ORLANDO, Fla. – To the untrained eyes of space fans everywhere, when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in late May and splashed down Aug. 2nd, everything looked perfect.
Space travel is powered by data and lots of it.
Space dads Bob and Doug are back from their historic journey, it’s time to let the data do the talking.
CBS News space correspondent Bill Harwood said all the info now has to be analyzed before we can declare Dragon’s mission a success.
“The whole point of a test flight is that there are gigabytes of data from all the sensors, navigation computers...they are going to go back and review every bit of data that was collected during the launch, free flight to the space station, the undocking reentry and make sure it really was as flawless as it seemed to all of us,” Harwood said.
Assuming all of those things go well then it will clear the way for the next stage which will not be a test.
“It’s going to be a full-up mission to the international space station. The four-person crew is already assigned and in training,” Hardwood said.
Right now NASA has targeted late September for SpaceX's next crewed mission.
The NASA astronauts assigned to Crew-1 are Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi.
Click on the link to hear more of what Harwood has to say about SpaceX’s historic crewed test flight on this week’s edition of Florida’s Fourth Estate with Ginger Gadsden and Matt Austin.