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SpaceX Launches the Crew-3 Mission for NASA, the Company's Fifth Human Spaceflight

NASA TV
  • Elon Musk's SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station from Florida on Wednesday evening, as the company keeps up a steady pace of crewed missions.
  • Known as Crew-3, the mission for NASA will bring the quartet to the ISS for a six-month stay in orbit on the research laboratory.
  • The launch is SpaceX's third operational crew launch for NASA to date, and the first by the latest addition to its fleet of Crew Dragon capsules, named Endurance by the Crew-3 astronauts.

SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station from Florida on Wednesday evening, as the company keeps up a steady pace of crewed missions.

Known as Crew-3, the mission for NASA will bring the quartet to the ISS for a six-month stay in orbit on the research laboratory. SpaceX launched the astronauts in its Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.

"It was a great ride – better than we imagined," NASA astronaut and Crew Dragon commander Raja Chari told mission control after the launch.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule on launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on November 09, 2021 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule on launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on November 09, 2021 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The launch is SpaceX's third operational crew launch for NASA to date, and the first by the latest addition to its fleet of Crew Dragon capsules, named Endurance by the Crew-3 astronauts. The Crew-3 mission brings the number of astronauts SpaceX has launched to 18.

The mission carries three Americans and one German: NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer. This is the first spaceflight for three of the crew: Chari, Barron and Maurer.

SpaceX developed its Crew Dragon spacecraft and fine-tuned its Falcon 9 rocket under NASA's Commercial Crew program, which provided the company with $3.1 billion to develop the system and launch six operational missions.

Commercial Crew is a competitive program, and NASA also awarded Boeing with $4.8 billion in contracts to develop its Starliner spacecraft. Boeing's capsule, however, remains in development due to an uncrewed flight test in December 2019 that experienced significant challenges.

Crew-3 represents the third of those six missions for SpaceX, with NASA now benefiting from the investment it made in the company's spacecraft development.

NASA emphasizes that, in addition to the U.S. having a way to send astronauts to space, SpaceX offers the agency a cost-saving option as well. The agency expects to pay $55 million per astronaut to fly with Crew Dragon, as opposed to $86 million per astronaut to fly on a Russian spacecraft. NASA last year estimated that having two private companies compete for contracts saved the agency between $20 billion and $30 billion in development costs.

The SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts stand on the transporter in front of the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 stack inside the SpaceX horizontal processing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 26, 2021.
SpaceX
The SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts stand on the transporter in front of the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 stack inside the SpaceX horizontal processing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 26, 2021.

Endurance is a new Crew Dragon capsule debuting for this mission. Previously, capsules Resilience and Endeavour have flown astronauts, and SpaceX expects to add a fourth Crew Dragon early next year.

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