Volume 8, Number 3     May/June 2000

Parachute "Lifeboat" Flies High

NASA's X-38 prototype crew return vehicle successfully completed its fifth atmospheric test flight at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

"By intercepting the space flight return profile, we verified the X-38's operation in a phase of flight it will encounter as a station lifeboat," said John Muratore, X-38 Crew Return Vehicle Program Manager. "As our tests continue over the next couple of years, they will replicate those conditions more and more, culminating in a complete return from orbit."

In the highest, fastest and longest test of the X-38 to date, the vehicle was released from Dryden's NB-52 airplane at an altitude of 39,000 feet and flew free for 44 seconds, reaching a speed of more than 500 miles per hour before it began to deploy its parachutes. Opening at the same speed and altitude as it will during a return from space, a 60-foot-diameter drogue parachute pulled behind the craft first slowed the X-38 to about 70 miles per hour.

Then, a 5,500-square-foot parafoil, about as wide as the wings of a Boeing 747, began a phased opening, successfully demonstrating a new, more stable parafoil design recently developed by the X-38 team. The revised parafoil proved successful in ensuring a smooth ride for the craft during its 11.5-minute descent. The X-38 touched down smoothly on target, even though one of three landing skids did not deploy.

The test was also the first use of automatic flight control software aboard the X-38. The new software, developed in a fraction of the time and cost of past spacecraft software, performed flawlessly.

The X-38 is a prototype "lifeboat" for the International Space Station, designed to carry up to seven passengers home from orbit in an emergency. The project combines proven technologies—a shape borrowed in part from a 1970s Air Force project—with some of the most cutting-edge aerospace technology available today, such as the most powerful electric motors ever used to control a spacecraft.

This innovative approach is enabling the X-38 to be developed at a tenth of the cost of past estimates for such a project. Although the United States leads the development of the X-38, international space agencies also are participating. Contributing nations include Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Throughout the rest of this year and 2001, increasingly complex, unpiloted X-38 atmospheric flight tests will continue at Dryden. A space test of an unpiloted X-38 is planned for 2002, when a vehicle already under construction at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas will be released from a Space Shuttle to fly back to Earth.

The X-38 technology demonstrator descends under its steerable parafoil toward a lakebed landing in a March 2000 test flight. (Photo supplied by Tom Tschida)

For more information, contact Bob Baron at Dryden Flight Research Center. 661/276-3172, bob.baron@dfrc.nasa.gov Please mention you read about it in Innovation.