On November 16, 2020, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, namely, Resilience lifted off from NASA’s ‘Launch Complex 39A’, Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying a crew of the four astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker (USA), and Soichi Noguchi (Japan) to the International Space Station (ISS) on a six-month-long mission. Crew-1 Mission, a commercial crew programme, was the first of six crewed missions of NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The mission is being seen as the beginning of a new era in space travel.
Earlier, in May 2020, NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test fight became the first crewed flight, launched by the USA since the end of the space shuttle era in 2011. In November 2020, NASA for the first time certified SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 rocket.
Objectives of the Mission
- Making space access cost effective and easier to enable individuals to travel on a commercial space rocket by providing access to low-Earth orbit and international space station
- Ensuring timely scientific research by raising the crew number of the orbiting laboratory to seven
Significance of the Mission
- It was the first flight of the NASA-certified commercial system.
- It was the first international crew having four astronauts to launch on an American commercial spacecraft.
- For the first time ISS crew members will increase from six to seven.
- For the first time the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)licensed a human orbital spaceflight launch.
- The Crew Dragon spacecraft is capable of staying in the orbit for 210 days and will return in the spring of 2021.
- It is the longest human space mission of US as it will deliver 500 pounds of cargo, science hardware, and experiments to the ISS.
- After completing the mission, astronauts of Crew-1 will board Crew Dragon which will leave the space station and re-enter the atmosphere of the Earth.
Goals of the Mission
- The Crew-1 team along with members of Expedition-64 will conduct microgravity studies.
- The crew carried with them materials to investigate food physiology to study dietary improvements of immune function and the gut microbes.
- It will collect samples to send back data to Earth to help scientists studying dietary changes and its effects on human body.
- Another experiment abroad the Crew Dragon is a student-designed experiment known as ‘Gene in Space-7’, which aims to study the effect of spaceflight on brain function.
- The mission will try to enable scientists understand the physical interaction on liquid, rocks, and microorganisms, the role of microgravity on human health and its effects on heart tissues.