The launch from Cape Canaveral took place successfully, at 1:27 on Monday (Italian time). The bad weather generated by the tropical storm Eta had postponed by a day the debut of the first commercial voyage to the ISS space station. And it is a historic journey for human flight into orbit, marking the new course of development of cosmic activities. The Crew Dragon spacecraft of the Space X Crew-1 mission founded by Elon Musk, con a board the four astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, scientist Shannon Walker and Japanese Soichi Nogochi, provides NASA’s first transportation service like a taxi. Glover is a rookie, all the other veterans and Nogoci, as well as being the first international passenger aboard a private spacecraft is also the only one to have experience on the shuttle and on the Soyuz; therefore in his curriculum he can boast an astronaut record on three different spacecraft. The crew will arrive on the ISS at 5 am (Italian time) on Tuesday.
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Public money and private enterprise
For the first time, nine years after the Shuttle’s withdrawal, US astronauts fly back on an American spaceship. Until now, NASA paid a lucrative ticket to the Russian space agency Roscosmos to launch them towards the ISS. The last contract for the October Soyuz mission was $ 86 million for a single seat. For nine years, therefore, he depended on Roscomos to reach the ISS on which he had spent a hundred billion dollars to build. This has been generating discontent in Congress for some time. But both the political world and NASA had in the meantime accepted the idea of financing Elon Musk’s private initiative to create a vector and a spacecraft that would carry supplies to the station, testing a technology that, evolved, could then also transport astronauts. This was Musk’s goal and finally in 2014 he obtained a $ 2.6 billion loan from NASA in order to build Crew Dragon. At the same time, NASA guaranteed Boeing 4.2 billion dollars to build another capsule, Starliner, so as to have that double chance that was missing with the Shuttle and that paralyzed American human flights for a long time. Boeing received more money because it started from scratch while Space X had already benefited from the resources allocated for the cargo version of the Dragon which now, with various improvements, has become habitable. Each contract includes six flights to the station. So NASA now pays only for transport services to Space X which is responsible for the activities and owner of the vehicles, rocket and spacecraft.
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Carrier and capsule debut
The Dragon Crew-1 mission will last 180 days. The spacecraft on flights to ISS it hosts four astronauts but is designed to house seven. Its flight is completely automatic managed by the onboard computers, but the astronauts can intervene if necessary. Both the Falcon-9 carrier and the Crew Dragon capsule are new, on their first flight, however from the next mission NASA has authorized Space X to reuse both, with great economic benefits for society. Only the first stage of the carrier is recovered which lands in Cape Canaveral or on an ocean platform as in this case. The Californian company now has a proven experience of recovery and reuse having already completed the operation in 65 missions. For the Falcon-9 this is the 98th launch. Last May the first Crew Dragon test with two astronauts on board took place and its success gave the green light to the start of commercial missions.
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On the route of Mars
Hopefully the second Crew-2 expedition is scheduled for March 2021. Meanwhile Boeing is also preparing the launch of its Starliner spacecraft scheduled for next December. He will be without men and will have to prove that he can reach the station and return to Earth without problems, as it did not happen in December last year. Back then computer software errors were leading to the destruction of the vehicle and preventing it from hooking up to the ISS. The most important mistake concerned the clock that marked the computer’s orders and only by intervening from the ground were the controllers able to transmit new commands, avoid the worst and allow the return with a soft landing in the White Sands desert, New Mexico. Subsequent investigations concluded that it was necessary to carry out eighty modifications to make the capsule safe. It too is designed to fly fully automatically and also hosts seven astronauts. It is also reusable. If the next test is positive, the first inhabited flight of Starliner is indicated for June 2021. In the meantime it is the moment of Dragon Crew which marks the triumph of Elon Musk’s projects and dreams, and, at the same time, his first step to then start missions to the Moon and then to Mars, as he likes to tell.
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November 16, 2020 (change November 16, 2020 | 02:16)
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