Space Station Lifeboat Sails to Success In Desert Test


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	Space Station Lifeboat Sails to Success in Desert Test By Andrew Bridges Pasadena Bureau Chief posted: 01:29 pm ET 02 November 2000

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NASA successfully tested the latest prototype of an emergency rescue boat for the International Space Station on Thursday, just hours after the orbiting outpost received its first tenants.

For now, the X-38 prototype was dropped not from the space station Alpha, but from under the right wing of a B-52 aircraft, making a nine-minute cruise to a safe landing in California's Mojave Desert.

The X-38 is suspended from the wing of NASA's B-52 carrier jet before a November 2, 2000 drop test begins at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California. (Image from NASA TV)

"The landing was beautiful. It was perfect," said Leslie Williams, a spokeswoman at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

The free flight was the first for the latest incarnation of the X-38 Vehicle 131-R, an 80-percent scale version of the actual crew return vehicle (CRV) that NASA hopes one day will serve to ferry as many as seven astronauts to Earth in the event of an emergency aboard the space station. For now, astronauts must rely on a Russian Soyuz module to beat a hasty retreat.

The B-52 dropped the X-38 prototype at 12:20 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (17:20 GMT) from an altitude of 36,500 feet (11,000 meters). The lifting body, based on a design borrowed from a 1970s U.S. Air Force research project, made an unexpected 360-degree roll after it was jettisoned.

About 30 seconds into the flight, the uncrewed prototype's 80-foot (24-meter) drogue parachute snapped open, leaving the CRV to slowly rotate, counterclockwise, as it recovered from the roll and fell toward the desert floor.

Less than a minute later, the drogue dropped off as the world's largest successfully flown parafoil unfurled. The 7,500-square-foot (675-square-meter) parafoil jerked the CRV at first, and then allowed it to settle down for the remainder of its trip to Earth. However, the parafoil -- one and a half times larger than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 jet -- deployed while the CRV was in a nose-up attitude, a glitch that fortunately caused no damage.

By 12:29 p.m. EST (17:29 GMT), the CRV skidded to a halt, leaving a short furrow in the reddish desert soil just one half mile (0.8 kilometers) from its original target. The craft landed at a slight angle, as it had pointed leftward as much as 30 degrees during its final seconds of flight, a NASA commentator said. Touchdown speed was less than 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour.

NASA's proposed crew rescue vehicle kicks up some dirt as it lands following a November 2, 2000 drop test over the high desert of California's Antelope Valley. (Image from NASA TV)

"Today our design faced a test. Most systems worked well, some didn’t," said John Muratore, the X-38 program manager, in a statement. "We’re going to take the results of this test, improve the design, and we will be back to test it again."

The purpose of the flight was to evaluate the CRV's final aerodynamic configuration for actual production models. The flight also used for the first time European Space Agency-contributed parafoil guidance software.

Unlike previous flights, the majority of this drop test -- including the landing -- was autonomous.

NASA will continue to test the prototype this year and into next. In August 2002, the agency hopes to release an uncrewed X-38 from the space shuttle to fly back to Earth and land.