Your Guide to Crew-1, SpaceX’s Second Astronaut Flight

What’s happening and why it matters

The last time was a test. This time it’s for real.

In mid-2020, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley made history by becoming the first astronauts to ride a commercially operated spacecraft to the International Space Station and back. The mission ended a 9-year drought for crewed U.S. orbital spaceflight.

Behnken and Hurley’s 2-month test mission demonstrated that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle was ready for long-duration crew rotation flights as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The first such flight, Crew-1, will launch 4 astronauts to the station: NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi. The crew will stay aboard for 6 months.

The four fliers will join NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russian astronauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who arrived at the station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in October. This will max out the station’s crew complement at 7, which was previously not possible since the Russian Soyuz spacecraft can only carry 3 people at a time.

More crew members means NASA and its international partners can better utilize the ISS. Astronauts aboard the station conduct research that helps us learn about the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body, and test technologies that will be needed for human exploration missions beyond low-Earth orbit.

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