A Space Exploration Technologies’ passenger spaceship has made a quick debut test flight in Florida to demonstrate an emergency escape system.
The six-metre-tall Dragon capsule launched nearly 1.6 kilometres up and over the Atlantic Ocean. It tested SpaceX’s launch abort system designed to free the crew capsule from the Falcon 9 rocket in the event of a launch failure.
The flight ended less than two minutes later with the capsule’s parachute splash-down about 2.6 kilometres east of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch site.
“It was a great outcome,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told reporters in a post-launch teleconference. “The important thing is that if there had been people on board, they would have been in great shape.”
Originally published by Cosmos as SpaceX tests Dragon launch escape system in skies over Florida
Bill Condie
Bill Condie is a science journalist based in Adelaide, Australia.
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