What inspired spaceX to perform a historical achievement

As we know on Saturday, May 30th at 3.22 p.m EDT SpaceX has successfully launched the crew dragon’s demo-2 with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on top of Falcon-9. For American soil, it’s a 9 years gap from the STS shuttle. Also, this is the first privately-owned space vehicle to bring humans to Low Earth Orbit.

The biggest question is “How the SpaceX managed to do this?”. If you want to know the answer you have to know the journey of SpaceX from the beginning. In 2002, SpaceX was formed by Elon Musk and Tom Mueller (Present CTO of SpaceX) with the vision of colonizing humans in the Red Planet. In the early 2000s, SpaceX was a joke for the space exploration community. Everyone knows that transporting humans to Mars is a big deal. Still, the biggest achievement in mars is NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover. Elon Musk was very clear about this at the time when SpaceX was founded. Also, his fortune was not enough to go for launch at that time. But they were ready to face the challenge. They knew that the vehicle cost was the most important part in any of the missions out there. With the strong engineering team, SpaceX was planning to do a noticeable cost-cutting in launch vehicles. That’s where the Re-usable rockets were born. It was not as simple as we think. SpaceX headed to face multiple failures at the beginnings. Most of the people thought that’s the end of SpaceX. But after some time they have proved that on July 14, 2009, with Falcon-1 flight 5.

from the day they had a successful launch, they went to some commercial deals with few space organizations to carry the cargo to space. That brought the profit for SpaceX. That motivation takes them to the stage where they made the world’s largest rocket Falcon-heavy where they can bring noticeably large cargo or crew capsules to space. Meanwhile, some other private players like Boeing were trying to design some crew capsules and launch vehicles. At the same time, Nasa announced Commercial Crew Program where the private space companies can develop & demonstrate their crew capsules with NASA’s fund. Boeing headed first to the program with their CTS-100 Starliner. Anyway, SpaceX already had a design of RED Dragon which is a crew capsule that can land on Mars surface. But the NASA wanted to do some design changes in landing to get approved for the Commercial Crew Program. That’s the point where the development of the SpaceX crew dragon was started. Elon and Team were excited about this project from the beginning. The dragon was designed with a more futuristic interior and it was more cost-effective than CTS-100 starliner. And they manage to do a test launch successfully without astronauts. So they decided to go for a demo that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Initially, the training was provided to the NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug hurley. Doug hurley is a senior astronaut who was piloting the last STS mission in 2011. Bob Behnken is a former American Air-Force Engineer and Chief of Astronauts office at NASA. After all these preparations NASA and SpaceX scheduled a date for the demo-2 launch from the kennedy space center.But the scheduled date was postponed by three days because of the high density of charges in the atmosphere. It was so difficult to pick a launch date for NASA. it’s because they have to consider the crew’s sleep cycle, ISS astronauts sleep cycle, docking time, whether, etc. On Saturday, May 30th also they experienced a similar whether one hour before the launch but luckily after a few minutes it became normal. So hopefully they launched it successfully. As expected the falcon-9 booster lifted the dragon in low earth orbit then landed successfully and the dragon managed to dock into the space station approximately after 20 hours of travel. But the mission is not over yet. The crew has to come to earth in a few days. let’s hope that will be a successful landing.

So what will be next? Well, SpaceX’s main focus is not only to take people to the LEO but also to the deep space. For that, they are primarily developing a conceptual vehicle called Starship. It seems more futuristic and has a lot of miracles. if Starship became successful, it will be the first space vehicle that has no separations (Single stage) and complete stainless steel design.

Also, SpaceX has bought a village in Boca chica, Texas to develop its own spaceport. The neighborhood has a very less population and has an ocean that will be helpful for sea landings. Along with that SpaceX has another commercial plan on replacing the Airplanes with rockets. The idea is when a rocket becomes more and more cost-effective, the Public can afford a trip using rockets. The advantage is SpaceX reusable rockets will be much faster than Airplanes.

Other than these SpaceX is working more exciting projects which will change our way of life. For example one of their project called Starlink is going to give access to the internet from anywhere in the world which can create more start-ups based on the internet and digital enhancements. Likewise, SpaceX projects are going to be the tools to open the next chapter of human life. With all the hope let’s wait until the next miracle…

 

If you have any feedbacks leave them in the comments. Follow me to read more about space exploration, engineering & technology.

Originally published in https://msvithushan.blogspot.com/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/msvithushan