Falcon 9 Launches Crew-2 to International Space Station
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
A previously flown SpaceX Falcon 9 launched four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft making its second trip to space on Friday.
NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur – who serve as the mission’s spacecraft commander and pilot, respectively – are in orbit along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet.
The on-time liftoff at 5:49 a.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center lit up the pre-dawn Florida sky as the rocket arced to the northeast over the Atlantic Ocean.
Falcon 9’s first stage successfully landed successfully on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the ocean.
The Crew Dragon is scheduled to dock to the space station at about 5:10 a.m. on Saturday, April 24. NASA will provide coverage of the arrive on NASA TV and the space agency’s website, www.nasa.gov.
A post-launch news conference will begin at approximately 7:30 a.m. EDT with the following participants:
- Steve Jurczyk, acting NASA administrator
- Kathy Lueders, associate administrator, Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
- Hiroshi Sasaki, vice president and director general, JAXA’s Human Spaceflight Technology Directorate
- Frank de Winne, manager, International Space Station Program, ESA
- SpaceX representative
The arrival of Crew-2 on Saturday will begin a four-day overlap with the four-member Crew-1, which has been on board the station for 160 days. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will undock Crew Dragon Resilience on Wednesday, April 28, at 5 a.m. and splashdown off the coast of Florida 7.5 hours later at about 12:35 p.m.
Crew-1’s return date and time are dependent on having a healthy spacecraft and favorable weather in the selected splashdown zone.
28 responses to “Falcon 9 Launches Crew-2 to International Space Station”
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Congratulations on another successful launch!
Congratulations on the launch to all involved, also nice to see a used booster and capsule. We have recovered re use in human rated hardware all up and down the stack. Now Boeing just has to get that Starliner going and we’ll have two operational options for sending people to orbit.
“We have recovered re use in human rated hardware all up and down the stack.”
Except for the second stage…
That’s good enough. It really is. However I wonder if they’ll test the TPS subsystem for Starship on the Falcon second stage to see how deep into the atmosphere they can reach before destruction.
that would not surprise me. or some some satellite that test it
SpaceX has been there and done that – or something more sensible, actually – already.
not really no they have tried a capsule but that really means not a lot 🙂
It means more than some pointless and unrecoverable test with a 2nd stage would.
I think not.
1. The TPS would be parasitic mass on an F9 2nd stage.
2. The F9 2nd stage has a far different shape than does Starship and there is no way to usefully TPS its nose end in any case.
3. Recovering the 2nd stage upon return would be impossible as they crash in deep ocean.
4. Anything that could be discoverable by TPSing an F9 2nd stage has already been discovered by insertion of some Starship TPS samples into the heat shield of a Dragon some time ago.
If they stick SN15, and given how cheap SN’s are to build, ISTM they’ll do a suborbital fast entry first then do an orbital re-entry test. Just go for it.
Have they announced that? Even tho Starships are on the cusp of becoming key to government policy, and all that that may entail, I’d bet the FAA will want a more gradual test program which will go fast enough assuming they go to …. oh say , a 50% probability of vehicle loss for every flight. Right now they’re still at 100% chance of loss for every flight demonstrated. So there’s a ways to go yet.
yeah a 100 percent loss rate is well something unsustainable 🙂
The FAA has no power to mandate a minimum loss rate for tests.
And the trunk, but who’s counting.
the Falcon9 has done everything that the shuttle promised to do
1. lowered cost to orbit, 2) promoted reusability (lets just say that they are on the edge of reusability farther to that then rebuilding), 3) closed the business case for the next launcher
this is quite amazing…
Falcon performs what STS promised. We’re seeing what the 80s and 90
s wold have looked like had STS performed.
yes. we are seeing the slow slow slow expansion of the launch envelope and most importantly the flood of private capital into the space market
I am not for sure that this would have been possible with STS even had it worked, unless NASA somehow came to an epiphiny in terms of operation of the vehicle. its unclear for instance the two private flights could have happened.
I think Falcon 9 or something like it was possible after a 6 billion development program in 1970’s dollars. The technology push would have been in the GNC system. The accurate and miniaturized IMU, a single chip 32 bit CPU and math co processor, and a regional navigation system to replace GPS would have been the major new technologies that did not yet exist. The engines would have been a rehash of the SSME except with LOX Kero instead of HydroLox. I don’t think it was out of the range of possibility to do a Falcon 9 back then. It just would have been less mess efficient, or somewhat larger for the same performance to orbit.
