SpaceX successfully launched their second crew to space

SpaceX has successfully launched its second crew of astronauts to orbit on November 16, 2020 with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Crew-1, as the name given for the flight marks the first operational mission of the Crew Dragon. SpaceX now is moving close to regularly sending people to and from the International Space Station for NASA.

 

The Crew Dragon took off at 5:57 am Monday IST on top of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, launching it from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker as well as Soichi Noguchi from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency were flying in Crew Dragon. 

The crew will spend more than a day in space before reaching the ISS on Monday at around 9:30 am IST. The Crew Dragon is specifically designed to automatically dock to the international space station, without needing input from the crew inside.

The Falcon 9 booster successfully landed on the drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The booster is to be re-used on SpaceX’s next crewed mission, Crew-2.

The Crew Dragon’s first crew flight to space was in May that lasted just two months from start to finish. The flight was a test that was meant to demonstrate that the vehicle can safely transport people to the space station and bring them back home again. It was successful, and made the Crew Dragon the first vehicle that NASA has certified to carry humans since the Space Shuttle and the first private spacecraft ever to receive that designation.

Despite reaching this important milestone, some NASA officials are still hesitant to describe the Crew Dragon as fully operational. The losses of two Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia has impacted on the agency, and NASA engineers don’t want to get into the mindset that their work is finished.

After the last flight of the Space Shuttle took place in 2011, NASA had to depend on Russia to get the agency’s astronauts to the ISS. NASA had to pay roughly $80 million per seat for Russia’s Soyuz rocket. 

NASA now has options for sending its astronauts into space on the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.  The cost of a seat is roughly as low as $55 million, according to a government audit.

The four crew members on board will meet up with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who arrived at the ISS in a Soyuz in October. With so many astronauts on board, the crew are expecting to get a lot of things done during their six-month stay.