The Crew Dragon Resilience manned spacecraft launched a crew of four people into a polar orbit with a height of 425-450 kilometers. During the mission, more than two dozen scientific experiments will be conducted, including important ones for future long-term space expeditions.
At 4.46 Moscow time, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Resilience spacecraft took off from launch pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is his fourth spaceflight and the 17th manned SpaceX flight. For the first time for an American spacecraft, the entire crew is without American citizenship. The citizens of Norway, Malta, Australia and Germany, who make up it, became the first people in Earth's polar orbit. This is the name of an orbit with an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, that is, one in which the device passes over all its latitudes, including the poles themselves, during rotation around the Earth.
The first stage of the rocket that launched the mission into space. The picture was taken after she landed on the SpaceX robotic floating platform.
Image source: SpaceX
Previously, there were no manned flights on it, it was used only by satellites, especially those that need to take photos at high latitudes or provide communication there. The reason for the unpopularity of polar orbits among humans is twofold. When launched in the direction of the Earth's rotation (that is, with low orbital inclinations), the ship's speed is added to the speed of the planet's rotation, which reduces its energy requirements by up to 5%. This is a serious limitation for Soyuz-type space rockets with moderate energy capabilities.
In addition, polar orbits, by definition, intersect the circumpolar regions. Charged particles of cosmic rays fall there, along the lines of the Earth's magnetic field, creating an increased radiation background.
Steve is in the Earth's atmosphere. Despite the fact that they occur frequently, the scientific registration of the phenomenon and the beginning of its study occurred only in 2016-2017.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
The Fram2 mission, named after Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen's Fram spacecraft, on the contrary, will benefit from such a flight. During its course, observations [...] of probes, discovered eight years ago, ribbons of hot gas in the atmosphere of high latitudes of the Earth, were planned. In total, the astronauts will conduct 22 experiments during the 3-5-day flight. There are two of them that no one has ever done before, namely mushroom cultivation in space and the first X—ray image in the same place.
Both are of great importance for future particularly long-term space flights, for example, to Mars. The task of providing people in a small enclosed space with plant food was realized back in the USSR more than 50 years ago (the BIOS-3 experiment, conducted in the volumes of the residential section of the Korolev project Martian spacecraft). However, it is difficult to grow the animal food needed by humans in space, you need a lot of space. In many ways, it can be replaced by mushrooms that require little volume to grow, but so far no one has studied their growth in microgravity. The experiment on board Fram2 is called Mission Mushroom, and they will try to grow oyster mushrooms quickly.
In addition, long-term flights and stays on Mars will make medical examinations in space inevitable. X-rays can clarify the extent of bone loss by astronauts, which is necessary to monitor their health status.
For SpaceX, flight is additionally important for gaining flight experience with a crew that does not consist of professional astronauts. Formally, all four participants are space tourists who received only relatively brief training at the company itself. Elon Musk believes that future crews to Mars will also often not be formed from professional astronauts, since colonization of another planet is impossible only by their efforts.
