SpaceX fired up the engines on its new passenger spacecraft, the Crew Dragon, during a ground test in Cape Canaveral, Florida, paving the way for the company to perform a crucial test flight of the vehicle in the months ahead.

The engines that SpaceX ignited Thursday are part of the Crew Dragon's emergency abort system - a test of the important part of the spacecraft that will activate in case of an emergency during launch. The Crew Dragon is designed to travel into space on top of one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, but if for some reason that rocket fails in mid-air, the emergency engines embedded in the hull of the spacecraft will ignite and carry the capsule away to safety, after which the capsule could land using its own parachutes.

These emergency abort engines, known as SuperDracos, have recently become a source of concern for SpaceX. In April, a Crew Dragon test capsule exploded after the engines had been ignited a few times during routine testing.

SpaceX immediately formed a team to figure out what happened, which after months of investigations revealed that a leaky valve had caused some of the propellant from the engines to cross over into another system, sparking a chain reaction that destroyed the capsule. SpaceX assured the public that it would redesign the system and replace the valves moving forward.

Wednesday's engine test closes the investigation and marks another testing milestone for the spacecraft as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, an initiative to fly NASA astronauts on commercially made US vehicles. The next step for the company is to test out the emergency abort engines mid-flight.

In 2015, the company performed what is known as a pad abort test, which ignited the SuperDraco engines on a Crew Dragon sitting alone on a launch pad. The test was a success, and the engines carried the Crew Dragon up and away from the pad to the ocean, where the vehicle splashed down with parachutes.

Now, SpaceX wants to see if the SuperDracos can do the same thing on top of an actual rocket - paving the way for tests with an actual crew of astronauts. Once that test is complete, SpaceX will be done with most of its test flight milestones for the Commercial Crew Program.

The company already sent an uncrewed Crew Dragon to the ISS in March, showing that the capsule could successfully dock to the station and then return to Earth via parachutes. If everything goes according to plan, it's possible that SpaceX could fly to ISS as early as the first part of 2020.

Source: RIA Novosti

Related Links
Commercial Crew at NASA
Rocket Science News at Space-Travel.Com

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