SpaceX launches four astronauts to the ISS

Four astronauts were successfully launched on the SpaceX Crew Dragon “Resilience” to the International Space Station on Sunday, the first of what the United States expects to be many routine missions after a successful test flight in late spring.

Three Americans – Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker – and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi took off at 7:27 pm (0027 GMT Monday) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, thus ending nearly a decade of international dependence on Russia. for trips in your Soyuz Rockets.

“This is a great day for the United States of America and a great day for Japan,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a post-launch press conference.

Twelve minutes after lift-off, at an altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers) and a speed of 16,800 miles (27,000 kilometers) per hour, the capsule successfully separated from the second stage of the rocket.

“It was an incredible journey,” said the Hopkins mission commander from orbit.

SpaceX confirmed it was in the correct orbit to reach the ISS a little over 27 hours later, around 11:00 p.m. Monday night (0400 GMT Tuesday), joining two Russians and an American on board. the station, and staying for six months. .

There was a problem with the cabin temperature control system, but it was quickly resolved.

“It’s working well,” SpaceX president Glynne Shotwell said during the press conference. But “we will be able to breathe a sigh of relief, in about 26 hours, once we hand over the crew to NASA.”

SpaceX briefly broadcast live footage from inside the capsule showing the astronauts in their seats, something neither the Russians nor the Americans had done before.

US President-elect Joe Biden praised the Twitter release as a “testament to the power of science and what we can achieve by harnessing our innovation, ingenuity and determination,” while President Donald Trump called it of “great”.

Vice President Mike Pence, who attended the launch with his wife Karen, called it a “new era in human space exploration in America.”

The Crew Dragon capsule earlier this week became the first NASA-certified spacecraft since the space shuttle nearly 40 years ago. Its launch vehicle is a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

At the end of their missions, the Crew Dragon parachutes and then splashes into the water, just like in the Apollo era.

SpaceX is scheduled to launch two more manned flights for NASA in 2021, including one in the spring, and four refueling missions over the next 15 months.

NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing after shutting down the checkered space shuttle program in 2011, which failed in its main goals of making space travel affordable and safe.

The agency will have spent more than $ 8 billion on the commercial crew program by 2024, in hopes that the private sector can address NASA’s “low Earth orbit” needs so that it is free to focus on missions. back to the Moon then to Mars.

SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, outperformed its much older rival Boeing, whose program fell through after a failed test of its unmanned Starliner last year.

– Russians are not impressed –

But SpaceX’s success won’t mean the United States will stop hitchhiking Russia altogether, Bridenstine said. The goal is to have a “seat swap” between American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

He also explained that it was necessary in case any of the programs were inactive for a period of time.

However, the reality is that the space ties between the United States and Russia, one of the few bright spots in their bilateral relations, have eroded in recent years.

Russia has said it will not be a partner in the Artemis program to return to the Moon in 2024, claiming that the NASA-led mission is too focused on the United States.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency, has also repeatedly poked fun at SpaceX’s technology, telling a state news agency that he was not impressed with Crew Dragon’s “quite bumpy” water landing and that his agency was developing a methane rocket that will be reusable 100 times. .

But the fact that a national space agency is moved to compare itself to a company possibly validates NASA’s public-private strategy.

The emergence of SpaceX has also deprived Roscosmos of a valuable revenue stream.

The cost of round-trip Russian rocket trips had risen to around $ 85 million per astronaut, according to last year’s estimates.

– Biden incoming –

Presidential transitions are always a difficult time for NASA, and Joe Biden’s ascension in January is expected to be no different.

The agency has not yet received from Congress the tens of billions of dollars needed to end the Artemis program.

Bridenstine has announced that he will resign to allow the new president to set his own goals for space exploration.

So far, Biden has not commented on the 2024 timeline.

The Democratic party documents say they support NASA’s aspirations to the Moon and Mars, but also emphasize raising the agency’s Earth science division to better understand how climate change is affecting our planet.