Collect Space 5/20/2020
It might be the most high-profile, if not also the highest game of "capture the flag" ever played, but unbeknownst to many, the flag waiting to be captured by SpaceX's soon-to-be-launched first astronaut crew was briefly lost in space.
Soon after NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley arrive on board the International Space Station later this month, they will claim a small American flag as a symbol of their success. The stars and stripes banner, which was left on the orbiting laboratory by the crew of NASA's final space shuttle mission in 2011, will be SpaceX's prize for becoming the first U.S. commercial company to launch U.S. astronauts on a U.S. rocket from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.
"The plan always was, or we thought it would be back in 2011, that the first U.S. vehicle to launch from Florida and come to the International Space Station would grab that flag that flew both on STS-1 and STS-135, the first and last flights of the shuttle program," said Hurley, who was the shuttle's last pilot and is now the spacecraft commander on SpaceX's Demo-2 test flight of its new Dragon capsule.
"I think we will probably grab it from Chris [Cassidy, the space station's current commander] and put it in a safe place while we do our work on the space station. Then we'll bring it back when we come back later this summer," Hurley said at a pre-flight press conference on May 1.
More:
http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-052020a-capture-flag-lost-spacex.html
