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Zero-g Baby Yoda put a smile on our faces, and that was the plan from the start.
Minutes after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” capsule launched on Sunday, November 15, the four astronauts on board released a passenger who was driving in secret – a small plush version of Baby Yoda, or “The Child”, from the Disney + Star Wars series “The Mandalorian”.
Baby Yoda emerged to mark a milestone, showing the world that the astronauts of the Mission Crew-1 – SpaceX’s first operational flight to the International Space Station for NASA – had begun experimenting with microgravity on their 27-hour journey to the orbiting laboratory.
SpaceX Astronaut Crew-1 Launch for NASA: Live Updates
These zero g indicators are a centuries-old tradition for crewed space missions (and some not screwed too). For example, SpaceX’s very first astronaut mission, the Demo-2 test flight to the station last summer, used a plush dinosaur named Tremor. This choice was made by the sons of the two astronauts on board, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley of NASA.
The crew 1 astronauts did not delegate their zero g decision. And they chose Baby Yoda for the same reason called their Resilience capsule, said mission commander and NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins.
“It was a difficult year. And the fact that … SpaceX and NASA were able to get our spacecraft ready, the rocket ready to go, all through this year, through the pandemic, and all of that – we were inspired by the efforts of everyone. world. to do this, ”Hopkins said during a space station press conference Thursday (November 19).
“And that’s why we named Resilience, and we hope it puts a smile on people’s faces, it gives them hope,” Hopkins said. “Baby Yoda does the same. I think everyone, when you see him, it’s hard not to smile, and so it just felt appropriate. It felt appropriate for our team too. We like to have a lot of fun, and we had a lot of fun. “
Crew Dragon’s rise in space “was probably a little rougher than what Baby Yoda was used to, compared to what he normally rides,” Hopkins added with a laugh.
Hopkins was joined at the press conference by a colleague Crew 1 astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker of NASA and Japanese Soichi Noguchi, as well as Kate Rubins of NASA, who has been living aboard the space station since late October. (The two other occupants of the orbiting laboratory, cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, did not participate.)
SpaceX has a $ 2.6 billion contract with NASA’s Commercial Crew program to perform at least six operational missions to and from the station using Crew Dragon and the company’s Falcon 9 rocket . The six-month Crew-1 is the first of these contract flights. (The Demo-2 test mission lasted only two months.)
Boeing has a similar deal, worth $ 4.2 billion, that it will make with a capsule called CST-100 Starliner. Starliner has a space flight to date – an unmanned test mission in the Orbiting Lab that launched in December 2019. But the capsule failed to meet the station as expected and must successfully redo the mission. before the astronauts get on board. The second attempt is expected to take off in January 2021.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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