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SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has officially become the oldest U.S. spacecraft ever built, breaking an 84-day record set by the Apollo-era Skylab-4 mission nearly half a century ago.
Crew Dragon was able to break this record so quickly because NASA ultimately chose to cannibalize its expertise, production capabilities, and budget in the Saturn and Apollo CSM rocket, as well as its budget to participate in the program. the Space Shuttle. Designed to be reusable quickly and inexpensively, a wide array of tradeoffs, budget shortfalls, and committee design missteps ultimately produced a terribly complex, dangerous, only partially reusable shuttle, sub-optimal for most tasks, and more expensive to launch than Saturn V.
The Space Shuttle was ultimately a beast to renovate and “reuse”, often requiring almost complete disassembly and reassembly and extensive rework on most of the propellant components. Partly because of these extreme shortcomings and a catastrophically fatal launch failure just five years after its debut, the shuttle has never been able to realize its limited but still strong potential, including a maximum orbital longevity of only about two weeks.
As a result, NASA switched from Saturn I, Saturn V, and CSM – a combination that enabled single-launch space stations, multi-month manned space flights, and the Apollo program – to the space shuttle, an anchor that pulled man from the space agency. the agency’s ambitions return to low earth orbit (LEO). In the defense of the space shuttle, NASA has finally joined an international initiative to build the International Space Station (ISS), a shuttle-supported program with several dozen launches of crucial modules, components and supply missions.
However, if NASA had been able to continue the Skylab program with Saturn and CSM, a space station with a habitable volume similar to the 2021 ISS could have been completed in just three launches, compared to as many as 30 launches to build the ISS.
Either way, after an unfortunate and unnecessary 47-year hiatus, SpaceX – with funding from NASA – returned the space agency and the United States to its legacy of envelope pushback. On the heels of 20 successful unmanned Cargo Dragon missions to and from the ISS over the past 9 years, all of which have spent around a month in orbit, SpaceX’s third Crew Dragon launch has already broken the US longevity record. crewed spacecraft in orbit and is finally about to overtake it before the mission ends.
Crew Dragon’s Crew-1 astronauts even celebrated the milestone in orbit with (albeit virtually) Ed Gibson, one of three astronauts who set the Skylab-4 record 47 years ago. Also, in a pleasant coincidence, Skylab-4 and SpaceX Crew-1 almost launched on the same day, which means that tomorrow (February 8) will be the true 47th anniversary of the Skylab-4 mission re-entry and overflow. .
In total, all of Crew Dragon’s operational missions – of which Crew-1 is the first – are expected to spend approximately 180 days in orbit between launch and re-entry. As the first American spacecraft (and first private spacecraft) to attempt such a long space flight, there is obviously some uncertainty and no guarantee that this first test will not be interrupted, but the odds are in SpaceX’s favor that the Crew Dragon C207 capsule will leave the ISS without a problem and return safely its crew of four astronauts on Earth in May 2021.
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