As part of the development of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, the test demonstrated the spacecraft's abort system capability, verifying the capsule's eight side-mounted SuperDraco thrusters' capability to quickly power itself away from a failing rocket while it is still on the ground.

The flight was the one of four tests for the Commercial Crew Program (CCiCap) award given to SpaceX in 2012.

[4] After reaching a maximum height of about 1,187 m (3,894 ft), slightly lower than expected; Dragon jettisoned its trunk about 21 seconds after the liftoff.

[5] The C201 capsule, dubbed DragonFly was originally planned to be used for the in-flight abort test expected to fly after this mission.

However, SpaceX and NASA decided later to use the capsule used for Demo-1 for the in-flight abort test as there were design changes after construction of DragonFly.