News Update on NASA Astronauts Return Home in the SpaceX Crew Dragon

[Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] this is nasa tv [Music] good afternoon thank you for joining us here on nasa tv we're about to conduct a briefing right after the flight readiness review of the return of bob bankin and doug hurley to planet earth completing the spacex demo 2 mission and the first test flight of the crude commercial vehicle i'm joined by an esteemed set of panelists here from across th

e country to discuss uh what came out of the flight readiness review as well as from what's to come both from nasa and from spacex joining us today for this briefing is nasa administrator jim bridenstine here in houston texas we have steve stitch manager of nasa's commercial crew program and joel montobano the manager of the international space station program and then all the way from spacex benji reed joining us director of crew mission management thanks to our steam panelists for joining us t

oday we're going to be opening up with some comments from each of our panelists before getting to questions taking questions from our phone bridge make sure you call in to submit a question make sure you dial star one and we'll be able to address them right after comments from our panelists we're gonna start some comments first from nasa administrator jim breidenstein administrator brian side take it away well thank you so much gary um and and uh as as you just mentioned the return flight readin

ess review is complete and the teams the nasa team and the spacex team everybody remains go for return and we cannot wait to get bob bankin and doug hurley back to earth but of course we have some weather pending and uh and so just like when we launched we had some challenges with weather we may have that again but the first opportunity remains august 2nd and we look forward to seeing if that's going to be within the realm of what is possible a couple of things that are important i'm here at the

kennedy space center right now tomorrow we're launching a mission to mars the mars 2020 vehicle with the perseverance rover inside and ingenuity a helicopter that is attached to the rover so we have a lot of things happening right here at the kennedy space center we're excited about that launch tomorrow morning and of course while we were doing the press conference for the mars launch we had a barge pull into into the the bay here and the barge of course had a stage adapter for the sls rocket w

hich of course is going to launch artemis one and uncrewed orion capsule around the moon next year so so many great things happening here at nasa i want to say thank you to the spacex team and of course to the nasa team for making demo 2 possible it is not over yet entry descent and landing is is ahead of us but certainly we're very excited to get bob and doug back home and get on to crew one and crew whole entire commercial crew team as jim said we had our flight readiness review this morning f

or landing we really took the time to review um the vehicle on orbit you know it's been on orbit for about 63 days we talked uh pre-flight about having capability to go 120 days the systems on dragon are doing very well the spacecraft is very healthy we went through all the systems any issues or problems that we saw on orbit in terms of how the vehicle responded to the thermal environment in the different parts of space we reviewed the readiness of the ops teams and also the recovery teams and s

o we came out of the fr with a with a go to proceed toward uh undocked the orbit and landing today i'll talk a little bit about the landing operation and kind of how things will unfold over the next few days and a little bit about decision making if we could show the graphic uh first we have seven landing sites that we're going to be using as jim said for the landing as early as sunday you can see these sites they're spread across florida pensacola panama city tallahassee and tampa those are pen

sacola was there before but we added the new sites of panama city tallahassee and tampa since the initial flight maintenance review and then jacksonville daytona and the cape on the eastern coast of florida we added the daytona site after the flight readiness review and did a bunch of work between nasa and spacex to ensure that site was ready over the next few days we'll be carefully looking at the re weather and getting ready for uh for the undock uh and deorbit and landing uh just a little bit

of the sequence for the earliest opportunity would be to undock on saturday the crew would wake up about 7 30 central time here in houston we would close the hatches about 4 30 on saturday and undock around 6 35 pm central and we have about an hour or so on dock window and then that would set us up for our first landing opportunity on sunday deorbiting around 12 56 central time on sunday and then landing at about 1 48 p.m central we're going to watch the weather very carefully you know we have

a series of sites and and many days in the future if we don't undock on saturday to come home on sunday we would move that undocking to monday so we'll watch this tropical storm it's probably going to form it's a tropical uh area of disturbed weather right now looks like it may be coming into the florida area and and we'll kind of take it day by day we have decision points and weather briefings at uh about 24 hours prior to undock then at around six hours probably prior to undock when we start t

o bring some cargo over from the space station and then two and a half hours prior to undock so we'll have to evaluate the weather each day and just see things how things unfold as jim said you know this is a test flight and we're going to take our time to come home we have plenty of opportunities here in august and we're in no hurry to come home we've completed all the objectives really for the mission while we were docked we uh figured out if four crew could live in dragon habitability demo we

