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The four astronauts boarded the International Space Station on Thursday after a day’s tour inside a spacecraft built by Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX. The quad pushed the number of people flying into space to more than 600, marking another milestone in 2021, the busiest year for manned spaceflight in more than a decade.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, nicknamed Endurance, docked at the orbital lab at 6:32 p.m. ET on Thursday, about 40 minutes before a previously announced schedule. When the capsule opens later in the evening, three Americans and one German will emerge. They will remain in orbit until April 2022.
The crew includes three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn, and German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who represents the European Space Agency. They’re joined by three residents already on the space station, two Russians, and a NASA astronaut who’s in the middle of an almost one-year mission.
The docking of the mission, Crew-3, sparked a flurry of spaceflight activity this week for SpaceX and NASA, which coordinated the Monday night return of Crew-2, the other four astronauts who have spent more than six months in space. station. The company is scheduled to launch another rocket on Friday that sends satellites into orbit for the high-speed internet constellation Starlink.
In 2021, more people have traveled to space in any year since 2009. This trend is part of the rise of a space tourism industry backed by billionaires and the escalating space race between the United States, China and Russia.
During Crew-3’s six months aboard the space station, astronauts will work on more than 200 scientific experiments, from fiber optic printing to investigating how concrete hardens in microgravity. Some astronauts will stick to an “advanced spaceflight diet” as part of a study aimed at determining the healthiest meal plan for long-term astronauts in space. It’s one of a handful of scientific studies that could help NASA researchers understand how astronauts will eat on longer journeys to the moon and ultimately Mars.
Some astronauts will participate in a series of spacewalks to prepare the station’s power system for new solar arrays. These arrays will replace a series of aging solar panels that have been powering the station since 2000 despite a planned lifespan of 15 years.
Crew-3’s launch was delayed several times from its initial Halloween launch date, but bad weather and a “minor medical issue” with one of the astronauts caused further delays.
“The Dragon spacecraft was a great trip,” said Mr. Marshburn, the only member of Crew-3 to have traveled to space before, during a live video tour of the capsule. After launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday night, Crew-3 astronauts took photos from inside the capsule, ate snacks and played games to pass the time, like seeing who could “turn without touching anything” the most. said Marshburn.
NASA’s next astronaut launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule will also send four astronauts, but only three have been named so far: NASA’s Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines, and Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut. They are scheduled to travel to the space station around the time Crew-3 returns in April 2022.
One possibility was that the fourth astronaut could be SpaceX’s first Russian astronaut passenger. But talks between NASA, the US agency’s main partner on the space station, and Russia to arrange such a flight mean that the seat will most likely be filled by an astronaut from a different country.
“We’ve been working on this deal for a while, and as I always say, any partnership or agreement should work on both sides,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator, in a recent interview. He and Russia’s space chief, Dmitry Rogozin, said at a meeting last month that they took a “very positive step” to secure a potential deal to fly a Russian on a SpaceX mission in September 2022 in exchange for a future flight for NASA. . Astronaut in Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.
“We just have some things to work on,” he said.
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