[ad_1]
Apparently we’ll see one more big milestone in private space flight before the end of 2020.
In May, SpaceX became the first company to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). That mission, a test flight known as Demo-2, sent NASA’s Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbiting laboratory for a two-month stay.
Then last month, Elon Musk’s company released Crew-1, his first operational astronaut mission to the station under a $ 2.6 billion contract with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Crew-1 flew four space planes – Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of Japan – to the ISS for a regular period of six months.
Those successes helped pave the way for one more commercial crew flight to the station this year, and a very special one too: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Wednesday (December 23) that it has , “for the first time ever”, issued a special commercial space license to Santa Claus for a manned mission to the ISS.
Related: Vacation in space: an astronaut photo album
However, Santa will not fly in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. St. Nick will travel aboard “his StarSleigh-1 space capsule powered by the Rudolph rocket,” FAA officials wrote in a statement. “The mission license includes launch and reentry operations and will take place from a US-based spaceport.”
That spaceport is not specified. But the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska, which recently housed the California startup Astra’s first space flight, would be a natural choice, given its relative proximity to the North Pole.
Obviously, Santa has visited the ISS before; otherwise the astronauts celebrating Christmas in the orbiting laboratory would not have received gifts. But it’s unclear how he made those earlier trips, as the newly issued license is the first commercial the FAA has given Santa.
For example, has StarSleigh-1, a mysterious spacecraft about which little is known, have surreptitiously flown to the station in previous years? Obviously, Santa is in possession of some very advanced technology, so it is possible that the capsule has some kind of cloaking system. And unlicensed visits to the ISS certainly would not be out of place for St. Nick, the most skilled and accomplished home invader in history.
Or maybe Santa used to hide aboard NASA space shuttles and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the only manned vehicles to have visited the ISS prior to the pioneering Crew Dragon missions this year. (The ferries were grounded in 2011, so Soyuz it was until recently the only orbital astronaut taxi available). As burly as he is, Santa can slide down the narrowest of chimneys, so sneaking into the three-person Soyuz is not out of the question.
Most of Santa’s gift-giving time this Christmas Eve, of course, will be spent here on Earth. As always, you can follow the progress of the merry elf on our planet. via NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Mike Wall is the author of “ORut there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