completed all those uh objectives while docked and so now is the right time to bring this vehicle back and then start the processing of this vehicle which will go forward and fly again in the spring on crew 2. and then finally when we land you know the important thing after landing will be to review all the data from this flight so the importance of getting the vehicle back getting bob and doug safely back is to then go assess the data on this flight so that sets us up for the crew one mission

as early as the end of september and we'll go through the data methodically for that flight and make sure we're go ready to start the operational flights and with that i'll turn it back over to you gary thank you steve i'll now hand it over to international space station program manager joe montebono thank you gary hello again and welcome to the space x return post flight readiness review briefing we had as you heard a great review today we walked out of the review with no actions and just stand

ard open work so the team has done a tremendous amount of work you can tell by what you heard today and the team is ready to go i mean it's been great to have bob and doug on board and they complemented the crew that came up on soyuz in april the fact that we were able to complete four evas and a tremendous amount of utilization research technology development we worked cargo operations with the japanese transfer vehicle we had medical operations i mean these guys have just complimented signific

antly to the iss team and into the isis program and and to nasa in general you know the work we're doing on board space station the utilization the research the technology development the work that's being done to help us for you know the go past low earth orbit and help us with the artemis program it's just been outstanding and the fact that we had two crew today is just uh a little view into the future eventually we'll have four crew on the boeing and spacex missions and and increasing our sci

ence and research to about 70 hours a week of utilization research technology development so we're just looking forward to that i'll also remind you that this year we celebrate 20 years of continuous human presence onboard the international space station so with that we look forward to the return of spacex vehicle doug and bob and with that i'll hand that back over to you gary thank you thank you joel now for some final comments from benji reid over at spacex really sincere thank you on behalf o

f all of the spacex employees um our vendors and contractors all of our team that that works together to nasa and of course to bob and doug and to their families for allowing us the opportunity to uh to return human space flight to united states um as as mentioned earlier i think the administrator mentioned entry descent landing as we call it edl bringing a spaceship home that's a really big deal and it's very important it's part of that sacred honor that we have for ensuring that we bring bob a

nd doug back home to their families to their kids and making sure they're safe so we give it the same attention as a team both the spacex and the joint team with nasa we give it that attention and that um that concern that we would for any launch and we're very much looking forward to doing this it'll be the first time in i think about 45 years um that we have splashed down uh astronauts from space so this will be another historic and great moment for for the nation so i think the next thing i'd

like to do is actually show a little video we have talking about the mission so far [Music] [Music] good morning welcome aboard standby from biblical com check [Music] spacex dragon we're go for launch let's light this candle three two one on behalf of the entire launch team thanks for flying the falcon 9 today we hope you enjoyed the ride and wish you a great mission we would like to welcome you aboard capsule endeavor we do have a friend on board with us trimmer the apato tourist [Music] i ge

t goosebumps every time i see that and i can only imagine what it's going to feel like when we bring those guys back home and they get to see see their spouses and their kids it's going to be amazing um as as mentioned um i think everybody's talked about it we had a successful flight readiness review for undock today with nasa an agency level review that went well and um as we proceed into things we'll be evaluating the weather so kind of over the next 24 or 10 48 hours we'll be looking at the w

eather ensuring that we're um that we're really ready we'll be doing that closely with nasa not only do we do these checkpoints but there'll be a continuous monitoring process to ensure that um that we know that we've got safe weather to bring them home in safe ways to splash down and of course do the recovery operations and bring it back to land as part of that i think we have a little infographic that we can put up right now and i'll just talk through a couple of items on that so you can see u

m in this graphic and this is one of the great graphics that are available online as well to check out but the first step that happens is you do a departure burn actually i'm sorry you do an undock automated undock autonomous undock from station just like how we did the autonomous docking and undocking for demo one we'll do the same thing uh do an autonomous undocking for demo two for this mission um then there's a departure burn and then we move into the phasing burns so depending exactly on th

e launch uh or the landing site i should say um and the timing of everything it depends on how many you know orbits we need to do what the number of phasing burns are on the timing of those so that sequence really depends on ultimately what or where our landing sites will be in our landing timing once we once we're ready to actually come home the next step is a trunk jettison and then the deorbit burn um and then and that your burn lasts a number of minutes um it's actually one of the longest bu

