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Crew Dragon capsule set to fly four civilian astronauts into space this year is getting an upgrade: a glass dome will be added to the top to give space tourists a 360-degree view degrees of the cosmos. The plans for the window were announced on Tuesday as SpaceX and the team managing the tourism mission, Inspiration4, revealed the full crew for the upcoming expedition.
The glass domed window replaces Crew Dragon’s docking adapter to its nose since the spacecraft will not be docked to the International Space Station. It’s similar to the famous cupola aboard the International Space Station, but Crew Dragon’s appears to be an unbroken sheet of glass, with no supporting structures dividing the view from the window.
Crew Dragon’s protective aerodynamic shell that protects the hatch door area during launch opens to expose the glass dome once the craft is safely in orbit. Based on the render tweeted by SpaceX, the cupola would fit at least one crew member from the chest up, revealing panoramic views of space.
SpaceX designed Crew Dragon under a $ 2.6 billion contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew program, a public-private initiative to spur the development of privately-built space capsules that will serve as the main routes of the NASA in space. Boeing is developing a competing capsule, Starliner, under the same program. Crew Dragon is already in its operational phase and flew its first two crews of government astronauts into space last year.
NASA, which certified Crew Dragon for astronaut flights last year, said it does not plan to use the cupola version of Crew Dragon for NASA astronaut missions and that the Window installation did not require NASA security approval.
“NASA currently has no plans to fly a modified version of the Crew Dragon,” agency spokesman Josh Finch said. The edge. “As a fully commercial launch, NASA does not need to approve SpaceX’s design for the company’s private missions. NASA will continue to keep an overview of SpaceX systems through our normal work, including sharing SpaceX flight data from non-NASA missions. “
The Inspiration4 charity mission, led by billionaire tech entrepreneur and CEO of Shift4 Payments Jared Isaacman, is slated to launch on September 15, sending Isaacman and three other lay astronauts free-flight into Earth orbit for three days. He will use the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule which is currently docked at the ISS in support of NASA’s Crew-1 mission, and the glass window will be installed during Resilience’s refurbishment in Florida after its return.
“We have done all the engineering work, we continue to go through all the analyzes, tests and qualifications to make sure that everything is safe, and that it does not preclude all use of this spacecraft for other missions” , Benji Reed, SpaceX’s director of Crew Dragon Mission Management, said Tuesday at a press conference.
The Inspiration4 crew includes Christopher Sembroski, an engineer with Lockheed Martin of Everett, Washington; Sian Proctor, professor at the University of Tempe, Arizona; and previously announced Hayley Arceneaux, a St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee and bone cancer survivor.
The new window was announced on the same day that Richard Branson’s space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, unveiled an upgraded version of his SpaceShipTwo suborbital space plane called SpaceShip III.
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