The scorched spacecraft will be refurbished and reused in 2021.
Russia. The United States. China. The list of those who have successful launched humans to orbit is short, and rightly so – getting to space is no easy feat. But now there’s a new name to add to the list, and it might just change everything.
SpaceX.
Yesterday, Sunday, August 2, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley successfully splashed down back on Earth, the culmination of a historic 63-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
Their flight, on California-based company SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, makes SpaceX only the fourth entity in the world – and the first commercial one – to send humans to orbit and back.
“What this heralds is fundamentally a new era in spaceflight and space exploration,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press conference following the successful splashdown.
“We’re going to go to the Moon, have a base on the Moon, send people to Mars, and make life multiplanetary. This day heralds a new age of space exploration.”
Behnken and Hurley had launched on Crew Dragon back on May 30, a major moment in American spaceflight as human launches returned to U.S. soil for the first time since the final Space Shuttle flight in July 2011.
The two astronauts had the walk of their Crew Dragon capsule, giving viewers back on Earth a tour of the spacecraft – which they named Endeavour – as they made their way to the ISS.
After a night's sleep in space, the astronauts arrived the following day, with the spacecraft autonomosuly docking with the orbiting space station on May 31. Once the hatches were opened, another mission highlight, Behnken and Hurley then began their two-month stay on the ISS as part of the station’s crew.
While Crew Dragon remained docked to the station, engineers on the ground kept a keen eye on the spacecraft to see how it coped with being in space. Happy with its performance, the mission continued for almost its full possible length.
The astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Ultimately, the decision was made to bring the astronauts home in August. On Saturday, 1 August, Crew Dragon undocked from the ISS with the two NASA astronauts on board to begin the journey home.
They began a lonely orbit of Earth for 18 hours, until their landing site came into view and Crew Dragon’s thrusters kicked in at 2 P.M. Eastern Time on Sunday, August 2 to push the spacecraft into Earth’s atmosphere.
Withstanding re-entry temperatures of about 2,000°C, the spacecraft passed through a six-minute communications blackout window – when plasma from the ensuing heat renders communications impossible – before it emerged and deployed its parachutes to slow its descent.
Behnken (left) and Hurley had spent two months in space.
Less than an hour after re-entry had begun, the spacecraft came in for a gentle splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Florida, at 2.48 P.M. Eastern Time – the first planned water landing of astronauts since the Apollo Soyuz Test Project in 1975 (two Soviet cosmonauts experienced an unintentional splashdown in 1976 when their Soyuz capsule accidentally landed in a frozen lake).
Fast recovery boats quickly pulled up to the capsule, along with unwanted private boats, checking for any toxic fumes that may have leaked. Within the next hour the spacecraft was hoisted out of the water onto a larger recovery vessel called Go Navigator and, after some further purging of toxic fumes, the astronauts emerged triumphantly from the capsule.
The astronauts then flew by helicopter back to Pensacola, Florida followed by a plane flight back to Houston to meet their families in a heart-warming moment. As for the capsule, it was taken to a SpaceX facility in Florida for refurbishment ahead of another flight in spring 2021.
“This has been quite an odyssey,” Hurley said after the return to Earth. “To be where we are now, [with] the first crewed flight of Dragon, is just unbelievable.”
Behnken and Hurley’s mission, known as Demo-2 (or DM-2), was essentially a test flight, paving the way for fully operational missions of Crew Dragon with more people on board.
The first of those, Crew-1, is expected to take place in September with three American astronauts and one Japanese astronaut. The next, Crew-2, is the aforementioned 2021 flight of the same Demo-2 capsule.
The smoothness of the entire Demo-2 mission, from launch to landing, will be music to the ears of NASA, who has bet big on SpaceX and Boeing – beset by delays with its own Starliner vehicle – to provide a taxi service for astronauts to and from Earth orbit.
The agency, meanwhile, hopes to focus its own efforts on missions further afield into deeper space, to the Moon and Mars, with its Artemis program – where SpaceX may also play a key role.
The astronauts were flown back to Florida and then Houston.
Alongside these NASA missions to the ISS, SpaceX is expected to begin a new era of private spaceflight, too. Space tourists will be able to pay for seats aboard Crew Dragon, with prospective clients already including the likes of Tom Cruise, for flights to the ISS or other destinations in orbit, perhaps even space hotels.
For SpaceX, Crew Dragon is very much the start of that private spaceflight era. The company, with its upcoming Starship vehicle, hopes to ultimately take humans to the Moon and Mars. Musk has made no secret of using Starship to try and settle humans permanently on the Red Planet.
Musk is not everyone’s cup of tea at the moment, from sharing right-wing memes to downplaying coronavirus. But in SpaceX he has created something truly special that is the envy of the world – a successful private company that can now not only launch and land rockets, but launch and land humans too.
Demo-2 looks set to be the first of many human spaceflight launches for SpaceX.
Demo-2 is the culmination of that goal SpaceX set out to achieve more than a decade ago. Now with more NASA flights, private customers, and flights to the Moon and Mars on the horizon, the best is very much yet to come.
“Welcome back to Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” Mike Heiman, SpaceX’s operations engineer, radioed to Behnken and Hurley after they touched down. They might just be the first of many, many more to hear those words.
