published 9 minutes ago
NASA and SpaceX are looking to extend the number of flights that each Crew Dragon capsule can make, from five to 15.
On May 30, 2020, Crew Dragon became the first American spacecraft to carry astronauts to orbit since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, and the first private spacecraft to reach the International Space Station. Since then, Crew Dragon vehicles have flown 49 different astronauts (one of them twice) to space on 13 missions, nine of them for NASA and four of them private.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft known as Endeavour launched to space on March 3 carrying three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut on SpaceX's Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station. The three other Crew Dragon spacecraft — Resilience, Endurance and Freedom — have all flown to space and back multiple times (three times each for Endurance and Freedom, and two for Resilience), but none has flown as many times as Endeavour.
Crew-8 marks the fifth flight for Endeavour, the maximum number of flights Crew Dragon spacecraft have been qualified for. But this spacecraft, what NASA and SpaceX refer to as the "fleet leader," could potentially prove itself worthy of more flights — possibly many more. According to NASA officials, Crew Dragon might be able to fly up to 15 times, depending on the results of a requalification campaign the agency and SpaceX will undertake this year and next.
During a press briefing on Feb. 28 to discuss the Crew-8 mission, Steve Stich, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said SpaceX is currently performing qualification tests of "every single" component on the Dragon spacecraft in order to determine how many flights the spacecraft might be capable of making.
