The Dragon Roars – SpaceX Lift-Off

Update: A successful launch!

Crew Dragon will depart the @Space_Station with @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug in about 6 hours and splash down off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico at 2:41 p.m. EDT on Sunday, August 2. Demo-2 return webcast begins today at ~5:15 p.m. EDT → https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK pic.twitter.com/JZdhG1ATzA

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 1, 2020

The SpaceX Dragon, breathing fire of kerosene-based rocket propellant (RP 1) and liquid oxygen, thrilled us when it carried two U.S astronauts to the Space Station on a re-usable rocket commercially built by an American-based company:  Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

The two astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, are scheduled to depart the Space Station on August 1 aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon, now named Endeavor by the astronauts it carried to the space station.

Scheduled splash-down is August 2 in either the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.

Success of SpaceX is the Beacon of Hope for a Star Trek Future

The success of the SpaceX DM-2 launch has opened the door for more crewed flights using the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, capable of carrying up to seven passengers. NASA has tentatively scheduled a flight for four astronauts late September 2020.

The Boeing CST–100 Starliner (Crew Space Transportation) is a four to seven-passenger ship that will be reusable up to 10 times, developed in partnership with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Glitches revealed during the first un-crewed test flight in December 2019 must be resolved before the next test, but the project is still a go. The five crewmembers were selected in 2018 and have been training since, currently using a state-of-the-art virtual training set-up created by Boeing.

NASA Celebrates Successes and Hopes for its Commercial Crew Program with Free Posters

NASA has created these free, official, downloadable posters in low or high resolution, here: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/sfa/sp/commercial-crew-posters

Click on the “Expedition” poster links on the same page for posters from NASA expeditions going back to the year 2000,

Further Reading:

• https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/category/spacex/
• https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-1-mission-september-2020-launch.html
• http://www.boeing.com/space/starliner/
• http://www.boeing.com/features/2020/06/starliner-crew-training-goes-virtual.page
• https://www.space.com/boeing-starliner-2nd-software-glitch-potential-collision.html