NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission gets underway with the successful liftoff of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Launch occurred November 15, 2020, at 7:27 p.m. EST from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Crew-1 is the first regular crew mission of a U.S. commercial spacecraft with astronauts to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Cameras outside the International Space Station captured dramatic views of Hurricane Zeta at 12:50 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday October 28, 2020 as the storm churned 200 miles south-southwest of New Orleans packing winds of 90 miles an hour.
Zeta is expected to make landfall near New Orleans later in the day Wednesday October 28 as a Category 2 hurricane before accelerating to the northeast.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station (habitable artificial satellite) in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project between five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada). The ownership and use of the space station is established by intergovernmental treaties and agreements. The ISS program evolved from the Space Station Freedom, an American proposal in the 1980s to construct a permanently crewed Earth-orbiting station.
The ISS serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific experiments are conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields. The station is suited for testing the spacecraft systems and equipment required for possible future long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. It is the largest artificial object in space and the largest satellite in low Earth orbit, regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth’s surface. It maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda Service Module or visiting spacecraft. The ISS circles the Earth in roughly 93 minutes, completing 15.5 orbits per day.
The station is divided into two sections: the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS), operated by Russia; and the United States Orbital Segment (USOS), which is shared by many nations. Roscosmos has endorsed the continued operation of ISS through 2024, but had previously proposed using elements of the Russian segment to construct a new Russian space station called OPSEK. As of December 2018, the station is expected to operate until 2030.
After the Space Shuttle program was brought to an end in 2011, NASA no longer had a spacecraft system capable of sending humans to space. As a result, it was forced to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the Russian Soyuz space vehicle, at a cost of up to US$80 million per astronaut. As an alternative, NASA contracted with private companies such as SpaceX for the Commercial Crew Program, which is expected to cost 50% less than Soyuz once in regular operation. Up to the launch, NASA has awarded a total of US$3.1 billion for the development of the Dragon 2. The Demo-2 mission is expected to be SpaceX’s last major test before NASA certifies it for regular crewed spaceflights. Prior to that, SpaceX had sent twenty cargo missions to the ISS, but never a crewed one.
Crew Dragon Demo-2 (officially Crew Demo-2, SpaceX Demo-2, or Dragon Crew Demo-2) was the first crewed test flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The spacecraft, named Endeavour, launched on 30 May 2020 at 19:22:45 UTC and carried NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken to the International Space Station in the first crewed orbital spaceflight launched from the United States since the final Space Shuttle mission, STS-135, in 2011, and the first ever operated by a commercial provider. Demo-2 was also the first two-person orbital spaceflight launched from the United States since STS-4 in 1982.
Demo-2 was intended to complete the validation of crewed spaceflight operations using SpaceX hardware and to receive human-rating certification for the spacecraft, including astronaut testing of Crew Dragon capabilities on orbit. During their time aboard, Behnken conducted four spacewalks with fellow American astronaut Chris Cassidy to replace batteries brought up by a Japanese cargo vehicle.
Docking and undocking operations were autonomously controlled by the Crew Dragon, but monitored by the flight crew in case manual intervention becomes necessary. The spacecraft soft docked with the International Space Station at 14:16 UTC on 31 May 2020. Following soft capture, 12 hooks were closed to complete a hard capture 11 minutes later. Hurley and Behnken worked alongside the crew of Expedition 63 for 62 days. Endeavour autonomously undocked from the station at 23:35 UTC on 1 August 2020 and returned the astronauts to Earth on 2 August 2020 in the first water landing by astronauts since 1975.
Endeavour will be refurbished and reused for the SpaceX Crew-2 mission, expected to launch in February 2021. Crew Dragon’s next mission, SpaceX Crew-1 — SpaceX’s first operational astronaut flight — is slated to fly with four Expedition 64 astronauts in late September 2020.
EVA Officer Sandy Fletcher narrates an animation showing Expedition 61 Flight Engineers Jessica Meir and Christina Koch of NASA teaming up for their second spacewalk together. They venture outside the Quest airlock of the International Space Station for a spacewalk to continue the replacement of aging nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries on the port truss of the orbital outpost. The spacewalk is the third in a series of four spacewalks to upgrade the station’s power systems on the port truss that began with two days of work outside the station last October. It is the 225th spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance, the second spacewalk in Meir’s career and the fifth for Koch.
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