rns in the whole mission and then we re-enter and and re-entry you know there's the heat shield on dragon we've we've used this um built up on our technology that we've used for many of the missions um on crs and of course on the demo one mission we demonstrated on this uh dragon 2 capsule because you know you get a lot of heating as you come in and it's really critical that we keep the crew and the vehicle safe from that heating the heat shield and all of the thermal protection system that's al

l all around dragon will uh we'll keep them safe we'll reenter and then the drogue parachutes will deploy and then the main parachutes deploy um and then we splash down um after splashdown um we have the uh are the spacex recovery forces i like them as a spacex navy they get to go in and um and uh recover the crew a couple of fast boats will go out ensure that everything is ready to go um that the vehicle is safe to approach checking in front of the hypergolic fuels making sure there's no leaks

everything looks ready to go and the other fast boat is there as a backup and also doing parachute recovery once the fastboat gives the clear then the main recovery vessel moves in and will lift the the capsule up onto the deck of the boat into a nest and then help bob and doug come out of the capsule and check them out and make sure that they're okay you know once once once we have them on board the vessel will take the time um to like i said check them out and then uh and then you know within

about four hours uh or less we should have them back to back to land and just depending on landing location and needs we have the ability to bring them back very quickly via helicopter or come back on boat either way that really is kind of the whole process of the recovery ultimately they get to you know once they get back to land and they get checked out there they get to see their families um this whole process of course is a test mission um and as we do this um you know we're we're again givi

ng it all the same attention that we would for every crew mission and um and and that and that also extra attention we do today as we observe all of the data and observe everything that's happening this is really critical um obviously i mentioned that to date the the mission's looking beautiful it's very clean um the data's look great but we want to watch all of this data and learn from it as we come come back now what we'll do next after bob and doug or we've gotten bob and doug safely home is

we'll start to look into the vehicle we'll open it up check it out make sure that everything looks great gather a lot of data that way we'll also have downloaded all the data that's recorded on the vehicle and then start the process immediately after splashdown of assessing and analyzing all of that data and making sure we're ready to go as steve stitch mentioned once this happens once we feel really good about everything that happened on this demonstration mission this test mission we wrap up t

he certification process overall for the program and then we move on into operational space which as joel mentioned is really the key that's when we're sending up four crew members every time um in every mission and we've got that next mission coming up um really soon uh and that'll be in late september uh crew one is what we call it and i think we actually have a picture of that vehicle ready to go just about let's take a look at that there it is you can see that it's in the clean room right he

re in hawthorne actually just uh just a few feet away from me and we look forward to getting that capsule ready to go and it'll be shipping out of here in just the first or second week of august um so coming up very soon that'll be ready to go and then it'll finish final preparations down at the cape and of course i mentioned there's four crew members and i think we have an image of the four crew members um and there they are shannon and victor and mike and soichi and soichi from the jackson spa

ce agency we're very excited to have this crew getting ready to go they've been going through their training wrapping up their final training they're actually here in the building right now doing some of their final work with us today um and this week and uh and i mentioned soichi is super exciting because it'll be our first time we have an international partner on board representing japan and the jackson space agency so super cool to have that coming online and once we go from this group then w

e'll be moving on to crew 2 which we're going to be ready to fly uh just six months later um as steve stitch mentioned crew two will actually be um flying on the same vehicle that bob and doug are coming back home um that will be a refurbished uh vehicle we'll be putting that through reuse um and uh and look forward to that mission as well again i just want to say thank you um to to nasa to to the nation to the american public to all the international partners um uh and uh and just to everybody

who's put all their heart and soul and time into this we got the next big step to go to bring those guys home and we're looking forward to making it happen thank you thank you benji and thank you to all of our panelists for those initial comments we're now going to open it up for questions now we have a lot of them but if you don't uh if you need to submit a question just make sure you press star one there's a lot of questions that we've uh have to go through as well as some of those initial com

ments so if you find that your question has already been answered just make sure to press star 2 to address it as i said we do have a lot of questions to get through today in a limited time so i do ask that you refrain to just one question so we'll start it off with lauren grush from the verge lauren hi thank you so much for taking my question i'm curious about how much leeway you have when performing all the various maneuvers for leaving so for instance what's the last possible moment before cr

