How SpaceX and Boeing will get Astronauts to the ISS

- Hello, it's me, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut. We are at a really exciting time, in which the number of manned vehicles that

will

go to the International Space Station

will

increase from one to three. Soyuz's eight-year monopoly on carrying humans to the International Space Station is finally coming to an end. So today we're going to delve into the two new spacecraft that will be responsible for carrying humans to and from the International Space Station from the United States. So we're going to compare the Boeing Starliner, mounted on an Atlas V rocket, with SpaceX's Crew Dragon on its Falcon 9 rocket.

And to see how we've progressed in the world of human spaceflight, we'll also compare all of these systems to the Russia's Soyuz capsule and the United States' retired space shuttle, in a side-by-side comparison. We'll take a look at the designs, the rockets they carry, dimensions, cost, safety considerations, and any other unique features each vehicle offers. Considering I've been up close and personal with SpaceX's Crew Dragon Capsule and Boeing's Starliner, I think I have a pretty good idea about these vehicles. Let us begin! - Three, two, one. And take off! (upbeat rhythmic music) - That's one small step for man. - Let's clear the traffic for the test. (bleep) - The International Space Station remains one of the greatest feats of human engineering.

I mean, after all, it's a floating laboratory the size of a football field that travels 10 times faster than a bullet, circling the Earth every 90 minutes. It took 33 launches to put all its pieces into orbit and it has been home to more than 230 people from almost 20 countries. The ISS usually has six

astronauts

on board. The crew is sent in groups of three and typically reside on the station for six months. There is generally a three-month overlap for existing crew and newly arrived crew. But since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, there has only been one trip to the ISS: the Russian Soyuz vehicle.

But we are approaching a truly exciting time, as the United States prepares to send American

astronauts

to the International Space Station from American soil in two brand new spacecraft! And what I think is most exciting is that NASA has hired private companies to do development and operations in a new program called the Commercial Crew Program. The two companies that won the contracts are SpaceX and Boeing. I'm not really going to go into how the Commercial Crew Program started or how it has progressed in today's video, I mainly want to talk about the hardware, starting with Boeing and its Starliner.

Boeing began designing the Starliner, originally known as CST-100, in 2010, after winning a NASA contract for the CCDev program. The Starliner has the traditional truncated cone capsule design, much like previous United States spacecraft. It can carry up to seven astronauts at a time, although NASA will not use more than four seats at a time. The Starliner will be the first orbital capsule to land on land in the United States. Now this is similar to how the Soyuz capsule lands, and also how Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital capsule lands. There are five proposed landing sites in the western United States, but the two main sites will be those in the United States.

The Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and the Army's Dugway Test Range in Utah. Starliner will land using parachutes and a set of large airbags. A pair of parachutes deploy at about nine kilometers altitude, followed by a trio of main parachutes at 3.6 kilometers, and at 1.5 kilometers altitude, the heat shield is removed and all six airbags inflate. These airbags have a dual purpose. In nominal cases, airbags will soften the landing when landing on land, and in non-nominal cases, such as an abort or emergency re-entry, airbags provide buoyancy and balance for water landings. Landing on land will allow the Starliner an easy path to renewal and reuse.

Boeing hopes to turn one around in just six months and reuse it up to 10 times! That's definitely a good thing. Since the crew will land on dry land, crew recovery is quite different from a ditching. At the edge of the landing zone there will be a Mobile Data Tracking Vehicle, or MDTV, as well as a Mobile Landing Control Center, or MLCC, and a number of other recovery vehicles waiting to jump. Once the landing is confirmed, a small army of vehicles will make their way through the desert. Now I imagine this will be more or less like a real-life Mad Max scenario, so Boeing, please send us videos of this.

Upon arrival, a team will check and stabilize the hydrazine fuels and then ground the vehicle for static electricity. After that, an HVAC truck will arrive and begin cooling the spacecraft, including the crew and fuels. A mobile landing platform with stairs will then stop and begin evacuating the crew. Boeing has to remove the crew in one hour and the cargo in two. The person who actually extracts the crew is a member of the Boeing Fire and Rescue team, which I think is pretty cool. They take the crew out and then send them to a truck for medical exams and then take them on a NASA helicopter.

