This year has been about SpaceX's nearly successful attempts to land its rockets on barges. But while Elon Musk's company pursues that ambitious goal, don't forget that SpaceX ha pressing business. It's under contract with NASA to build a replacement for the Space Shuttle that will once again ferry astronauts to the ISS without the help of those pesky Russians.

Wednesday is the big day for the crew-carrying variant of SpaceX's Dragon capsule. This is the Pad Abort Test, a demonstration of the spacecraft's ejector seat for launches gone wrong that can prevent a tragedy from happening. It involves a wholesale separation of the Dragon capsule from its launching body with the crew inside. The SpaceX system is designed to abort at any point in the launch, whether just after lift-off or in second stage separation high above the ground.

NASA TV will live-stream the test launch. The launch window opens at 9 AM ET and extends into the early afternoon, until about 2:30.

The company has released this graphic of tomorrow's test. As you can see, it's not a full scale launch. Rather, Dragon will launch just under a mile into the air before deploying the emergency system to see if it works. The only passenger on this craft will be a dummy who "prefers to remain anonymous" and is definitely not Larry the Crash Test Dummy. No sir.

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If the test is successful, it will be the next big step in NASA's goal of being independent of Russian launches by 2017. Boeing is currently competing with SpaceX for NASA's astronaut-carrying business, with Boeing hard at work on the CST-100. Both companies are contracted for a series of future flights to the ISS to test out their technology, while somewhere, Sierra Nevada weeps at what could have been.

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John Wenz
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John Wenz is a Popular Mechanics writer and space obsessive based in Philadelphia. He tweets @johnwenz.