On Saturday May 30, while the global coronavirus pandemic was changing the world as we know it, I sat watching the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket coupled to the Crew Dragon space capsule, which was carrying two astronauts from the United States – commander Douglas Hurley and joint-operations commander Robert Behnken – to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS).
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The ISS itself is hardly new, so I did wonder exactly how novel the event was. Having first been occupied in 2000, 20-years of continuous human presence in space will be realised in November this year. In this time, ISS modules have been launched regularly by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets, along with US Space Shuttles, which were routinely ferrying supplies and crew, who carried out regular upgrades, expansions and experiments.
But this SpaceX launch captured my imagination. Perhaps because it was preceded by the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Apollo 11 moon landing last year; or the Mars Netflix series, which cleverly interplays comments from SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, and other space professionals onto a drama exploring the colonisation of Mars and its potential challenges.
Or perhaps it was just because I was in lockdown at the time.
So on Wednesday May 27, I watched the first launch attempt, which was aborted due to Tropical Storm Bertha, but on the Saturday, I saw an extraordinarily precise lift-off, which went far more smoothly than any space drama would have deemed entertaining.
That same evening, having heard it was possible to see the orbiting ISS – and in the hope that we might see the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule chasing it – I was out just after sunset looking up at the sky. The ISS came from the West, a fast moving and easily visible dot of light that steadily moved across the night sky, disappearing from view in the East within five minutes or so.
Crew Dragon, however, did not reveal itself.
The next day, I was avidly watching NASA’s live stream of the Dragon capsule arriving at the space station. After a period of test manoeuvres that showed off the use of the capsule’s 16 Draco thrusters to precisely position the spacecraft in the vacuum of space, the process of docking the ship with the space station began.
It was a slow and precise process, boring to watch for some, but I found it amazing. For a vehicle to travel into space, orbit the Earth, chase down the ISS and couple – to millimetre accuracy – with a football field sized space station, I find remarkable, exciting and uplifting.
Why is the mission historic? The Demo-2 mission is the first private/commercial venture to carry astronauts into space. Although still a test flight, the mission demonstrates SpaceX’s crew transportation system and is described as heralding “a new era of human spaceflight as American astronauts once again launch on an American rocket from American soil”; the first time since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Programme in 2011.
Making commercialisation possible is SpaceX’s development of reusable spacecraft. The Falcon 9 boosters used to lift the Dragon capsule into orbit were recovered for reuse. NASA says SpaceX can begin reusing Crew Dragon vehicles and Falcon 9 first stage boosters on crewed launches beginning with the second post-certification mission, or Crew-2, which is scheduled in 2021. This will follow the Crew-1 mission, SpaceX's first operational astronaut flight, which is scheduled for launch in mid-September this year.
This all depends, of course, on the successful completion of the Demo-2 mission. The Crew Dragon still has to bring the astronauts safely back to Earth. This will have to precede the Crew-1 mission, so the Crew Dragon capsule will probably drop Hurley and Behnken gently into the Atlantic Ocean sometime in August.
Like many on Earth, the two astronauts have been in isolation, too. They will have been communicating with their loved ones remotely via the likes of Zoom and Teams. As well as their fantastic space experience, though, they will have experienced the best of international cooperation, interacting on space projects with people from Russia, Canada, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States, and from the European Space Agency, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
They may be coming back to a world changed by COVID-19, but they have played their part in extending global human achievement. Most importantly, this demonstration mission, the ISS projects and the long-term SpaceX endeavour to take humankind to Mars, are all unifying, in stark contrast to the dangerously divisive rhetoric that has emerged across the world in recent times.
Let’s hope the uplifting aspect of this technical achievement outweighs the politically divisiveness and negativity that COVID-19 is leaving in its wake.