SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience has splashed down after delivering four astronauts home from the ISS, but it's already gearing up for a groundbreaking flight: the company's first fully civilian orbital mission.
After a record 167 days docked to the International Space Station (ISS), Resilience made a successful nighttime splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on May 2-3. This marked the first such landing for a U.S. crewed spacecraft since Apollo 8's predawn Pacific touchdown on December 27, 1968.
On board were NASA's Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, joined by JAXA's Soichi Noguchi for the Crew-1 mission.
SpaceX recovery teams swiftly retrieved the capsule from the water to minimize seawater damage, transporting it to Cape Canaveral. Preparations for the next flight, Inspiration4, are already underway.
Inspiration4 will be truly historic as SpaceX's first mission with an all-civilian crew—no professional astronauts required.
The team includes Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments; Hayley Arceneaux, a St. Jude Children's Research Hospital team member; Sian Proctor, professor at Arizona State University; and Christopher Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer. They'll make history as the first to fly to orbit without a pro astronaut companion.
Unlike previous missions, there's no ISS rendezvous. Instead, the crew will orbit Earth at around 570 km altitude—roughly 130 km above the station.
Originally slated for October, launch is now set for September 15, 2021, atop the same Falcon 9 booster that lofted Thomas Pesquet's Crew-2 mission on April 23.
Resilience will also get a key upgrade: a panoramic glass dome installed at the top for stunning 360-degree views of space and Earth. Once in orbit, the capsule's nose cone will deploy, revealing the cupola—designed for one crew member at a time, per SpaceX illustrations.