Eventually, the capsule will be loaded onto a small crane truck and taken back to begin its renovation. The Starliner cabin takes a fairly conservative and familiar approach. Although much less cluttered than the space shuttle cabin, it still features familiar, traditional controls, buttons, and non-touch screens. The Starliner will dock with the ISS and will not dock. Docking is where the vehicle performs all the final maneuvers, until it connects with the docking port. Dragon 1 and Cygnus cargo vehicles currently dock at the station, meaning they park and then are docked to the station via the Canada Arm or Canadarm.

Astronauts enter and exit through the side hatch when on Earth, but when docked, they crawl through the top that connects to the International Space Station via the ISS International Docking Adapter. It is true that at first getting in and out of the Starliner is a bit cumbersome. Astronauts need to move in their seats, lying on their backs. The spacecraft consists of two main sections, the crew module and a service module. The crew module is, well, exactly what you would think, it's where the crew goes. It is also the part that survives re-entry. The service module houses orbital maneuvering propellant tanks, the orbital maneuvering thrusters, the launch abort engines, which are located on the bottom in a pusher configuration, solar panels on the bottom and radiators on the sides, as well as a number of other things. .

The abort engines are four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-88 Bantams modified to run on hypergolic fuels, to function as a launch abort engine. The first uncrewed test flight, OFT-1, will fly with the qualification test engines, but they will be idle as there will be no crew on board. In the event of a thruster problem, or an unscheduled quick teardown, these abort engines would be used for up to a few minutes of flight, after which the vehicle would only use the maneuvering thrusters. The Starliner offers a full-envelope abort window, meaning astronauts can abort at any time and remain safe.

Boeing designed the Starliner to be able to ride on a variety of rockets, including the Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9. They ended up selecting United Launch Alliance's Atlas V for now, and eventually, ULA's next Vulcan rocket will likely fly. Starliner. The exact Atlas V they selected is an N22. Now here's a quick reminder of those numbers. The first part of the name represents the size of the fairing, with the options being four meters, five meters or N for none. The middle number is the number of strap-on rocket boosters and can range from zero to five.

The last number is the number of RL-10 engines in the centaur's upper stage. The centaur may have one or two RL-10s. So adding all this up, the Atlas V that will launch the Starliner will have no fairing as it has a Starliner on top, it will have two solid rocket boosters and two RL-10 engines on the upper stage, hence the N22. When the Starliner launches, it will be the first time ULA uses a dual RL-10 centaur upper stage on the Atlas V; However, the twin-engine Centaur has been flying since 1962 and flew on the Atlas III as recently as 2005.

So it's definitely nothing new. So why are Boeing and ULA using a twin-engine Centaur when the Starliner is relatively light? The RL-10 engine is tremendously efficient, but what it is not is powerful. To allow enough time for a single standard engine to boost the upper stage and its payload to orbital speeds without re-entering the atmosphere, the Atlas V first stage is typically lifted to an extra-high altitude, allowing more time for the upper stage to do its circularization burn. This works great for standard payloads, but in the case of an abort, this trajectory is actually too steep, generating incredibly high and insurmountable G-forces when it hits the atmosphere.

So, to maintain a nice, safe, shallow profile for the fragile, precious humans on board, the upper stage needed more thrust, and the solution for that was the twin-engine centaur! If you need more information about this unique engineering solution, Scott Manley has an amazing video about it. Boeing and ULA will also use a secondary flight computer that will operate in parallel to the primary flight computer on the centaur's upper stage. It will detect any errors in the flight plan faster than human reaction time, shutting down the engines and causing an abort. Another design consideration is due to the Starliner's blunt nose.

You'll see these little lattice structures around the outside. The Starliner was designed to be as stable as possible during reentry, which means having a short and robust design. The lattice structure helps diffuse airflow over the vehicle, helping to ensure that there are no inadvertent shock waves or pressure areas over the bottom of the vehicle during ascent, especially since the rocket actually tapers to the thinnest upper stage of the centaur. They also added an aerodynamic skirt to ensure smooth airflow. Even though the Apollo spacecraft was similar in shape, the Saturn V it rode on was something of a caked-on wedding, getting narrower and narrower, and therefore had no such design considerations.

Starliner astronauts will lift off from ULA's SLC-41 launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The platform has already been fitted with the crew access arm in preparation for the first crew launches. This will be the first time humans have launched from this particular launch pad, which is incredible and also the first time humans have launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station since Apollo 7 in 1968. We'll go in in dimensions, designs and prices. , and even more so when we do a side-by-side comparison of all the vehicles. (upbeat melodic music) Now, let's move on to the other new spacecraft, SpaceX's Crew Dragon or Dragon 2.

