The first mission of SpaceX’s new astronaut taxi is within the books. The Crew Dragon capsule splashed down within the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast as we speak (March eight) at eight:45 a.m. EST (1345 GMT), wrapping up a historic mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
There have been no astronauts aboard this flight, solely the sensor-packed dummy Ripley named after a personality from the “Alien” movies. But the success of the check flight, generally known as Demo-1, helps paves the best way for a crewed mission of the SpaceX car, maybe as early as this summer time.
That might be an enormous milestone when it comes; astronauts haven’t launched to orbit from American soil since NASA retired its house shuttle fleet in July 2011.
“Fifty years after people landed on the moon for the primary time, America has pushed a golden spike on the path to new house exploration feats via the work of our business associate SpaceX and the entire devoted and proficient flight controllers at NASA and our worldwide companions,” NASA astronaut Anne McClain radioed Mission Control from the ISS when Crew Dragon undocked from the orbiting lab earlier as we speak.
“This is a brand new period in human spaceflight,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stated Wednesday (March 6) throughout a webcast occasion with Vice President Mike Pence, who spoke to McClain and Canadian Space Agency’s David Saint-Jacques from NASA’s Mission Control middle in Houston.
NASA officers stated there was a little bit of Apollo historical past concerned in as we speak’s Crew Dragon splashdown: It got here almost 50 years to the day after the Apollo 9 spacecraft returned to Earth in the identical space on March 13, 1969.
Dragon is a free-flying spacecraft designed to ship each cargo and other people to orbiting locations. It is the one spacecraft at the moment flying that’s able to returning important quantities of cargo to Earth. Currently Dragon carries cargo to house, nevertheless it was designed from the start to hold people. The first demonstration flight underneath NASA’s Commercial Crew Program launched on March 2, 2019 at 2:49 a.m. ET. The Dragon spacecraft efficiently docked with the house station forward of schedule at 6:02 a.m. ET on March three, 2019, turning into the primary American spacecraft in historical past to autonomously dock with the International Space Station. (Source: SpaceX/Space.com/NASA – Image: NASA)
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