The spacecraft Resilience has just returned to Earth, carrying with it four astronauts from the ISS, that another flight is looming:the first mission entirely civilian from SpaceX.
After hanging on for 167 days to the International Space Station (ISS), a record, the Resilience capsule successfully landed in the Gulf of Mexico on the night of May 2 to 3. It was the first night landing of a manned American spacecraft since the arrival of Apollo 8, before dawn, in the Pacific on December 27, 1968 .
Aboard Resilience were the four astronauts of the Crew-1 mission:Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker for NASA. They were accompanied by Soichi Noguchi for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
SpaceX recovery teams pulled the ship out of the water shortly after landing in a way to minimize seawater damage to structure , before reaching Cape Canaveral. In a few days, the team will begin the process of preparing the Dragon for its next mission named Inspiration4.
This mission will be a bit special since it will be entirely civilian. This will be a great first for SpaceX.
Crew members will be Jared Isaacman, Founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, Hayley Arceneaux, one of the employees of St Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Sian Proctor , professor at the Community University of Tempe (Arizona) and finally Christopher Sembroski, engineer for the company Lockheed Martin. Together, they will therefore be the first people to fly into space without being accompanied by a professional astronaut .
For this mission, however, there will be no question of joining the station in orbit. The capsule and its occupants will indeed circumnavigate the Earth at an altitude of approximately 570 km , about 130 km higher than the ISS.
Initially scheduled for next October, the launch date has been brought forward to September 15, 2021 . On D-Day, Resilience will be capped atop the same Falcon 9 booster that launched Thomas Pesquet's Crew-2 mission on April 23.
Finally, the capsule is also scheduled for an upgrade. A glass dome will indeed be installed at its top to offer occupants a 360-degree view of space and the Earth.
Once in orbit, the capsule's protective aerodynamic nose should then be able to open, exposing the observation cupola which, based on the illustration tweeted by SpaceX , can only accommodate one crew member at a time.
