![]() The Crew-2 booster, which teams refer to as “flight proven,” last flew in November, and its sooty façade bears the markings of its previous journey into space. This is something we pay a lot of attention to.” “I know there’s a little boy out there whose mom is flying. ![]() “We ask ourselves all the time, would we be willing to fly our families on these vehicles?” Reed said. But that’s a tiny percentage of the total launch weight, and NASA and SpaceX decided that the overage didn’t pose a threat to the astronauts. During the process, they learned from teams at SpaceX’s Texas facility that the company has been routinely loading extra liquid oxygen fuel into Falcon 9 boosters-the equivalent of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds of fuel, Stich said. But before certifying the rocket and spacecraft for the Crew-2 flight, engineers scrutinized every aspect of the hardware, looking for any defects or surprises. The SpaceX crewed Dragon capsules are designed to fly at least five times each, with some refurbishment between journeys. “This business of human spaceflight is unforgiving,” Norm Knight, NASA’s deputy manager of flight operations, said at a pre-flight press event. That equation changes when humans are involved. SpaceX says that the latest iterations of its Falcon 9 boosters, known as Block 5, are designed to survive at least 10 launches-and Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director of human spaceflight programs, says the company intends to push that limit for uncrewed missions. Since then, it has achieved 80 rocket landings, both on land and on barges at sea, although the company’s boosters still occasionally miss their mark.Īmong roughly two dozen reused boosters in the company’s inventory, the most flown is booster B1051, which has so far survived nine uncrewed launches and recoveries. In December 2015, the company successfully returned a Falcon 9 rocket booster to its landing pad for the first time. The concept is not new for years, the space agency reused its small fleet of space shuttles, but reusable rockets weren’t a reality until SpaceX entered the scene. “Flight proven”īoth NASA and SpaceX contend that reusable spacecraft are crucial for making space travel more affordable. “There’s nothing like it, when you look out the window and see a spaceship getting prepared and realize that you’re going to be riding on it in a few days,” McArthur, who was rocking a pair of sparkly silver boots, told reporters after they arrived. Late last week, when the crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center, they were treated to a view of their rocket as their plane descended. More than 200 science experiments are also aboard, including several that will investigate human immune cell function. The four-person crew is made up of NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace and Exploration Agency (JAXA). Now the Crew-2 astronauts-all veteran space flyers-are settling in for their roughly 24-hour cruise to the station, where they’ll live for six months.
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