Dragon 2 is the follow-up to SpaceX's successful Dragon capsule that has transported cargo to and from the ISS since 2012. The Dragon capsule was originally called DragonRider when it was initially proposed to NASA for the CCDev program. SpaceX was not selected for the first round, perhaps because the Dragon capsule had noses around it, but SpaceX was selected during the second round of contracts. The original DragonRider capsule was essentially just a crewed version of their Dragon Capsule, which at the time was preparing for its first in-orbit test flights and already had a contract to resupply the ISS, which it would do later in 2012.

In 2014 , SpaceX revealed the updated version of the Dragon capsule that would transport astronauts to its headquarters in Hawthorne. Dragon 2 was a massive redesign of the original Dragon Capsule, which included seating for up to seven astronauts, although again, NASA will not use more than four at a time for the Commercial Crew Program. Originally, Dragon 2 also planned to land back on land using the abort engines, assuming they weren't used for an abort, to make for a nice soft landing anywhere. However, due to some reasons, SpaceX abandoned booster landings and will perform a parachute recovery and ocean splashdown, much like the current Dragon Capsule.

If you need to know more about why SpaceX canceled the propulsive landing of itsDragon Capsule, I've got you covered. Crew Dragon's main landing zone is the Atlantic Ocean, which is different from the current Dragon capsule, which has been landing in the Pacific Ocean since its first launch and recovery in 2010. SpaceX also requested that the Gulf of Mexico be a landing zone. contingency. site too, which I think would be the first time. SpaceX has a pair of ships, called Go Searcher and Go Navigator, that will be in charge of crew recoveries. Go Searcher features a hoist capable of lifting the Dragon capsule to the deck and then unloading the crew.

There are also communication relays and a helicopter landing pad to take the crew home after landing. Go Searcher has been part of the SpaceX fleet for some time, assisting in recovery efforts from the Falcon 9 unmanned spacecraft landings, as well as Dragon 1 recoveries. Despite the ocean landings, SpaceX has revamp and reuse plans for Dragon 2, although not in the way you might be thinking. The refurbished Dragon 2s will no longer carry humans, but will eventually be used to carry cargo for CRS-2 missions. SpaceX already has experience restoring downed Dragon capsules and has re-flown five Dragon capsules to date, although according to Elon Musk in 2017, he mentions that it is almost as expensive to restore downed Dragons as it is to build new ones.

But I'm sure they've since implemented streamlined processes that have helped make the efforts worthwhile. The design of the Crew Dragon capsule is extremely minimalist. It's easy to see that the design was influenced by Elon, who likes simple things. The interior looks like the spaceship Tesla Model 3 compared to Knight Rider's car, Kitt. Some unique features of the interior are the touch screens and movable chairs. When Dragon 2 was first revealed, Elon sat in a seat and lowered the screen towards him, that is now reversed as the screens are stationary and the seats move towards them. Again, like the Starliner, the Dragon 2 is designed to be completely autonomous with manual overrides that really only exist as contingencies.

But the Dragon 2 does something the old Dragon 1 couldn't do: dock. Entry to the Crew Dragon capsule is through the side hatch. Once you peek your head out, it is very spacious and minimalist. It's easy to drop into the seat and get comfortable. In fact, I really think this design makes sense. Like the Starliner, the Dragon 2 also has two sections. There is the crew module and the trunk. The crew module is again the part that holds the humans, but it also has the Super Draco abort engines built into it. Since this part of the spacecraft is recovered, the Super Draco engines are also recovered, yay!

Like the Starliner, the Super Dracos are powered by hypergolic thrusters and also offer a full envelope abort window. The trunk is a pressure-free section of the spacecraft, just as it is on Dragon 1. This allows the ability to house larger components that would not fit through the docking port, or items that are installed on the outside of the station. The items inside the trunk are recovered through the Canadarm2 or another arm called the Dextre. The Dragon 2's trunk offers a unique design with stationary solar panels covering one side of the vehicle and radiators on the other side.

The old Dragon 1 had extendable solar panels. This makes sense because you want the solar panels to face the sun and you want the radiators to face away from the sun. So, a pretty good design. The trunk also has fins to help stabilize the vehicle in the event of an abortion. And again, I already made a video about this, so if you want to learn more about the Dragon's fins and why they are important during an abortion, check out this video. The trunk detaches before re-entry and burns due to lack of heat shield. This also allows for the removal of some items at the station.

