HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT
Success stories: SpaceX has already flown two crews to the ISS; the latest, Crew-1 (above in red shirts), docked on 16 November 2020… for an all-up test flight to the International Space Station (ISS). Meanwhile, Crew Dragon will rotate ISS crews in the spring and summer, helping to maintain a permanent presence of seven humans aboard the sprawling orbital outpost.
Space tourism... and movies
And with Crew Dragon also lined up for other clients, the Houston-based Axiom tourism firm is aiming for its maiden flight in 2021. Its crew features a former ISS commander, Hollywood film star Tom Cruise and producer Doug Liman to shoot part of a movie on the station. Three Russian Soyuz missions are also planned, one of which includes a pair of tourists.
The ISS itself will change physically next year, with the departure of the long-serving Pirs docking hub to make room for Russia’s large Nauka science lab in April. A new ‘node’ called Prichal will then arrive in September. Add to that 10 cargo deliveries (including the first flight by Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spaceplane) and the station promises to be an exceptionally busy place.
SpaceX is also midway through an extensive test programme at its Boca Chica facility in Texas for Starship, a next-generation launch vehicle that NASA picked in April 2020 as a candidate for returning humans to the Moon. Standing 120m tall and weighing 5,000,000kg in its final form, small-scale Starship tests began in April 2019 and attained altitudes as high as 150m. Plans to climb incrementally higher are in progress and Starship may take its first commercial payloads into space in 2021.
Having already sent men and women into orbit under its own steam, China is planning a large modular space station, whose ‘core’ — the 19m-long Tianhe living quarters — might fly atop a Long March 5 booster in 2021. In its final configuration, it will be a fifth as big as the ISS, with a pair of 15m-long science labs and power-producing solar arrays. India, too, is prepping two uncrewed flights of its three-person Gaganyaan spacecraft. Work was stalled by the steady spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the South Asian country still hopes to send its first national astronauts into space as soon as December 2021.
And 60 years after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering voyage, Virgin Galactic anticipates its first passenger flights to the edge of space. Already, its SpaceShipTwo vehicles successfully exceeded 80km in altitude in December 2018 and February 2019, securing commercial astronauts’ wings for their crews in the process. Two new test pilots were recently hired, expanding Virgin Galactic’s flying corps for a robust series of fare-paying trips in 2021. In addition to two qualified pilots, each flight can carry up to six passengers.