Count down for Crew Dragon Launch!
On 27th May 2020, History will be made as NASA will launch its astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, on a crew dragon capsule to the International Space Station.
Why Its so special you ask? Good question!
After the Space shuttle was retired back in 2011, USA didn’t have the capability of launching people into space from US soil, NASA has relied solely on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to perform this taxi service.
It’s really cool. You fly to Moscow, they take you out to Kazakhstan, and then you get into a Russian Soyuz rocket which shoots you into a low earth orbit. Or just sits there on the launch pad because the Kazakhi mafia sold the rocket fuel on the black market.
TBBT/Howard Wolowitz S05E04
I mean think about it, there are not many countries who have the capability to launch humans into space, Only Russia, US and China can take people into space. India is developing its capability to launch people into space as part of its Gaganyan mission and planning to launch people in 2021-22.
Another importance of this mission is that its being launched from Launch Complex 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the same pad as the Apollo missions launched from.
The Crew Dragon
The crew Dragon was developed under NASA’s commercial crew program. The aim of the program was to let private vendors develop and operate crew vehicles to carry US and international astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). Two companies won the contract Boeing and SpaceX.
Crew Dragon is a reusable spacecraft developed by SpaceX based on the Dragon 1 cargo spacecraft. The Dragon spacecraft was the first private cargo spacecraft to dock to the ISS, and the first cargo spacecraft to be reused, and its launched on top of a Falcon 9 booster.
Crew Dragon is re-usable like its predecessor, but only as cargo variant.
Lets wait for the Dragon to go to ISS and safely splashdown back to earth!
As always, Thank you for reading
