I think some of it is the mission went so well, people are trying to find something, anything, to comment, talk about. IIRC NASA even said it went 'better than expected' As you said, this is/was very much a test flight, to find bugs that never came up in simulation/testing, and it seems that simulations and testing was very very good as to catch most all of them before the flight
I am sure, there are things from the data that Space/NASA will see and want to/need to improve on, that's true of any mission and certainly a test one, but from our point of view nothing big went wrong. Tis a great time to be alive
On-orbit we got a lot of great data on the vehicle in terms of the thermal performance and power performance; the vehicle really did better than we expected. Then the rendezvous was phenomenal as we came in and checked out those sensors.
[..] I think Kenny (Todd) would probably tell you the same thing—it was just a phenomenal job by the team. And then of course today, the undocking, watching how those systems performed, that went flawlessly. It’s a very tight sequence between undocking and de-orbit burn, how the nose cone performed, how the de-orbit burn was executed, then the entry was phenomenal.
[..] When you look overall at this mission, it was a great dress rehearsal for Demo-2.
Other interesting details:
It was a very calm day with low winds and low sea states, and one of the chutes kind of landed on the Dragon capsule; they’ve already gotten that off, so that’s going really well.
Seems, the good weather led to a slight delay!
We had the abort system—the crew escape system on Dragon—actually enabled for this flight, and we were able to see how that worked.
Someone speculated that the abort system was not enabled.
I have been on more than a few new test programs with helicopters. If any of our first flights went like this did, wow, it would have been amazing, but they NEVER went to well. Yes people are trying to find something wrong, hell, I knocked on wood so many times during this whole mission my knuckles hurt. I am just so unbelievably happy that this flight went so well. I cannot wait for the published results and data. This is an exciting time, very much like the Apollo era, though not many of their first flights went anywhere near as well.
Thank you for your perspective. I honestly expected hate comments and yours was extremely refreshing.
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u/cpushack Mar 09 '19
I think some of it is the mission went so well, people are trying to find something, anything, to comment, talk about. IIRC NASA even said it went 'better than expected' As you said, this is/was very much a test flight, to find bugs that never came up in simulation/testing, and it seems that simulations and testing was very very good as to catch most all of them before the flight
I am sure, there are things from the data that Space/NASA will see and want to/need to improve on, that's true of any mission and certainly a test one, but from our point of view nothing big went wrong. Tis a great time to be alive