ew dragons undocking where you can decide to call off the return or schedule for another day also how much leeway do you have to perform the deorbit burn in case conditions drastically change at the landing location thank you yeah i'll take that one lauren so uh for for on doc really we uh have quite a bit of margin in terms of that that decision process as i said earlier we really are trying to look at about six hours prior to undock if if things are really uh lining up to be good to undock uh

and and then another decision point a little closer in at two and a half hours that's really to prepare the vehicle and take a lot of the cargo in there's a couple of freezers that are bringing home important science that we want to put in the vehicle but literally we have about an hour period where we could undock and if at the last minute we thought that the weather something wasn't wasn't okay um the spacex team could command the vehicle and bob or duck could stop and stop the whole undock se

quence and so the whole beauty of this sequence is that we can stay on station for a period of time and not get into free flight and then you know save our opportunities it's the same thing relative to the whole the orbit sequence after we've undocked and we're heading toward a landing opportunity most of those are about let's say 15 to 17 hours after undock we can then uh stop and pause before uh before we execute that deorbit burn and then go around again most of those uh most of the way off o

pportunities would be about 48 hours later and we have roughly three days of consumables once we undock to try to bring the vehicle home thank you for your question we'll now move on to the next paul brinkman from upi paul yeah thanks for taking my question um i would really like to hear some more detail about the castle tests uh during the flight and when attached to the space station um what was learned especially what was learned during the habitability demonstration yeah i could take that on

e uh so we did a habitability test and really the purpose of that you know this flight has two crew members on board and so bob and doug have the opportunity to to live in dragon for the first part of the flight for about 20 hours or so so that habitability test was really looking at uh this next flight that benji talked about uh with our next crew crew one we'll have four people on board dragon and so what we did is we uh brought over additional crew members and had them in dragon and then we d

id a series of uh life in the day of dragon how would you prepare meals different hygiene activities how would you sleep in the seats and tried to assess that and tried to learn from this vehicle for the next vehicle and and those tests went really well there's a few things we're learning about uh how to package and how to stow various things for the crew to uh to get to when they need them on on orbit but it was very successful and so we take that data from that habitability assessment we feed

it back into crew one and we'll make that flight even better for for that crew next we have stephen clark from space flight now stephen thank you for taking my question i'm curious maybe benji can talk about what happens with the spacecraft once it's uh back in back on earth uh does it come back to cape canaveral on the recovery ship or does it come back uh by land and can you talk about the inspections refurbishment and some of the modifications you're gonna be making on the spacecraft to upgra

de it for a full six month crew rotation mission next year thanks sure absolutely that's a great question um so as i mentioned once after splashdown we bring the vehicle up onto the deck of the of the recovery vessel we get bob and dug out and focus on them um uh and at the same time there's actually a refurbishment crew and a vehicle uh checkout crew that's on the recovery vessel at the same time so at the same time we're pulling bob and doug out we're we're inspecting the vehicle we're safing

it in a number of ways we're already starting to pull data off of the the data recorders that are on that vehicle at that time um and starting a number of processes in fact we're equipped to be able to do start the refurbishment process entirely while we're on vessel as we're coming back into port depending on how long depending on the landing location and how long it takes for us to get back um since we are landing on the east coast and this is part of the reason that we're landing on the east

coast is to bring us uh closer um to to where we're gonna do refurbishment and be ready for launch so we have an awesome dragon facility down there for not only doing the initial pre-launch preps when when a dragon arrives from hawthorne but also to do full refurbishment of dragons just like we do fervent refurbishment of the falcons and and basically do the whole processing and be ready just to put a dragon right back up on top of a falcon and get ready to launch some of what that looks like in

this case is we'll actually be taking off a lot of the panels of dragon we'll be inspecting inside again as a test mission we want to make sure that we kind of dig deep and understand everything that happens that's going on with this vehicle make sure we're really ready to go and then do some of the some of the aspects of the refurbishment there are some things that we will replace some things that are standardly replaced some things that we want to upgrade based on on lessons learned or that w

ere already planned in work and of course there's the trunk itself since the trunk is jettisoned um before uh before re-entry we have to produce a new trunk um for each flight and so in this case for example we'll have upgraded um solar panels uh solar rays on the on the trunk for the for the upcoming flight so it's one of the examples of things that will be will be upgraded the whole process is actually very fast we should be able to have dragon um refurbished and ready to go in just a matter o

