These two dragons are in a position to spread their wings.
SpaceX gave us a sneak peek at the Crew Dragon pickups that will fly on the Polaris Dawn and Crew-9 astronaut missions, which are scheduled to launch on Aug. 26 and Sept. 24, respectively.
“Double Dragons prepare to fly ahead of the Polaris Dawn and Crew-9 human spaceflight missions,” the company wrote in an X article on Wednesday (Aug. 21) that featured two photographs of the capsules, at a facility in processing on Florida’s Space Coast.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions planned under the Polaris program, funded through billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. The flight will send Isaacman, Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon into a five-day Earth orbit. .
Polaris Dawn will include the first personal spacewalk and will extend up to 700 kilometers from Earth, farther than any manned project since the Apollo era. Gillis and Menon will achieve more success in a vacuum than any women have achieved before. (The Apollo astronauts were all men. )
The next project will be the time for Isaacman, who also committed and funded the Inspiration4 to Earth orbit in September 2021. Like Inspiration4, Polaris Dawn will be a loose flight, circling our planet alone instead of connecting to the International Space Station (ISS). .
Related: Polaris Dawn Mission: Meet the crew conducting the first commercial spacewalk
Crew-9 will be the ninth long-duration astronaut operational project that SpaceX will bring to the ISS for NASA. There are currently plans to send Alexsandr Gorbunov of the Russian company Roscosmos and NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson to the orbiting laboratory.
However, this manifesto may change. NASA plans to use a Crew Dragon to bring astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore home to Earth. The duo took part in the first manned test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which encountered thruster failures on its way to the ISS.
If NASA determines it is too risky to send Williams and Wilmore home on Starliner, it will launch Crew-9 with two astronauts on board. This project’s Crew Dragon will then return to Williams and Wilmore, along with their two original team members. , home early next year.
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Michael Wall is Senior Space Editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but has been known to delve into the realm of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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