A very fiery garbage service. Dragon 2 is designed to fly exclusively on the Falcon 9, although there were plans for it to fly on the Falcon Heavy at one point, but SpaceX no longer plans to certify the Falcon Heavy as human and is instead focusing on Starship. In order for the Falcon 9 to be crew-rated, NASA required a design freeze on its Block 5 variant, as SpaceX tends to update its vehicles so frequently that they sometimes introduce unintended consequences. Part of this design freeze also required the use of a new composite wrapped pressure vessel, or COPV. A COPV failure was the primary cause of the AMOS-6 pad anomaly and a COPV strut was the cause of the CRS-7 failure.

SpaceX began flying a newly designed COPV in late 2018. It's a bit unusual for NASA to require a design freeze. I mean, considering NASA has considered flying humans on the second SLS launch, or even crazier, there's even been talk of putting humans on the first SLS flight. But SpaceX is known to make changes all the time in the constant search for improvements, so I think a safer, more conservative approach is a good idea when it comes to human lives. The flight profile of the Falcon 9 with the crew also had to be modified compared to the cargo versions to ensure the safest profile in the event of an abort.

Due to the shallower and flatter profile, it also means that the Falcon 9's first stage booster will not return to the launch site and will have to land in the lower area of ​​the unmanned spacecraft. The Falcon 9 upper stage uses the Merlin 1D Vacuum engine, which is extremely powerful, but not very efficient. You will have no problem maintaining a shallow profile. The crew will climb to the top of a Block 5 Falcon 9 located at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now I have to say it's not a contest, but SpaceX definitely has the coolest launch pad ever.

I mean, after all, this is the same launch pad that humans took off from to go to the moon. The crew will board the fixed service structure, which is a relic of the space shuttle era, although SpaceX has done a lot of work to remove the rotating service structure, repaint the tower, add cladding and attach its mobile access arm. One thing SpaceX will do that is completely new to the world of human spaceflight and, in fact, needed to be convinced by NASA to consider it a valid option is a fuel loading and starting procedure. Since SpaceX uses super-cold propellants, they need to load them into the vehicle as late as possible so they don't heat up and boil before the vehicle takes off.

In fact, SpaceX continues fueling the rocket until just three minutes before liftoff. Now, clearly three minutes is not enough time to go up the tower and strap the crew to the Dragon Capsule, and then exit the tower, so the crew will enter before the propellant load and remain on board while it is loaded. loads fuel into the vehicle. I can clearly understand how this is different, but I actually feel like it's a safer measure. I mean this means that the astronaut and ground crew never need to get close to a fully loaded vehicle on the pad.

Once the fuel begins to flow, the crew finds themselves in the safest place imaginable: a hermetically sealed pressure vessel armed with a powerful abort system. So even though the process of refueling is quite risky, the crew is in a very safe place. You imagine? This will be the first time in history that a human ear will hear the sound of cryogenic fuel flowing into the vehicle. You'll hear all those creaks and strains from the vehicle as it comes to life. That's going to be crazy! Another fun fact is that the crew will arrive at the launch site in Tesla Model X, of course!

Man, SpaceX will put on a new show, that's for sure. Now, finally, before we get to the direct comparisons, did you know that both launch pads have an amusement park attraction? Well, not quite, but each platform has an emergency zipline capable of evacuating astronauts and ground crew quickly in the unlikely event of, say, a leak or fire. While I'm sure there are limited use cases where they would be remotely useful, it seems like it would be pretty fun, well, assuming you're not chased by a fireball. Okay, wow, enough recap. It's time to compare these vehicles side by side and see how these new vehicles compare to the Soyuz and the space shuttle. (upbeat melodic music) So, first of all, let's line up these vehicles next to each other and compare their sizes.

Yes, the Space Shuttle Orbiter clearly dwarfs these vehicles in size, that thing is huge! And because of its immense size, we'll focus only on the crew module portion of the Shuttle, so we can see these other vehicles. But don't forget about the rest, we will continue talking about the system as a whole, since the aft end is its service module and the cargo compartment is similar in nature to the trunk of the Dragon capsule, only much larger. But look at how much bigger the Starliner and Dragon are compared to the Soyuz! So let's review its dimensions starting with its height.

