Four Astronauts Begin 8-Month Mission

On Friday, SpaceX launched jets into the skies of Florida ensuring a group of four well-known astronauts were hurled into the skies towards the International Space Station on a scientific trip that would span eight months.  At 5:15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time off of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the 9 Merlin engines of the 15 story Falcon 9 rocket burned through about 700,000 gallons of propellant a second and produced the dramatic effect of propulsion that was transmitted to a global audience through the NASA-SpaceX webcast.

Stellar Crew Takes Flight

The head of this mission is the 48-year-old marine biologist, the first person in space, Commander Jessica Meir, who, in 2019, was the first female to complete an extravehicular activity, accompanied by Christina Koch, on the all-female EVA in the ISS.  She has the trainee NASA pilot, Jack Hathaway, 43, former naval fighter ace; an ESA astronaut, Sophie Adenot, 43, who is a French helicopter specialist; and Fedyaev, a veteran military pilot making another arrival. On the autonomous Crew Dragon Freedom, the crew will be able to dock with the ISS on Saturday after a 34-hour orbital insertion maneuver at 250 m altitude.

Proven Powerhouse

SpaceX has recently finished 20 orbital missions of their Crew Dragon in 2021 since Elon Musk initiated the company in 2002; thus, reducing reliance of the United States on Russian Soyuz rockets. Having a footprint of over 100m and dating back more than 25 years, the ISS experiences the fruits of multinational involvement that was developed in the post-Cold War period and united the United States and Russia and Canada and Japan, as well as European nations. According to Kathy Lueders, the Commercial Crew Program manager, NASA has partnered with SpaceX to transform the human spaceflight to provide reliability at scale. Crew-12 follows in this series of zero launch failures, which indicate that the commercial sector has control over the commercial sector, indicating that nearly 300 Falcon 9 flights have already taken place.

Bold Horizon Ahead

NASA plans to continue to maintain the operation of ISS by 2030 with the entrance of private station missions by Axiom and Blue Origin. Meanwhile, the information obtained during Crew 12 will perfect the preparations of deep space missions, though; the geopolitical issues and the aging infrastructure require further innovation. The predicted crewed Starship experiments will help lower the launch prices and favor a long-term plan of colonization from Mars to Moon, thus forever altering the orbital dynamics.