An Internship with NASA's Commercial Crew Program
SpaceX Dragon: Pad Abort Simulation and Analysis
After my freshman year, I was fortunate enough to get an internship at Johnson Space Center. The project NASA put me on was simulating the SpaceX Crew Dragon’s pad abort sequence to identify potential failure modes. You may be wondering why a NASA intern would be working on a SpaceX vehicle. My project was a part of the Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between NASA and numerous aerospace giants to fly humans to space on commercial American rockets. As part of the program, NASA needed to independently study the safety of SpaceX’s vehicle used in the program.
My project used Monte Carlo simulations on GPU clusters to simulate hundreds of launches, each including a launch abort while on the launch pad. I analyzed resulting forces on the crew, the parachute deployment behavior, the landing area, and stresses on the vehicle, along with many other risk factors.