f a couple months a few months um and and make it have plenty of margin multiple months of margin against um six month reflights so we can take a vehicle and be ready to fly it again six months later with multiple months of margin so that's that's actually very exciting um and again almost entirely um reused a lot of the vehicle is um uh you know almost all of it is totally reused like i said a few things that we that we that we that we fix up or that we might replace we decide to upgrade that's

really it next we have uh joey roulette from reuters joey hey uh thanks so much for doing this question for benji reed originally spacex was planning to use new vehicles for each pcm mission i was wondering what led to the decision to reuse crew dragon for crew 2 and how the refurbishment process for that is going to be different than originally planned uh thanks sure absolutely you're right uh originally um you know on the contract in in we decided to to go for new vehicle use but you know as

we as we've continued down in the last number of years of proving the awesomeness of reuse and reflight the importance of it not only from an economics viewpoint for overall for the space flight industry but also from a safety and reliability perspective you learn so much from a vehicle um that you that you can refly and you also have to build it better you have to build it more robustly for a vehicle that you know that you're gonna you need to use multiple times so the reality is is that dragon

2 this line of dragons which will be used for both the crew vehicles and the cargo vehicles dragon 2 is designed for at least five reuses um and possibly even more so from the get-go we were expecting to be able to reuse this vehicle we had always hoped that we'd be able to reuse it on on nasa astronaut missions we had also planned though from the beginning that we would be able to use it for for commercial passenger missions and and any other uses so the the good news is is that we were always

always ready to do it um and it was always part of the plan we've been working closely with nasa over the last few years um and then recently to uh to finally kind of lay out the whole plan of what reuse would look like on crew we want to make sure of course that that's just as safe and just as reliable in fact i think it's even more safe and more reliable in a lot of ways and we've been working closely with nasa to lay out what that plan looks like and what that certification process is so whi

le we're in the middle of refurbishing this drag and getting it ready to go for crew 2 we're also wrapping up the certification process for reflight so it's very exciting not a lot of difference in what we'd originally planned for this vehicle but a lot of difference in what it took to refurbish a dragon one that the dragon one capsule took longer to refurbish although we got very good at it out of the 20 missions that we flew almost half of those i think nine were were flight proven and so we l

earned a lot in that effort to go from also what was originally a new you know a new vehicle every time to reuse vehicles re-flight vehicles what it took to refurbish them and we applied all of that knowledge to the dragon 2 line next up is tariq malik from space.com hello uh thank you very much tariq knowledge with space.com and my question i think is for uh steve stitch you know uh uh or or benji uh i'm really curious about what your weather constraints are when you're picking one of the seven

landing sites that you're going to target after either prior to undocking i know that there's a tropical storm approaching uh for sunday and i'm wondering kind of what what are you looking for to make sure that you're comfortable with one of those seven landing spots and when is that cut off to have to pick it before you can undock thank you yeah i i can talk a little bit about the weather constraints that we'll be evaluating the first one and probably the one that may be the most challenging i

s is wind the wind speed can't be any greater than 15 feet per second or about 10 miles an hour so uh this is to protect how the vehicle actually lands in the water and and how the water will come up and and surround the vehicle at touchdown um the next criteria is really waves so there's a certain amount of uh of wave height and wave period that uh that we have to have within limits and that really has to do with again as the the heat shield impacts the water protecting that from a from a struc

tural capability uh we don't want any rain within the area we don't want the parachute to the vehicle to get to get rained on or any lightning and then we have some also some criteria as benji said depending on the landing site the way that the crew gets back to shore actually is via helicopter and there's some criteria also for uh having the helicopter be able to to land on the ship in terms of the motion of the deck uh in the water and then obviously visibility and things like that for the hel

icopter so those are the constraints and and again what we really are trying to do is set ourselves up uh to have these constraints be met uh prior to undock at two sites so we're really looking for uh uh two sites to be go to be on for undock and then we can take that down to the wire relative to undock and of course we can also decide if the weather is looking bad that hey we're not even going to try to undock that day if if really if this hurricane tropical cyclone moves in and to the area an

d really has bad weather across multiple sites for multiple days then the beauty of this vehicle is we can stay docked to the space station we work with kenny todd and joel montebano and and they understand it's a test flight and it may take a little while to get off we'll just stay there and we'll wait for the weather to clear so okay next we have eric berger from ours technica yeah hi good afternoon and good luck everyone a question for jim maybe following up on the question joey asked about r

