Human space travelers now top 600
354 manned trips made since 1961 when 1st person flew 63 miles off Earth
“Human spaceflight was the reason we were founded, so it’s incredibly meaningful to the whole team”
— Sarah Walker, SpaceX director of Dragon missions
ORLANDO, Fla. — When the SpaceX Dragon Endurance took flight atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, it marked the fifth flight to carry humans aboard the commercially built spacecraft.
It also transported among its four passengers the 600th human to make it into space. Three of the four Crew-3 astronauts are space rookies.
Based on his mission assignment from NASA, European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer takes the 600th spot. The flight also took Kayla Barron, the 601st person to space, in that she was the last of the four assigned to the crew in May.
No. 599 is mission commander Raja Chari while Dr. Thomas Marshburn punched his first spaceflight ticket in 2009 on STS-127 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour and then again on a Soyuz flight in 2012. This is his third flight.
In all, with SpaceX’s latest, 13 types of spacecraft have made 354 trips to space with humans along for the ride since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961. SpaceX itself has been responsible for 18 humans in the past 18 months.
“Human spaceflight was the reason we were founded, so it’s incredibly meaningful to the whole team,” said SpaceX’s director of Dragon missions Sarah Walker. “We could not be more excited to finally be here and to be standing on the shoulders of giants with this partnership with NASA learning everything that we can … just really dawning a new era of spaceflight and all the possibilities that come with that.”
The definition of space includes the lower threshold of 50 miles set by the U.S. Air Force to be considered an astronaut. Others consider 100 km (about 63 miles), known as the Karman line, as the altitude needed to have made it to space.
From the 13 spacecraft, four have been created by commercial companies with the other nine from government programs: one from China, three from either the Soviet Union or Russia, and five from the U.S.
China’s continued spaceflights as well as more flights by private companies will see those spacecraft numbers grow. SpaceX, for instance, now has four Crew Dragon capsules.
The first to fly with humans, Endeavour, took NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to space in May 2020 on a demonstration flight.
Since then it has rolled out Resilience used on the first operational flight Crew-1, reused Endeavour for Crew-2, reused Resilience for the all-civilian orbital Inspiration4 mission and just sent Crew-3 up on Endurance. The fourth capsule has yet to be named, but SpaceX plans to use it next year.
SpaceX will continue flying its rotational crewed missions to the International Space Station, which go up about once every six months as one of two companies awarded the transportation contract as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. It will also fly civilian missions to the International Space Station and potentially more civilian orbital flights.
It has five flights in the books, and is set to fly at least three more in 2022 for Crew-4 and Crew-5 plus at least one private flight to the International Space Station through the space tourism company Axiom.
The company could fly as many as six civilian flights annually on top of its NASA responsibilities, Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said ahead of Inspiration4.
“There’s nothing really that limits our capability to launch,” he said. “It’s about having rockets and Dragons ready to go and having everything in the manifest align with our other launches.”
SpaceX continues work on its next-generation human-rated spacecraft, Starship, a version of which is being developed to be the Human Landing System for the Artemis III mission that would transport Orion passengers to the lunar surface potentially in 2025.
The big jump in space travelers, though, will come from suborbital flights in the coming years.