Incredible week for SpaceX

SpaceX is going to celebrate its 19th anniversary and the past two weeks will remain as the most incredible weeks in the history of SpaceX.

  1. Launch of SpaceX Crew-2 in Crew Dragon Endeavour.
  2. Splashed down and recovery of four astronauts in Crew Dragon Resilience.
  3. 2 successful flights of Falcon 9, each carrying 60 Starlink satellites
  4. Successful test flight of Starship (SN15) and landed it back.
  5. Successful flight and recovery of F9 booster for the 10th time.
1. Launch of SpaceX Crew-2 in Crew Dragon Endeavour.
  • It is the second crewed operational flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft, and it's third overall crewed orbital flight.
  • Crew-2 also used the same capsule as Demo-2 (Endeavour) and used the same booster as Crew-1 (B1061.1).
  • Launched on 23 April 2021.

2. Splashed down and recovery of four astronauts in Crew Dragon Resilience.
  • Resilience lifted off successfully and launched into orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket on 16 November 2020.
  • It is the first operational mission in the Commercial Crew Program, carrying four astronauts and they spent over 6 months at ISS.
  • The capsule splashed down on 2 May 2021, It was the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since Apollo 8 in 1968.

Splash Down


3. Successful flights of Falcon 9, each carrying 60 Starlink satellites.

  • Starlink is a satellite internet constellation being constructed by SpaceX providing satellite Internet access. The constellation will consist of thousands of mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), which communicate with designated ground transceivers.
  • As part of this mission, SpaceX launched satellites on F9 successfully on 29 April and 4 May 2021, each carrying 60 satellites.
  • So far SpaceX Launched 27 Starlink missions, In total, SpaceX has now launched 1,443 satellites for its Starlink constellation.
Starlink



4. Successful test flight of Starship (SN15) and landed it back.

  • SN15 Rocket Prototype Achieves First Safe Landing on May 5 following Four Failed Attempts, coincidentally this comes on the 60th anniversary of the first spaceflight by an American astronaut — Alan Shepard.
  • Starship flew about 10 km into the sky and took a safe touchdown at its designated pad six minutes after takeoff.
  • If all goes well, Starship will fly NASA astronauts to the moon.
SN15


5. Successful flight and recovery of F9 booster for the 10th time.
  • On May 9 2021 SpaceX achieved double-digit recovery with its F9 booster. This is a huge milestone in the SpaceX mission on developing reusable launch vehicles.
  • The first flight launched in March 2019. 10 flights in just over 2 years is an incredible statistic.

F9 first stage on Drone ship 




Image credits:
SpaceX


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