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Two NASA astronauts will make history this month when they become the first crew to fly to the International Space Station in a private spacecraft. But exactly how long their historic mission will last has yet to be determined.
On May 27, astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and launch into the orbiting lab. The test flight is scheduled to take off on a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:32 p.m. EDT (2032 GMT), and if everything goes according to plan, the capsule will dock at the station approximately 19 hours later.
Related: Take a stroll through SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft
Behnken and Hurley could spend anywhere from a month to 119 days on the International Space Station, but the exact duration of their mission will not be determined until they are already in orbit, NASA officials said in a mission briefing on Friday (1 of May) . So they could return to Earth in late June or as late as September 23.
To decide on a date for the return flight, NASA and SpaceX will assess not only the status of the Crew Dragon spacecraft in orbit, but also progress on SpaceX’s Crew-1 capsule. That vehicle will carry the first operational flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will transport four Expedition 63/64 crew astronauts to the International Space Station. (So far, no launch date has been set for the Crew-1 mission; Demo-2 must return safely before Crew-1 can fly.)
“Actually the decision point is, hey, is the dragon healthy? Is the vehicle working well, the dragon in orbit? And then we’ll look at the next mission, the flight of Crew-1, and see the preparation of the vehicle and trying to figure out the smartest thing to do in relation to mission duration, “Steve Stich, deputy director of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said at the mission briefing.
“It’s a bit variable, but I think we can handle it well,” Stich said of the state of the Crew-1 capsule. “We would like to fly a mission that is as long as necessary for a test flight, but that also supports some of the needs of the space station program and increases the ability of its crew to do science in other operations at the station.” .
Regardless of how the moment works with the arrival of the Crew-1 mission, the Crew Dragon used for the Demo-2 mission cannot stay connected to the station for more than 119 days, Stich said, because its solar panels are not designed to Withstand degradation in space for more than 120 days.
“Any solar matrix in low Earth orbit tends to degrade a little over time,” Stich said. “It turns out that the atmosphere has a little bit of oxygen, it’s called atomic oxygen, so there is a little bit of a breakdown in the cells’ ability to generate energy. And the particular cells in the trunk for a Dragon, according to analytical skills , a kind of worst-case prediction, we think we can get a capacity of about 120 days from those. “
However, the operational version of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, like the one that will fly the Crew-1 mission, is designed to last 210 days in space. That coincides with the orbital lifespan of Russia’s Soyuz crew capsules, which have transported NASA astronauts to and from the space station since the space shuttle program ended nearly a decade ago.
The Demo-2 mission comes just over a year after SpaceX successfully launched a pilotless Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for the Demo-1 mission. If all goes well with Demo-2, SpaceX could start regularly transporting astronauts to and from the orbiting lab as early as this summer.
Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom and in Facebook.
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