Even if you don’t follow space news, you’ve probably heard about this historical achievement. Space X’s new module, Crew Dragon, which is going to take later this year astronauts to the ISS, has successfully made its maiden voyage, even though it only carried a dummy and not people. But the mission is the first step to get the US back into crewed spaceflight, abandoned after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in July 2011.
“SpaceX employees at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheered as Crew Dragon docked nearly 260 miles above the Pacific, north of New Zealand. They burst into applause again, several minutes later, when the capsule’s latches were tightly secured. The ISS astronauts offered congratulations to SpaceX as they got ready to open the hatches and collect the supplies onboard Dragon. The capsule’s lone passenger, a mannequin wearing a white SpaceX spacesuit, was also welcomed onboard. The dummy – or Smarty as SpaceX likes to call it, given all the instrumentation – is named Ripley after the lead character in the Alien films,” (read the whole story on the Guardian).
Watch Crew Dragon’s launch here:
Amazing! Thank you so much for sharing this!
And Ripley… yessssss!!! 🙂
Yes…! Today it is coming back home 🙂