Austin, Texas (CNN Business) — A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, carrying four astronauts from three countries, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday morning, beginning its six-month stay in space.
This launch marked the third crewed flight for Elon Musk’s company and the first to make use of a previously flown rocket booster and spacecraft.
NASA astronauts, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, will be accompanied by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, from the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide, from Japan. They are to spend six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their Crew Dragon capsule docks early Saturday morning.
The Crew Dragon capsule, called Endeavor, previously carried NASA’s Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the space station in May 2020. Endeavor took off into space atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, part of which was spotted. from soot from a previous mission, in November 2020. SpaceX has made reuse a cornerstone of its business plan, in the hope that recovery and restoration of equipment will reduce the cost of spaceflight.
Although the company has returned to flying thrusters and spacecraft dozens of times in satellite and cargo launches in recent years, this will be the first time the company will reuse equipment for a crewed mission.
After enjoying time at the beach on Thursday and getting some sleep, the crew was at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to get ready shortly after midnight. They then enjoyed carefully curated playlists, one of which featured tunes from Ozzy Osbourne, Foo Fighters, and Metallica, inside the Teslas that brought them to the launch pad before they were taken to the launch tower and accessed the launch pad. spaceship through an elevated walkway.
The astronauts spent hours being tethered to the capsule by a team of SpaceX aides and performing a series of communications and security checks. The crew briefly entertained themselves during the checks by playing rounds of rock-paper-scissors, a superstitious tradition that all astronauts departing KSC follow before flight.
Then, just before 6 a.m. local time, the Falcon 9 rocket came to life and propelled the spacecraft at more than 17,000 miles per hour before separating from the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX also landed the first-stage rocket booster on an offshore platform so that it can be used once again on a subsequent mission.
The Crew Dragon, meanwhile, is now moving through space. It will continue to fly freely through orbit as it gradually approaches the International Space Station, which orbits about 400 km above the Earth’s surface. It’s scheduled to dock at the ISS around 5 a.m. Miami time on Saturday.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
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Kimbrough, McArthur, Pesquet and Hoshide will join seven astronauts already aboard the station, four of whom arrived in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in November. That will bring the total staffing of the space station to 11, one of the largest crews the ISS has ever hosted. But that number will quickly drop to seven when four more astronauts travel home on April 28.
NASA has spent more than a decade working to increase staffing aboard the 21-year-old space station, following the retirement of its space shuttle program in 2011 that left the Russian Soyuz spacecraft as the only option to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The United States had been paying Russia up to $ 90 million per seat for those trips.
For years, SpaceX worked under a $ 2.6 billion fixed-price contract to develop its Crew Dragon spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which for the first time in the space agency’s history delivered the task of building and testing. a spacecraft worthy of crew to the private sector. SpaceX made history last May with the first crewed launch of a Crew Dragon on a mission called Demo-2, which brought NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken to the Space Station for a four-month stay. A second manned SpaceX mission took off in November.
(Boeing is working under a similar contract to develop its own capsule for the program, called the Starliner, although it is still in the testing phase.)
A main focus of the astronauts’ mission will be to study “tissue chips,” or “small models of human organs that contain multiple types of cells that behave very similarly to how they do in the body” and that NASA hopes advance the development of drugs and vaccines, according to the space agency. That work will build on years of studying biological and other scientific phenomena aboard the International Space Station, where the microgravity environment can give scientists a better fundamental understanding of how something works.
McArthur is a veteran of the space shuttle and is married to Behnken, who co-piloted the historic Demo-2 mission, last May. McArthur told reporters over the weekend that he was able to gain “years of experience” with the Crew Dragon vehicle while Behnken worked alongside SpaceX during the Crew Dragon development process.
“I really had several years learning from him along the way,” said McArthur, who will pilot the Crew-2 mission and has a Ph.D. in oceanography.
McArthur will be joined by NASA’s Kimbrough, a retired Army colonel and veteran of two previous Space Station missions. His fellow crew members Hoshide from Japan and Pesquet from France also have prior space flight experience.
Pesquet said he appreciated the opportunity to fly aboard the reconditioned booster rocket that helps lift the capsule into space. The worn gear still covered in soot from his previous flights allowed him and his fellow crew members to “draw our initials” on the side of the vehicle.
“I do not know if [la escritura] It will stick, but I found it really cool, ”he said.
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