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SpaceX will send four astronauts into low Earth orbit as part of its first manned operational flight to the International Space Station (ISS).
The crew, consisting of a Japanese and three US astronauts, are scheduled to take off shortly after midnight on Sunday, on a rocket and capsule system built by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s aerospace company.
For NASA, it marks the beginning of using private firms as a “taxi service” to fly its crew to and from the space station.
The US space agency announced this week that it has certified SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket to carry astronauts, making it the first commercial human spaceflight system in history.
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“This is a great honor that inspires confidence in our attempt to return to the Moon, travel to Mars and ultimately help humanity go multi-planetary,” SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said in a statement.
Since ending its Space Shuttle program in 2011, NASA has relied on the Russian space agency Roscosmos to transport its astronauts to the space station, at a cost of approximately US $ 90 million (£ 67 million) per seat. .
In 2014, it awarded SpaceX and Boeing contracts to provide manned launch services to the space station as part of its commercial manning program. The SpaceX certification ends NASA’s dependence on Russia and comes with a price tag of approximately US $ 55 million (£ 40 million) per astronaut.
“NASA’s partnership with US private industry is changing the history of human spaceflight by opening up access to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for more people, more science and more business opportunities,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial space flight development at NASA, said in a statement. “We are truly at the beginning of a new era of human spaceflight.”
In May, Elon Musk’s company made history when it became the first private company to send humans into orbit. US astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley traveled to the space station and returned as part of a mission to demonstrate SpaceX’s ability to safely carry out manned missions.
The current mission, named Crew 1, will see the Crew Dragon capsule transport NASA’s Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, to the space station.
The astronauts will spend six months in the orbiting space laboratory, conducting scientific experiments and performing various other tasks.
The crew will depart from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A in Florida at 00:49 UK time on November 15 on a journey that is expected to take approximately nine hours.
Shortly after take-off, the Falcon 9 rocket will separate into a first stage and a second stage. The first leg will return to a SpaceX landing ship stationed off Florida, while the second part of the rocket continues its journey with the Crew Dragon.
Once in orbit, the Crew Dragon will separate from the second stage and travel at approximately 27,000 km / h (17,000 mph). The aircraft is expected to meet and dock with the space station on Sunday at 9:20 am UK time.
The astronauts will join three other space station residents – NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russia’s Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov – to join the Expedition 64 crew.
Meanwhile, NASA’s other rental taxi service, Boeing, is not expected to fly its first crew until the summer of 2021.
Reader’s Questions and Answers: Why is a rocket’s trajectory curved after launch?
Asked by: Fred Wilhelm, US
Students have long been taught that all bullets follow a curved path known as a parabola. The explanation is that as they fly they cover the distance both horizontally and vertically, but only the latter is affected by the force of gravity, which bends the path of the projectile into a parabola.
For long-range rockets, things are more complex. For example, air resistance must be taken into account. But even ignoring this, a bullet doesn’t really follow a parabola, because the Earth isn’t flat. This means that gravity doesn’t just pull objects back down. Instead, it pulls them toward the center of the Earth, whose direction changes as the bullet moves further down, away from the launch site. Detailed calculations therefore reveal that the true trajectory is not a parabola, but part of an ellipse.
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