euse can you talk a little bit about how you know nasa has quickly it seems like become more comfortable with reusing both the falcon 9 rocket and the excuse me crew dragon spacecraft thanks uh yeah from my perspective uh what we're really looking for in all of our missions is sustainability and that's true for low earth orbit it's true now when we go to the moon we're looking for how can we how can we drive sustainability reduce costs across all of our all of our missions so when we think about

for example and you know this uh eric when we think about the gateway for example i refer to it as not a space station in orbit around the moon but as a reusable command module that will be there for 15 years to be used over and over and over again and we want our landers to go back and forth to the surface of the moon to also be reusable and refuelable so really what we have learned through this whole process and of course the commercial crew program has kind of proven this out is that with re

use we can actually drive down costs and we can increase access and of course all of this was developed because nasa did the right thing and and established basically the the high level criteria the requirements and didn't get involved in designing everything downstream but we set the high level criteria and that was you know in terms of payload and safety and then we let private companies go and innovate and that innovation ultimately drove uh drove us to a point where we're now reusing these r

ockets reusing the capsules and of course we want to apply that to what we do at the moon and eventually mars next is uh lavesio alessandro from the spacex reddit group modesio hello thank you so much this question is for benji what are the main reasons to deploy the trunk before the final the orbit barn unlike what was happening if i'm not drawing with dragon version one thanks that's a great question you know fundamentally that is that is a big difference we're we're uh judging the trunk befor

e we de-orbit uh before we initiate the burn versus after um and um and a lot of it just has to do with general differences in the design of the vehicle um and i don't have a lot of good detail to give you on that right now but i'm sure we can we can get some of that for you next is gina cinceri from abc news uh yes you say three days of supplies what are the limiting factors that would keep you from staying up longer before splashing down once you were undocked yeah i can take that the supplies

that we look at really are you know oxygen for the crew debris nitrogen lithium hydroxide to scrub the carbon dioxide from the air and then simply put you know food and water and when you lay all those things together it turns out you know uh water and lithium hydroxide the chemical that scrubs the co2 are about the limiting consumables so it kind of puts you at about three days of capability if we had to we could probably stretch that a little bit more but going in that's kind of our number fo

r planning and so um it's pretty typical for uh for any time that we're undocking a vehicle from the space station you have some time that you you have before you can get to the ground the vehicle will have plenty of power plenty of propellant plenty of oxygen for the crew it really comes down to uh to food water and and lyo to scrub the co2 next is chris davenport from the washington post hey guys thanks for taking the time i wonder if you could just lay out for us what assets you'll have on st

andby in the case of an emergency the c-17s etc and where they'll be stationed thanks yeah chris i can take that so we do have several assets on standby um we are activating the detachment three from the department of defense uh we will have a c-17 stationed at hickam in the event that we had some very strange this is in in hawaii on the in the pacific coast and arsenal also on the east coast of the us at charleston and so they'd be available for search and rescue uh for this test flight should

we have some problem you know we don't really intend to have that happen we'll we'll have the the spacex vehicle um go search and go navigator out and one of those will be in the gulf position for those sites and one will be on the east coast position four for jacksonville cape and daytona and those will be the prime vehicles to go recover the crew and then of course we've got the you know helicopters that spacex has available to to get the crew back to shore should we need that so next is phil

harwood from cbs news yeah thanks guys uh for benji i think steve was telling us the vehicle is good to land in winds up to 10 knots i'm wondering what the specifics are of wave height in period what's allowed for this flight and how will those numbers change for the crew one vehicle thanks so that's a great question um and i'm going to i'm going to look at my cheat sheet and we've got some good things online by the way uh nasa's uh put out a a great uh product that we've that we've worked on wi

th them as well um and it looks like we're looking for uh you know wave height generally speaking um and wave period we want to particularly make sure that we don't have any uh greater than seven degrees of wave slope um it just it's really uh the important thing to understand about this is that it's an integrated problem um uh it's not only just you know one specific like oh we have exactly this threshold for you know for wins for wave for all these different things there are some absolute thre

