The Stars My Destination: Crew-2 Launch

Yesterday, for the third time inside eleven months, a Crew Dragon capsule launched from American soil, ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station. This is quickly becoming routine, which we here at The Secret Base find very exciting.

Commander Shane Kimbrough (N.A.S.A.), Pilot Megan MacArthur (N.A.S.A.), Mission Specialist Akihiko Hoshide (J.A.X.A.), & Mission Specialist Thomas Pesquet (E.S.A.) lifted off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center's LC-39A aboad the Crew Dragon Endeavour (C206) atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The Endeavour is the same capsule that ferried the Demo-2 astronauts last summer, & in a further bit of cost-saving reusability, the Falcon 9 first-stage is the same first-stage rocket that carried the Endeavour last summer. I suppose the use of the N.A.S.A. "worm" logo is appropriate in that SpaceX is helping to realize the Space Shuttle's goals of reusability leading to significant cost-saving.

I was not yet two years-old when S.T.S.-1 flew in April 1981. The Space Shuttle, ferrying astronuats, satellites, & scientific experiments to & from Low Earth Orbit (L.E.O.) was routine throughout the first three decades of my life, until the retirement of the Shuttle fleet in 2011. I took the Space Shuttle, & the International Space Station (I.S.S.) it constructed, for granted—no ifs, ands, or buts. After an agonizing nine years (2011-2020) of watching the United States flounder without the ability to launch even a single astronaut into L.E.O., I am resolved not to take the Commerical Crew Program (Launch America—the SpaceX Crew Dragon &, eventually, the Boeing Starliner) & the I.S.S. for granted.

Kimbrough, MacArthur, Hoshide, & Pesquet are now on-board the I.S.S., completing the crew of Expedition 65. We are now three-fourths of the way through the month-long handoff from Expedition 64 to Expedition 65. The Crew-1 quartet of Hopkins, Glover, Noguchi, & Walker are scheduled to remain aboard for about a week before falling to Earth aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience.

Bonus! Song o' the Day: Crew-2 & the Endeavour
Guster, "Rocketship" from Goldfly (Space Cadet Mike Papa Whiskey)