With the successful launch of the first all-civilian flight on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon, the company is looking to ramp up similar flights in the near future.
Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director for its human spaceflight program projected as many as a half a dozen flights a year.
“There’s nothing really that limits our capability to launch,” he said. “It’s about having rockets and Dragons ready to go and having everything in the manifest align with our other launches.”
The company founded by Elon Musk has two active Crew Dragons, both having launched with passengers twice, and both currently in space.
Crew Dragon Endeavour first took NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station launching from Kennedy Space Center on May 30, 2020, on the Demo-2 test mission, which marked the first time any humans had launched to orbit from U.S. soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
It’s currently docked again to the ISS on its first operational mission, Crew-2, and scheduled to return in November.
Crew Dragon Resilience is currently orbiting Earth at nearly 360 miles altitude with the first all-civilian crew of Inspiration4. It launched from KSC on Wednesday night and is slated to return with a splashdown off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean at 7:06 p.m. Saturday.
Resilience’s first trip was Crew-1 in November 2020, and SpaceX and NASA look to turn it around again once the Inspiration4 mission lands for the upcoming Crew-3 launch that could come as early as Oct. 31.
“Missions like Inspiration4 help advance spaceflight to enable ultimately anyone to go to orbit & beyond,” Musk said on his Twitter account.
The crew-capable version of Dragon came about after SpaceX and Boeing won the NASA contract to take over crew taxi services to and from the ISS. While SpaceX surged ahead, now having flown 14 people on four missions in its Crew Dragon, Boeing’s capsule, the CST-100 Starliner, has yet to complete its first successful uncrewed demo mission.
Until Boeing joins the rotation, SpaceX will be the sole partner to bring astronauts to the ISS from American launch sites at a rate of two missions a year as each expedition lasts about six months.
“The reality is the Dragon manifest is getting busier by the moment,” Reed said, noting the planned flight in early 2022 of four passengers for customer Axiom Space that will actually fly to and stay on the ISS for a few days. “It just goes on from there. We have a number of NASA missions that we’ll do, and we also have a growing backlog of commercial astronaut missions that we’re looking forward to perform.”
Axiom is charging $55 million per passenger on that flight, and SpaceX advertises its capability to fly orbital missions like Inspiration4, flights to the ISS and even missions farther out.
It has already announced the first civilian mission to orbit the moon, but that will be with its in-the-works Starship rocket.
The Inspiration4 mission marked the first time in 60 years of human spaceflight that a rocket has taken passengers into orbit without a professional astronaut.
The crew spent more than six months training for the flight, putting the effort in to make this mission a success and pave the way for more.
“Ultimately, we want to make life multiplanetary,” Reed said. “And that means putting millions of people in space one day. So the long-term vision is that spaceflight becomes airline-like. Right? You can buy a ticket and you go, but right now the appropriate thing is we still train people significantly, and as I mentioned, this crew has been astronaut-trained like our other crews have been trained before.”
The billionaire behind the Inspiration4 mission, Jared Isaacman, was eager to become SpaceX’s first customer and pave the way for a future with more civilian access to space.
“It’s just getting started,” Issacman said during a pre-launch press conference. “This is just the beginning.”
Issacman pushed SpaceX to allow a higher altitude orbit for Inspiration4, farther out than the space station or even the current orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. The reason behind it was to further test the effects of things like higher radiation levels and risk of debris, so that eventual missions to places like Mars are possible.
“There’s a lot of risk on a six-month journey like that,” Issacman said. “Better to start taking some steps now today in a very well thought-out and mitigated way so that we continue to reach toward those extraordinary goals like making life multiplanetary and the world more interesting when people can journey among the stars.”