The Starliner is five meters tall with the service module attached, the Crew Dragon is 8.1 meters tall with the trunk, and the Soyuz is 7.5 meters tall with the orbital module and service module attached. The space shuttle, we'll show its length as height, because that's what it was like when it was on the pad. It was 37 meters tall from tail to nose. Then its width. The Starliner is 4.5 meters wide, the Dragon Capsule is 3.7 meters wide, the Soyuz is 2.2 meters wide, and the crew compartment and payload compartment of the space shuttle were 4.6 meters wide; We will ignore the wings for this comparison.

I feel like we're going to have a lot of asterisks when we compare these vehicles to the space shuttle, because that thing was a completely different beast. Next, dry dough. Starliner weighs 13 tons, Dragon weighs 9.5 tons, the Soyuz capsule is surprisingly light at 7.1 tons, and the space shuttle, yes, you can imagine it, is quite a bit heavier at 68.5 tons. As mentioned above, crew capacity for both Starliner and Dragon is seven, but again, NASA will only use four. The Soyuz capsule barely fits three people, and the Shuttle fits up to eight, although seven was much more common. Now the volume, both pressurized and unpressurized.

Starliner has 11 cubic meters of pressurized and non-depressurized volume. Dragon 2 has 10 cubic meters of pressurized volume and 14 cubic meters of unpressurized volume. Soyuz has 8.5 cubic meters of pressurized volume and no unpressurized volume. The space shuttle is, of course, king here with 74.3 cubic meters of pressurized volume and 300 cubic meters of unpressurized volume. In other words, you could almost fit all three spacecraft inside the Shuttle's payload compartment. Now, how long can these vehicles stay in space? The Starliner can last 60 hours on its own and 210 days while docked, the Crew Dragon can last a week on its own and also 210 days when docked, the Soyuz can last 30 days on its own and 180 days when docked, and the space shuttle couldn't last much longer than 17 days because it runs on fuel cells.

Next, what about their abortion systems? Both the Starliner and Crew Dragon have a full envelope pusher-type system, meaning they can safely abort at any time during climb, the Soyuz has a pull or tractor system with an abort tower and fairing engines Also, it also offers a complete wrap. escape and of course the space shuttle had no mechanical abort systems. And a quick little note here on abort systems, pushers push up from the bottom or middle of the spacecraft and tractors or pull abort systems pull from the top using a turret or something. Now where do all of these land?

Starliner, Shuttle and Soyuz land on land, while Crew Dragon lands. Now, what about reusability/renewability? The Starliner is capable of being reused up to 10 times, the Crew Dragon is capable of being reused, but for now only as a cargo variant, the Soyuz is expendable and the Space Shuttle was also reusable. Now the launch vehicles that take them into space. Starliner will travel on the Atlas V N22, Crew Dragon on the Falcon 9, Soyuz on the Soyuz FG rocket and soon on the Soyuz 2, and the Shuttle was part of the space transportation system. While we have these rockets in the air, I think it's important that we take note of their reliability.

We will ignore partial failures and only talk about the success of the mission, in whichcase the Atlas V really emerges victorious, with 100% success in 79 flights. The Falcon 9 has had 69 missions and has had two failures, one of which occurred before launch, giving it a success rate of 97.1%. The Soyuz is complicated because it has been flying since the 60s in one form or another, so in total there are 996 out of 1028 for a success rate of 96.9%, but its newest variant, the FG, has only had a failure of 66, making it 98.5% successful. And the Shuttle had two failures out of 135 launches, so it was also 98.5% successful.

It should also be noted that thanks to the abort system, a single failure of the Soyuz FG does not cause any loss of life. And another quick note, this time on the use of solid rocket boosters. The solid rocket booster caused the loss of the Challenger vehicle, but that doesn't mean that solids alone are inherently more dangerous per se. The combination of a solid rocket booster and the lack of a mechanical abort system is really what's dangerous. We have learned a lot since the space shuttle, and the use of SRB by the Atlas V is considered very safe, and due to the fact that the Starliner has an abort system, if there was a failure, the crew could get away from the rocket.

So we really shouldn't compare Atlas' use of SRB to the space shuttle's use of SRB. And now we are going to launch the four? The launch sites are SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base for Starliner, right next door is the Falcon 9, which will launch from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, Soyuz launches from Baikonur LC-1 /5 and the Shuttle launched from both LC-39A and LC-39B at KSC. And finally we are going to talk about the price per seat, and this also has a pretty big asterisk. Both Starliner and Crew Dragon are priced at $58 million per seat, the Soyuz Capsule now costs up to $82 million per seat, and the Shuttle, well, this is tough.

