SpaceX brings four astronauts back to Earth safely from the ISS – Elon Musk’s company is the favorite of the US space agency NASA.
Florida – Elon Musk has a run: Just two weeks after his space company SpaceX won the coveted NASA contract to build the lunar module, Musk’s company shows how dependent the US space organization is now on SpaceX. After six months on board the ISS, four astronauts have returned to Earth with a SpaceX space capsule. The spacemen: Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker (all Nasa) and Soichi Noguchi (Jaxa from Japan) watered in the Gulf of Mexico off Panama City in the US state of Florida on Sunday night (local time).
Last November, the four-man crew on board a “Crew Dragon” capsule from SpaceX set out for the International Space Station, the first regular flight of a SpaceX space capsule with people on board. A test flight had previously been carried out with two astronauts on board. The landing of the four astronauts: inside marks the successful completion of SpaceX’s first astronautical mission on behalf of NASA – and the next mission is already in full swing: Last week another four-person crew set off for the ISS with a SpaceX capsule and had the Number of people on board briefly increased to eleven.
Elon Musk and SpaceX successfully complete first austronautical NASA mission
With the successful completion of the first astronautical mission on behalf of NASA, SpaceX shows why Elon Musk’s private space company is now very much appreciated by the US space organization: SpaceX has released US space travel from a dilemma. For the first time since the end of the space shuttle program in the summer of 2011, NASA is again able to transport astronauts into space themselves. For many years NASA had to rely on Russian space travel and its solid “Soyuz” capsules – a heavy blow for the once proud space-travel nation USA, which brought the first humans to the moon and thus the so-called “space race” won in the middle of the Cold War.
SpaceX is the darling of US space travel: dreams about the moon and Mars
SpaceX has now released the USA from this dilemma and promises even more: The company will build the lunar module that will land the next people – including the first woman – on the moon. SpaceX’s offer to NASA was the cheapest and at the same time the most promising: Elon Musk actually wants to build the spacecraft “Starship” in order to colonize Mars in the future. It was precisely this “Starship” that SpaceX proposed for the moon landing – and was awarded the contract. This decision by the NASA officials was certainly not entirely without ulterior motives: The USA would also like to bring people to the moon in the long term – after a “stopover” on the moon.
While Elon Musk’s competitors, above all Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin, complain loudly about the NASA decision, work at SpaceX continues: In the coming days, the next test flight of a “Starship” prototype will take place and The next flight of four astronauts to the ISS is planned for autumn. Then a German astronaut should be there: Matthias Maurer. (Tanja Banner)
Headline list image: © Bill Ingalls
