Photo: NASA
So far, the American space program, presently relying heavily on the hardware manufactured by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is going wonderfully. The Crew Dragon spaceship, unlike Boeing’s Starliner, proved time and again it is a reliable vehicle, and NASA is planning to keep launching people up using it.
To date, the Crew Dragon has been in orbit with humans onboard three times. The first operational flight, Crew-1 took place in late 2020, and the most recent, Crew-2, occurred in April this year (the first crewed flight, Demo-2, carried astronauts into orbit in May 2020, but it did not dock with the International Space Station).
SpaceX is under contract with NASA to provide six crewed flights to the ISS, and the next one, Crew-3, is scheduled to take place later this year. And despite the proven track record of the ship, and all the safety measures in place, astronauts are training in case something bad happens.
The main photo of this piece shows Crew-3 members conducting water survival training at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The photo was taken in April and published this month by NASA.
Unlike Starliner, which is designed to come back to Earth on land, the Crew Dragon went for the good old fashion way of returning astronauts to Earth (and, by extension, saving them during a potential botched launch) by touching down in the water.
The Crew-3 mission comprises NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer (a fourth will likely be added by the time the mission launches). Chari and Maurer are at their first trip to space.
The mission, just like the others, is scheduled to last six months, and its arrival on the ISS will make things a tad crowded as this new people would overlap for a period with those of the previous launch.
SpaceX is under contract with NASA to provide six crewed flights to the ISS, and the next one, Crew-3, is scheduled to take place later this year. And despite the proven track record of the ship, and all the safety measures in place, astronauts are training in case something bad happens.
The main photo of this piece shows Crew-3 members conducting water survival training at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The photo was taken in April and published this month by NASA.
Unlike Starliner, which is designed to come back to Earth on land, the Crew Dragon went for the good old fashion way of returning astronauts to Earth (and, by extension, saving them during a potential botched launch) by touching down in the water.
The Crew-3 mission comprises NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer (a fourth will likely be added by the time the mission launches). Chari and Maurer are at their first trip to space.
The mission, just like the others, is scheduled to last six months, and its arrival on the ISS will make things a tad crowded as this new people would overlap for a period with those of the previous launch.
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