30.
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