SpaceX announced a new capability for the Dragon spacecraft on Sept. 27 for the unlikely event of a parachute failure. Dragon now has built-in redundancy to propulsively land using its SuperDraco thrusters, saving the vehicle and potential crew from a rough landing or imminent danger.
I wonder what changed to get it approved after all this time.
It’s only approved as an “oh shit, we are going to die” process. It’s not a system they want to see used.
Understood, but I’m asking why it wasn’t an approved last ditch backup plan until now. Did they do more testing or sumulation recently? Is NASA more risk averse after Starliner and digging deeper into backup backups?
From the article it sounded like it just needed more SpaceX development time to polish it up and come up with software that NASA was happy with.