For the
Commercial Crew Program, NASA requires participating companies to include and test a
launch escape system in their crew-carrying vehicles. Prior to this, the last time American crewed spaceflight implemented the capability to escape a rocket during an emergency or anomaly was on the
Saturn IB launch vehicle during
Skylab missions and
Apollo-Soyuz. The Saturn's successor, the
Space Shuttle, had no system to eject the crew compartment from the rest of the spacecraft and launch stack at any time after two-person test flights had ended, and had
limited launch abort options. The Space Shuttle program had fourteen astronaut casualties during its 30-year duration, half of which occurred when
a booster rocket failed during ascent. NASA heavily emphasized crew safety during successor programs. The need for an effective launch escape system was further amplified by the launch failure of
Soyuz MS-10 in 2018, during which American astronaut
Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut
Alexey Ovchinin had their lives saved by the rocket's abort system.The SpaceX in-flight abort test was envisioned as a separation and abort scenario in the
troposphere at
transonic velocities during
max Q, where the vehicle experiences maximum aerodynamic pressure.
Dragon 2 would use its
SuperDraco abort engines to push itself away from the
Falcon 9 after an intentional premature engine cutoff. The vehicle would reorient, deploy parachutes and soft-land in the Atlantic Ocean. Earlier, this test had been scheduled before the uncrewed orbital test, however, SpaceX and NASA considered it safer to use a capsule capable of spaceflight rather than the
test article from the pad abort test. The flight would have launched from
Vandenberg Air Force Base SLC-4E on board a modified three-engine Falcon 9, which was possibly
F9R Dev2. After the change of plan, the test would have used the
C204 capsule, which successfully flew
Demo-1, however, C204 was destroyed in an explosion during a static fire test on 20 April 2019.
Capsule C205, originally planned for
Demo-2, replaced C204 in the In-Flight Abort Test;
C206 was subsequently used for
Demo-2. but it was eventually decided to be
B1046, the first of the human-rated
Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters to be built and flown. The launch stack included a fully loaded second stage with a dummy weight instead of a functional vacuum engine. As the flight was the final test before SpaceX and NASA were to fly crew to the
International Space Station, it was used by all parties involved to practice various procedures surrounding the launch and abort. Prior to the actual abort test, NASA and SpaceX conducted an all-in simulation of events leading up to an actual crew launch, including crew suit-up and travel to the pad. For this test, preparing recovery vessels and personnel for emergency and contingency situations was deemed particularly important. After delaying because of weather and visibility issues, Falcon 9 lifted off at 15:30:00UTC, at
Kennedy Space Center from
LC-39A, on January 19, 2020. == Mission ==