After flying 4 astronauts into orbit, SpaceX makes its a hundred and first straight touchdown

A Falcon 9 rocket blasted into the starry sky above Florida early on Thursday morning, sending 4 astronauts safely on their approach into low-Earth orbit.

This mission, flown by SpaceX for NASA, will ship the astronauts to the Worldwide House Station after a 24.5-hour flight to synch up with the orbiting laboratory. Throughout this time, beneath nominal operations, Dragon will fly solely autonomously.

SpaceX is conducting its sixth operational human spaceflight for NASA, and accordingly this mission is called Crew-6. The Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage, shiny and clear on the launch pad, was really flying its very first mission, however the Dragon spacecraft is making its fourth total flight, essentially the most occasions that any Crew Dragon car has flown into area. Beforehand this Dragon, named Endeavour, flew NASA’s Demo-2 and Crew-2 missions, in addition to Axiom House’s Ax-1 personal spaceflight to and from the Worldwide House Station.

The image good liftoff got here after the launch of this rocket was scrubbed two days earlier, on February 27, with solely about two minutes left within the countdown attributable to a difficulty with the ignition system. NASA and SpaceX traced the issue to clogged filter within the floor methods that help the rocket up till the second of launch. As a result of this problematic filter, the correct quantity of TEA-TEB, a fluid used to ignite the rocket’s Merlin 1D engines, was not reaching the primary stage of the car. SpaceX changed the filter and reset the countdown.

Thursday morning’s flight carried NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, the mission commander, and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, its pilot, together with United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, each mission specialists.

Simply previous to launch, Bowen provided these phrases to the SpaceX launch staff: “As soon as extra unto the breach, pricey associates. Crew-6 is prepared for launch.” Bowen was quoting from Shakespeare’s play “Henry V.”

After the Falcon 9 rocket separated—with the second stage and Dragon motoring towards orbit—the primary stage burned again towards Earth. A couple of minutes later it made a bullseye touchdown on the Simply Learn The Directions drone ship.

Upon reaching orbit, Hoburg was clearly pumped concerning the heart-pounding expertise he had simply gone by. “As a rookie flier, that was one heck of a experience, thanks,” he radioed again to SpaceX’s flight management heart. “I’d say that is an absolute miracle of engineering and I simply really feel so fortunate that I get to fly on this superb machine.”

Somewhat greater than seven years have handed for the reason that Falcon 9 rocket made its first profitable touchdown again on Earth. That was simply SpaceX’s twentieth launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. Monday morning’s launch was the 207th total flight of the rocket. For a time, after that first touchdown, SpaceX had a number of misses because it continued to experiment with touchdown on a drone ship, in addition to enduring a couple of mishaps.

Nevertheless, since a drone ship touchdown failure in February 2021, SpaceX had reeled off 100 consecutive profitable booster landings. Monday morning’s return made for fortunate no. 101.