WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 25Several organizations began ramping up
their human spaceflight agendas last year. On
March 26, Vice President Mike Pence announced
America’s intentions to return humans to the
Moon by 2024. The new lunar endeavor, named
Artemis, will utilize NASA’s next-generation
rocket, the Space Launch System, and the Orion
spacecraft, currently undergoing testing. The
program’s first mission, Artemis 1 (formerly called
Exploration Mission-1), will send an uncrewed
Orion capsule 280,000 miles (450,600 km) from
Earth — and thousands of miles past the Moon
— over the course of three weeks in 2020, in
preparation for future crewed missions to Earth’s
satellite and beyond.
On May 9, Amazon owner and Blue Origin man-
ufacturing and spaceflight company founder Jeff
Bezos unveiled the Blue Moon lander, designed to
carry up to 6.5 tons of crew and cargo to the lunar
surface. Blue Origin aims to reach Earth orbit by
2021 with the launch of its New Glenn rocket.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on March 2
made its first spaceflight after launching atop a
Falcon 9 rocket. The uncrewed capsule success-
fully docked with the International Space Station
(ISS) and returned to Earth on March 8. The mis-
sion proved the functionality of the craft’s para-
chutes in slowing the capsule’s descent to ensure
a safe splashdown once crew are onboard.
On February 21, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo,
VSS Unity, reached space for the second time, fol-
lowing its first successful flight in December 2017.
Unity carried pilots Dave Mackay and Michael
Masucci, as well as Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut
instructor, Beth Moses. The ship reached an alti-
tude of just under 56 miles (90 km); NASA defines
the boundary of space as 50 miles (80 km) above
sea level. On July 9, Virgin Galactic announced it
would merge with Social Capital Hedosophia in
the latter half of 2019, creating the world’s first
publicly traded company dedicated to human
commercial spaceflight and gaining the capital
needed to fully commercialize SpaceShipTwo.“I want people to realize that we’re doing this
— humanity is doing this today,” Moses says.
“Companies beyond Virgin Galactic are currently
developing systems for private citizens to fly to
space and it really unifies everyone. I think it’s cool.
And I think it’s important. There’s some thread of
importance in there. It brings people together.”
But 2019 also saw several goals slip through
spacefarers’ fingers. On April 20, just weeks after
its successful ISS trip, the Crew Dragon capsule
experienced an “anomaly” during a test of its
SuperDraco engines at the Kennedy Space Center
in Florida. Following an investigation, SpaceX
announced that a leak allowed liquid oxidizer to
enter and damage a valve in the system providing
propellant to the engines, which are used dur-
ing an emergency launch abort procedure. The
leak ignited the valve, causing an explosion that
destroyed the capsule.
That same month, Boeing announced the delay
of uncrewed test flights of its CST-100 Starliner,
also designed to ferry astronauts to and from the
ISS. The first uncrewed ISS trip for the Starliner
is now slated for December 17, 2019. The next
Crew Dragon launch, NASA said July 30, will be no
earlier than November 15, 2019.
Despite these slips, 2020 is sure to bring more
spaceflight firsts, so stay tuned.6
Public and
private
spaceflight
takes off
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon
successfully docked
with the International
Space Station on
March 3; here, its
nose cone has flipped
open to reveal its
docking mechanism
as it approaches the
station. NASA