Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars.
SpaceX has developed several launch vehicles, the Starlink satellite constellation, the Dragon cargo spacecraft, and flown humans to the International Space Station on the Crew Dragon Demo-2.
Yesterday, four astronauts were brought to orbit on Sunday night after short delays from the weather and technical issues. At 7:27 p.m. Eastern time, the Resilience capsule in the nine engines of the Falcon 9 rocket finally took lift off as it lit the night sky.
The four astronauts are Michael S. Hopkins, Shannon Walker, Victor J. Glover of NASA, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
Colonel Hopkins, the mission’s commander sends his remarks about the beauty of Earth from orbit, thanking the staff at SpaceX to make everything possible.
NASA designated Sunday night’s launch as the first operational flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft built and operated by SpaceX, the rocket company started by Elon Musk. The four astronauts aboard — three from NASA and one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency — left Earth from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The certification progress between NASA and SpaceX was done last week, providing the space agency’s seal of approval that SpaceX has met the terms to take out the NASA astronauts to orbit. The launch, also known as Crew-1, is a regularly scheduled trip to take the four crew members on a six-month stay at the space station.
This launch marks the end of the development phase, where there is commercial capability from a private sector company to safely bring people to space, said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA, said in a telephone interview with reporters on Thursday.
In NASA’s video stream, it showed the astronauts being in good spirits, suited up in their modern SpaceX flight suits. The astronauts even took pictures with the visitors, including Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, and Gwynne Shotwell, the president, and chief operations officer of SpaceX.
The live video that streamed on the astronauts’ preparations has about 5 million views, being just aired 5 hours ago.
Just after 4 p.m., the astronauts began the drive to the launchpad in Tesla cars that have “L8RERTH” license plates. This is the first “operational” flight of the Crew Dragon since the demonstration mission in May, with Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard. That launch with Endeavour, the capsule’s name, was the first crewed mission from the United States to orbit since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles in 2011.
Crew-1 astronauts:
- Michael S. Hopkins, 51, a colonel in the United States Space Force, is the commander for the flight. (Colonel Hopkins is also the first member of the newly created U.S. Space Force to go to space.) He was one of nine astronauts selected by NASA in 2009. He has made one previous trip to the International Space Station, in 2013 and 2014, spending 166 days in orbit.
- Shannon Walker, 55, has had one previous stint on the space station, in 2010. Dr. Walker has a doctoral degree in space physics from Rice University, where she studied how the solar wind interacted with the atmosphere of Venus.
- Soichi Noguchi, 55, an astronaut with JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will be making his third trip to space. He was a member of the crew of the space shuttle Discovery in 2005 on the first shuttle launch after the loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts more than two years earlier.
- Victor Glover, 44, selected by NASA in 2013 to be an astronaut, will be making his first spaceflight. He is the first black crew member of a space station crew. Victor was a Navy commander and test pilot who joined the astronaut corps in 2013.
The journey of the Crew Dragon is aired live from America’s space program on Youtube, for those who wish to catch up and follow along.
Traveling at 27,359 kilometers per hour, it would still take about 19 hours to catch up to the space station; for now, the Crew-1 is resting and making sure that they’ll have enough rest before they reach their destination.
They will join three other astronauts already there: Kate Rubins of NASA and two Russians, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.
The Crew Dragon is a gumdrop-shaped capsule — an upgraded version of SpaceX’s original Dragon capsule, which has been used many times to carry cargo. It is roughly comparable in size to the Apollo capsule that took NASA astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier NASA capsules — Mercury and Gemini — were considerably smaller.
SpaceX says the Crew Dragon can be configured with seating for seven people.
Elon Musk, the SpaceX chief executive, said in a tweet on Saturday that he “most likely” had a “moderate case” of Covid-19, tested positive and negative on four swab tests on Nov. 13.
Mr. Musk has not stated whether he plans to be on hand to see off the astronauts, as he was in May when SpaceX’s capsule first attempted to carry astronauts to orbit. But Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said that anyone tested positive has to be isolated to break the chain of the spread.
Mr. Musk keeps himself updated with the operations remotely while tweeting about the progress and how he’s grateful to have it be launched.