Orlando Sentinel By Richard Tribou 9/17/2021
With the successful launch of the first all-civilian flight on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon, the company is looking to ramp up similar flights in the near future.
Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director for its human spaceflight program projected as many as a half a dozen flights a year.
“There’s nothing really that limits our capability to launch,” he said. “It’s about having rockets and Dragons ready to go and having everything in the manifest align with our other launches.”
The company founded by Elon Musk has two active Crew Dragons, both having launched with passengers twice, and both currently in space.
Crew Dragon Endeavour first took NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station launching from Kennedy Space Center on May 30, 2020, on the Demo-2 test mission, which marked the first time any humans had launched to orbit from U.S. soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
It’s currently docked again to the ISS on its first operational mission, Crew-2, and scheduled to return in November.
Crew Dragon Resilience is currently orbiting Earth at nearly 360 miles altitude with the first all-civilian crew of Inspiration4. It launched from KSC on Wednesday night and is slated to return with a splashdown off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean at 7:06 p.m. Saturday.
More:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/space/os-bz-spacex-plans-for-more-civilian-space-flights-inspiration-4-20210917-jj6tjpnj2fdnhk74bz2nvvh73q-story.html
