 So, last week, on Wednesday, January 17th, there was a House Subcommittee meeting on the Commercial Crew Progress that's been going on so far, and the Commercial Crew Partners and the Government Accountability Office were a little bit at odds as to how the schedule is going to play out for when the Commercial Crew vehicles are going to be certified. So, I wanted to talk about that a little bit this week. This is your space pod for Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018. Despite progress that was made in 2017, the Government Accountability Office had several issues with the current schedule for both companies. SpaceX must close several of the program's top risks related to its upgraded launch vehicle design, the Falcon 9 Block 5, before it can be certified for human spaceflight. Included in the Block 5 design is SpaceX's redesign of the composite over-wrapped pressure vessel inside of the upper stage, and SpaceX officials stated that the new design aims to eliminate risks identified in the older design, which was involved in the anomaly that happened back in September of 2016, where a Falcon 9 blew up on the pad. Separately, SpaceX officials told that the Block 5 design also includes design changes to address cracks in the turbine of the engine identified during development testing. Now Boeing is addressing risks in its abort system, which it needs to have for human spaceflight certification, and they may not meet the program's requirements to have sufficient control of the vehicle throughout abort. And in some abort scenarios, Boeing has found that the spacecraft may tumble and that it may pose a threat to the crew's safety. And to validate the effectiveness of the abort system, Boeing has conducted extensive wind tunnel testing and plans to complete a pad abort test in April of this year. Now, Boeing is also addressing a risk that during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, a portion of the spacecraft's forward heat shield may reconnect and damage the parachute system. The forward heat shield, they're going to plan to separate that after re-entry. And NASA's independent analyses indicated that this may occur if both parachutes that pull the forward heat shield away from the space clap do not deploy as expected. Now, Boeing's analysis indicates that the risk exists only if there's one of two parachutes that don't deploy as expected. And so far, if the program determines that this risk is unacceptable, Boeing would need to redesign the parachute system, which could push back their certification for at least six months. Now, program officials also told us that the commercial crew is the first NASA program that the agency will evaluate against a probabilistic loss of crew requirement that is a little bit extreme. They said that if the contractors cannot meet the loss of crew requirement in a one in 270 launches that NASA could still certify their systems by employing operational mitigations and said that this could potentially increase the risk or uncertainty of any type of loss of life during these missions. But the space shuttle had a way, way, way lower chance of loss of life in their flights. So I think that would be fair to do that. And in case though, SpaceX is maintaining their recently changed schedule of the first uncrewed test flight in August of this year with the first crewed flight in December of this year. And Boeing's current schedule is the first uncrewed flight in August and the first crewed flight in November, which to me seems the most likely to slide to the right for Boeing. Now, the Government Accountability Office believes that the commercial crew vehicle certification is likely to slip into December of 2019 for SpaceX. And as far as February 2020 for Boeing, which would overlap when operational crew are supposed to be flying on these commercial crew vehicles before the last crewed Soyuz flight that NASA has purchased. It would take some pretty intense negotiations and hard work on the part of Roscosmos to purchase any more seats on the Soyuz vehicle after the Soyuz 59, which is the last one that we purchased seats for NASA astronauts on, which is scheduled to launch in May of 2019. So there's quite a few different things that could push this program back, but I'm very hopeful to see both companies be able to push as hard as they can and keep up this competitive and aggressive schedule to achieve the goals that they need to do. I'm really hopeful that everything will go well for the pad abort test and hopefully the in-flight abort test for SpaceX as well and that they will be able to maintain the schedule as closely as they can. Of course, rocket science is hard and schedules will probably push to the right a little bit, but either way I'm very excited and also very nervous if there is any sort of gap between being able to send American astronauts up to the International Space Station before these commercial crew vehicles come online. But in any case, if you haven't watched it already, check out our last week's show, our live show from orbit 11.03 where we had Paul Hildebrandt on talking about his Kickstarter project for a new documentary first to the moon documenting the Apollo 8 mission. So be sure to check that out and check us out every Saturday where we have our show live at 1800 Coordinated Universal Time. 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