On paper, the Shuttle would cost around $214 million per seat, but let's not forget that the Shuttle did much more than simply carry a crew: it often carried an additional payload of a dozen tons or more! So maybe it's fair to take that $214 million per seat per launch and then discount 80% because 80% of the vehicle volume was dedicated to cargo. But maybe that's not fair either, so let's say it's somewhere between $43 million and $214 million. The last thing I want to mention, but only for Starliner and Crew Dragon, is their development cost. Thus, Starliner received $4.8 billion and SpaceX received $3.1 billion in total.

But this includes two demonstration launches and six operational flights by each company. Now, I don't really want to get into a dispute about why each company was paid such different amounts, but it probably had to do with each company's proposal. Maybe after SpaceX flies several dozen astronauts, they can charge a little more to boost NASA's confidence. Kind of like how they can increase the price of cargo resupply missions once they prove reliable and after they have a better idea of ​​the costs of running the program. So when all is said and done, here's my take. First of all, I couldn't be more excited to see a couple of exciting new trips to space.

It's time! As solid and reliable as the Soyuz has been, it is time for humans to have other, newer and more comfortable options. When it comes to each system, I have my opinions and I will be brief, because you know that the comments section will have plenty of opinions to go around. The Starliner is an impressive spacecraft. It is very well thought out and you can see that human safety is a priority for both Boeing and ULA. I'm glad to see that they'll land on land, because I think it's cool, and I'm glad to see that they can reuse the spaceship.

And I'm also happy that the Atlas is finally carrying humans again for the first time since Faith 7 launched with Mercury-Atlas in 1963! And as advanced as the Starliner is, I wish Boeing had taken a few more progressive steps. It seems like the spacecraft is a little conservative and you can tell they didn't want to take any design risks or cross any boundaries. And unfortunately, when I have to sit on it, it feels a little stale and cold. However, aesthetics and ergonomics are a very, very small part of the equation when placing humans in space. So now we come to SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule.

You can't really argue that SpaceX made the spaceship more attractive and sexier. It is really impressive. And frankly, the radical departure from the norm really seems to have been brilliantly accomplished. Just look at how easy this is to get into compared to the Starliner. And I have no doubt that the Crew Dragon capsule didn't take any shortcuts on safety, considering they had to answer to NASA for every inch of the thing, so when it comes to the pure cool factor, I'll have to take the plunge. to SpaceX. After listening to some people who have used touchscreens (we're talking hardcore pilots), they expressed that they missed a more traditional control scheme.

Saying it feels a little like flying an iPad. But finally, seeing a Falcon 9 land after taking the crew to the ISS will be a nice icing on the cake. And while, of course, it won't land back at Kennedy Space Center, I never get tired of watching this. So no matter how you slice it, you can't go wrong. NASA hired two incredible companies to create truly exciting new trips to space. NASA should be proud of this new program. It has saved them money and now offers a variety of options, so they now have some overlap and redundancy in the humanities access to space.

And while this video was intended to highlight the Commercial Crew Program, to be honest, I ended up appreciating the space shuttle more after diving into this. That thing was something really special. I mean, yes, of course, it had its flaws and didn't live up to the hype of making spaceflight cheaper or safer, but boy, it had some unmatched capabilities. Good job NASA, Boeing and SpaceX! Honestly, I couldn't be more excited for this new chapter in spaceflight. And don't worry, I'll do my best to offer it all to you! I'm planning on trying to get to all the demo missions and cover them live, in person!

If you'd like to help contribute and ensure I can provide you with the best coverage possible, consider becoming a Patreon supporter by visiting Patreon.com/everydayastronaut, where you'll also get access to behind-the-scenes content and exclusive live streams. If you'd like another fun way to support what I do, head over to my webstore at dailyastronaut.com/shop where you'll find t-shirts like this one, Grid Fin Not-A-Coaster coasters, rocket launch prints, and many more. other fun things. You can even find all the music in my videos, which is always original. And not only that, be sure to check out my new EP called 27 Merlins, whose music I wrote for the release of Falcon Heavy.

That's right, when you watch that video, you're watching direct video of the SpaceX live stream. It has not been cut in any way. Music was written for all the events of the flight. So it's a fun new way to experience the launch. Definitely check it out here on YouTube. Thank you all, that will be enough for me. I'm Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, bringing space to Earth for everyday people. (energetic melodic music)