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SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule has a name.
The vehicle is called “Endurance,” NASA astronaut Raja Chari announced today (October 7). Chari is the commander of SpaceX Crew mission-3, which is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station aboard Endurance on October 30.
As the very first Endurance crew, Chari, fellow NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron and Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency were honored to hang a name on the spacecraft, which was previously simply known as “Capsule 210”. And “Endurance” works on many levels, said Chari.
In picture: SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission to the International Space Station
For starters, the name is “a tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit, as we push humans and machines further than ever before,” Chari said in a short announcement video that NASA posted on Twitter today.
It is “also a nod to the fact that the development teams, the production teams [and] the training teams who brought us here endured by a pandemic“Chari added.” And then of course, just the fact that we’re going to reuse this vehicle. So one of the really cool things about the SpaceX Dragon is that we’ll be the first to use Endurance, but that won’t be the last time it’s used. ”
Endurance will be the third Crew dragon vehicle for transporting people into orbit. The Endeavor capsule completed SpaceX’s first-ever crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight to the space station in 2020, as well as Crew-2, which arrived at the orbiting lab in April and is slated to end this month. next.
Resilience flew the Crew-1 mission to the station, which ended in May this year, and Inspiration4, the first completely private mission in Earth orbit. Inspiration4 took billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and three teammates on a three-day free-flight journey into orbit last month.
Like Chari and his crew, the astronauts of Crew-1 cited the coronavirus pandemic as a factor in their choice of the name “Resilience”.
Crew-3 astronauts will spend approximately six months aboard the International space station. This will be the third operational mission that SpaceX flies under a contract signed with NASA’s commercial crew program in 2014. Boeing signed a similar agreement at the same time, but its CST-100 Starliner capsule did not yet sent astronauts into orbit.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about finding alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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