NASA (the United States space agency) has defined that its two astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after being sent on the maiden crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, will return to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule since the original vehicle was not considered safe for return travel .
Elon Musk’s company, which produces the vehicle, has an agreement with the agency to carry out commercial transport to Earth orbit, to the ISS or beyond, and its spacecraft is the only one at the moment that can take passengers and cargo into space.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle is 811 meters tall and has a diameter of four meters, with the capacity to carry a crew of up to seven people and a payload of up to six tons.
Inside, three touchscreens allow pilots to view flight data — but the aircraft is almost entirely autonomously steered.
Dragon was initially contracted to make five round-trip flights to the space station, a commitment that NASA tripled after the success of the trips. The company and the agency are recertifying the vehicle to go to and from space at least 15 more times.
The spacecraft is being used for the active mission NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 — Dragon’s ninth flight — as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, launching March 3, 2024.
Astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps and Alexander Grebenkin docked with the ISS to conduct new scientific research in preparation for space exploration.
In the Crew-7 four astronauts — Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen, Satoshi Furukawa and Konstantin Borisov — were launched aboard Crew Dragon to reach the space station on August 27, 2023.
This content was originally published in Meet the Crew Dragon, the SpaceX spacecraft that will “save” Starliner astronauts on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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