If you meant to say the STS was never going to be efficient like the Falcon I agree. STS had conceptual issues that were not going to be overcome by incremental development. I do think flight rate could have been addressed by more shuttles and incremental development, but it was never going to be inexpensive like Falcon is.
The main thing missing in the 1970’s was the attitude. If the 6 billion (1970’s) dollars has been spread over several systems that were not afraid of risk, then what is taking place now could have been started in the 70s. There were many aerospace companies back then with wildly differing concepts that could have given us a F9 equivalent by the late 80s. Starship equivalent to that currently projected by the early 2000s. Competition by the 1970s Boeing, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Rockwell, and many others would have led to a far different landscape than what exists now.
I think the NASA centric and no others of back then was the heart of the issue. Many things are possible when there is enough competition to somewhat countereffect paralyzing risk aversion.
Don’t forget the overwhelming number of payload applications back then were serving state enterprises or countering other state enterprises. There was plenty of competition, and it was from other states. Television and telephone relays were experiments 5 years old or so, but maturing at furious rates. I think the super saturation of American industry with a trained workforce, overstocked with European experts displaced by WW2 and the Cold War and all of them with experience in very effectively spending public dollars to great effect pumped space operations way beyond what the real economy called for. We grew up at the tail end of a series of waves that drove a 60 year period that ended in the early 80’s and we thought it was just the way things were. Our expectations were pumped way too high for what the real economy was going to give in that era. Falcon 9 was matched very well to communications satellite era it was built to serve. What Falcon really needed was 10 years of Proton and Ariane pumping the size of Geosync relays up to meet the commercial needs that were pumped up in the 90’s.
Not willing to do an extended serious back and forth. It seems at least possible that some feasible (read economical0 launch delivery system available by the late 80s would have captured some of the communications market that fiber ended up with. The supposed 90s markets (Iridium overcast etc) could possibly have been served give responsive and affordable launch.
It seems possible that some of the emerging cube sat, micro sat, small sat, etc concepts would have started a couple of decades earlier. In larger sizes and less capable, but earlier start and far more mature by now.
In such a couterfactual, most of us would never have heard of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Recovery systems would not mimic the Falcon9, but would have been some of the 60s and 79s visions executed by the players we now know as oldspace. With commercial competition driving prices down starting 2-3 decades earlier, it seems likely that private research facilities would have flown 0.38 and 0.17 gee centrifuges by now.
It didn’t happen that way, and maybe it couldn’t have, but attitude and markets could have radically changed the way we view and use space today. Picture a quick and dirty half scale shuttle to shake out the concept before committing to a full scale operational system. .
much to agree with there. but that attitude was trying to emerge. Andy Beal was willing to try it in the 90’s …he just had no market.
the problem is as you have stated is that we have watched the aerospace industry, the super high tech industry become a near no risk operation…and something that simply is immune to failure. see Boeing and CST
hmmm
had the federal government said “no shuttle but we are going to buy launches commercially” then there might have been new vehicles but probably not falcon like (ie the recovery)
what would have in my view happened is that both Titan and thhe old Atlas would have started to develop as commercial products and where that went, its not all that clear. the requirement for a space station would have pushed them in some direction …and that coupled with a cost requirement would have come up with some variants…but the technology in terms of computing power, GPS etc simply was not mature enough
what would have occurred is that like Delta, Titan and or whatever would have started a commercial launch industry which by the 90’s someone liek Andy Beal would have walked into …and then we can see how things would have gone.
the market that drove all this would have been the space station…and those launch numbers would have been fiercly competed. …along with GPS and as a residue commercial sats.
STS doomed the country to 30 years of trying to operate a low rate flight system that was completely without any commercial value, could share cost on infrastructure with commercial products and had near zero spin off capability.
the system was a failure, but the notion of government operating it…was the massive failure point
One of the big and interesting “what if” questions is “what if” the X-20 had flown. The other is if NASA stayed with the original TSTO Shuttle with the crewed fly back liquid fuel booster.
Back in business, baby!
All these fanboys commenting on the hobby rocket as if it can be compared to the shuttle in any way.
Ridiculous.
The shuttle was different in every way.
Congrats on your coming out Gary!
Congrats on continuing to be an anonymous creepy troll snarky!