sholds for some of these these measurements that we're looking for that we don't want to go over but in general when we're assessing um you know the readiness to bring them home on you know bring home in a specific location we're looking at an integrated you know combination of factors of the wind speed of the wave height of of you know um angle all of these sorts of things are really important um and so and that's that's it's kind of that's an important part of that um and then you ask a questi

on about crew one and how that changes um and we're actually um we're going to have a greater capability when we come to the crew one vehicle we'll be able to basically withstand you know even higher environments for landing which will increase our landing opportunities um as well in combination with all of our supported landing sites um we'll have have a really great a lot of opportunities to bring the crew home thank you and as benji mentioned we do have the specific uh criteria for landing av

ailable at nasa.gov or together with spacex on that it's available there next we'll move over to marcia dunn with associated press yes hello for benji please um i'm interested in how many ships helicopters and how many people you're going to have staged for splashdown and will you have equal numbers on both coasts simultaneously thank you hi marsha uh so come and get it the second fastboat is a backup and also goes out and gets the the parachutes in terms of number of people on the boats um it's

over 40. i want to think i think it's 44 people um are actually on the boat um you know five or so are contractors the the people who who are who are driving the vehicle the boat um and um and then there's about half and half roughly 20 and 20 um spacexers and nasa people on that includes doctors and nurses and medical personnel it incur it includes the people i mentioned before who are doing safing and recovery and refurbishment of the dragon vehicle um it includes um in the nasa group of cour

se there are people who will be there ready to assist and support people from health and medical um within nasa um you know when we start having international partners um on there'll be representatives from their space agencies as well as translators um to help in any for any needs um so it's actually a pretty uh sizable group of folks that come out and help get ready for recovery all right next is marcia smith from space policy online thanks so much for taking my question it's for steve and ben

ji you've talked in the past about having about six weeks between the splashdown and then the launch of crew one to complete the certification of the system since the mission is going so beautifully as uh i think you said benji is their chance of accelerating that especially if the splashdown gets delayed a little bit is it a one for one day delay from between splashdown and the next launch or how does that work yeah i'll i'll take that and then see if benji has anything bad uh yeah we've said i

n the past when we kind of looked at this timeline uh post landing how long does it take to get the panels off the vehicle like benji talked about do the inspections and then also get all the data from the vehicle all the temperatures and pressures and accelerations going through that whole process leading to certification takes about six weeks i wouldn't anticipate we would accelerate that at all if we landed early i you know we have talked about between nasa and spacex that if the landing were

to slide a little bit to the right and we needed more time we would just adjust that crew one day just to make sure we have all the time the important thing about this flight is it's a test flight we actually have more instrumentation on this vehicle than other vehicles and so we want to collect all that data make sure we jointly analyze it between uh spacex and nasa and then set us up for the the next mission with four crew and to support the station needs for increment operations one more que

stion we'll pass it over to dave mosher from business insider thank you so much for doing this i'm taking my question um can you tell us about the on-orbit vehicle inspection results i don't think i heard anyone discuss those did you check uh detect anything anomalous any signs of damage to the heat shield or other parts of the vehicle thank you i guess i'll take that uh we did do an inspection over the weekend we used the space station robotic arm to look at all all the parts of the heat shield

that we could see and uh we do this for every vehicle that undocks we do it for the russian vehicles as well we looked at that we had a joint team between nasa and spacex so we actually had three engineers from spacex here in houston looking at all that data and there was the results were very favorable and there was no um areas on the vehicle that uh that were any concern for entry we talked about that as a dragon mission management team and we talked about the fr today and the vehicles uh saf

e to to return and we'll do the same thing for crew one and subsequent flights this was really a test out of that system as well it worked great and we were able to get the data we needed really good resolution photos and clear the thermal protection system for entry all right with that we'll wrap today's briefing thanks to all of our panelists for joining us today and answering questions and thank you for submitting those questions we still have a lot of milestones coming up you can go to nasa.

gov to reference this at any time of course we have perseverance launch tomorrow the crew aboard the international space station will be conducting a crew news conference at 10 45 a.m eastern time and then of course we'll continue to look for that weather but right now we'll go for uh 9 10 a.m uh eastern time to do a farewell ceremony aboard the international space station on saturday august 1st and then again watching that weather we'll be going live for the undocking broadcast at 5 15 pm easte

rn time thanks again for joining us godspeed bob and doug [Music] [Music] let's do it oh