Although the spaceship was not manned, inside it were dolls and sensors that resembled humans. If the experiment is crowned with success this July, the company will send two astronauts to the International Space Station, thus returning the US to the manned space flight industry after an eight-year hiatus
SpaceX launched this morning (02:49 GMT, 04:49 Israel time) an experimental version of the manned Dragon spacecraft to the space station. The spacecraft, named Demo-1, was launched on SpaceX's Falcon 9 launcher, then launch 39A. This is the same launch pad from which the last flight of the space shuttle Atlantis was launched, which marked the era of shuttles in July 2011.
No humans were aboard the Dragon Version 2, also known as the Crew Dragon that went on the six-day mission. In their place is a life-sized astronaut doll loaded with sensors and named Ripley, a tribute to the sci-fi movie The Eighth Passenger.
If the vehicle goes as planned in DEMO 1 and the emergency test that will follow, SpaceX will use the capsule to launch two astronauts to the International Space Station as early as this July, eight years after the last manned launch from US soil.
Since the landing of the space shuttles, the US has depended on rockets and Soyuz capsules to bring astronauts to the space station, at a price that has gone up over the years and recently reached 80 million dollars per seat.
"This is an exciting time," said Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana, a former astronaut who took off three times on shuttle missions after launch 39A/. "I can't wait to see astronauts launched using this."
This time, too, the first stage of the launcher landed on top of the rig designed for it in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
About a year ago, SpaceX announced that it had selected two private citizens who paid a significant deposit to fly around the moon. They still have to pass health and fitness tests, and start initial training.
This launch will use a heavy Falcon launcher that was developed with SPACEX's own funding and which is supposed to be the heaviest launcher in history except for the rockets that brought the Apollo spacecraft to the moon in the sixties - Saturn 5 rockets. They will have a thrust of two-thirds that of Saturn 5, and more than double the thrust of the launcher The most powerful in use today.
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Easy fix.. there is no such thing as zero gravity in space.. considering the celestial bodies and the dark force, our universe is built from cosmic gravity everywhere in the universe
It seems to me that this is an experimental launch of the final version of the manned Dragon, before putting real astronauts on it (or on another spacecraft of this model).
Apart from that, the spaceship has already docked perfectly at the station. As far as I know the station staff has not invited Ripley in yet.