SPACE: Crew Dragon's Live-Crew Test Run

[dewline]

Noting comments from krpalmer and muchado about today's spaceflight milestone...

I admit to being distracted myself by multiple factors:

- solving the printing-from-open-applications issue plaguing me for the last two days, successfully.
- the meeting of my Mac User Group earlier this afternoon via Zoom.
- trying to work up a custom-designed greeting card for a neighbour's imminent birthday, preferably by using new-to-me graphic design software.
- worries about the tornado watch AND warning late this afternoon in my region.
- shopping errands.
- general research and exploration of the internet.
- other stuff to be added later, maybe.

The fact is that this was an important milestone of sorts today. The revival of American spaceflight technologies used from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo with upgraded components, with some success. It's a capability rebuilt to some degree, and yet as someone who enjoyed much of the Shuttle era, I cannot help but see it as backsliding somewhat. Physics and economics and human biology and psychology will certainly have their ways to varying degrees here, and have done so these past weeks.

I do await further developments with great interest and some hope. I want to see human adventure expand its horizons, and not to see this turned into a mere escape hatch for the richest of us.

Comments

[lyrical_heart]

I noted the return... just noted bc of some of the things you listed...(ie the weather?)

[autopope]

An almost unnoticed development: at 119 days, DEMO-2 was the longest duration crewed US mission ever outstripping the Skylab SL-4 mission (the third crew, who were up for 80-something days). The shuttle never spent more than a month in orbit; the only longer duration US astronaut flights were launched on Soyuz.

The next-but-one Crew Dragon flight is also due to reuse this one's capsule and first stage, making it only the second reusable crewed space vehicle ever to fly anywhere, after the US space shuttle (while the USSR launched Buran once, it flew without anybody aboard and never made a second flight).