SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 - Axiom Ax-1 - launch April 8, 2021
Screenshot from SpaceX Webcast of the launch of Axiom Ax-1
Mission Rundown: SpaceX Falcon 9 B5 - Axiom Ax-1
Written: August 3, 2022
We’re flying on a white Dragon
SpaceX successfully launched four private funded Axiom astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in a Crew Dragon spacecraft C206-3. The spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 Block 5 B1062-5, which lifted off Friday, April 8 at 11:17 EDT - 15:17 UCT from Launch Complex 39A, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Both ‘vehicles’ were flight proven. Only the second stage is a regular one-way rocket, unless the Merlin 1D# vacuum engine is a rebuilt booster engine with a bigger nozzle.
Dragon successfully docked to the ISS’ Harmony nadir port to IDA-2 on April 9, 2022 at 12:29 UTC. The crew remained docked for roughly twice as long as planned, due to unfavorable recovery weather.
Dragon undocked from the ISS at 01:10 UTC on April 25, 2022.
Following undocking, Dragon spent ~16 hours free flying, before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean at 17:06 UTC. The Axiom Ax-1 crew in the Dragon spacecraft was then recovered by SpaceX’s Dragon recovery boat, Megan. The Axiom Ax-1 crew egressed C206-3 roughly 45-60 minutes after splashdown.
It is the sixth crewed mission overall for SpaceX and its Crew Dragon vehicle following its Demo-2 flight. Like the Space Shuttle before it, Crew Dragon is reusable – the first reusable human capsule launch and entry system in the world.
Axiom Ax-1 marked the fifth flight for booster B1062-5. This is the third time a flight proven booster was used to launch a Crew Dragon mission.
Following the stage separation between 2nd stage and Endeavour, the booster B1062-3 will conduct an atmosphere re-entry burn and a landing burn and will softly touch down on “Just Read The Instructions'' positioned 535 km downrange on the Atlantic Ocean.
After the final static fire test at 14:00 EDT on April 6, 2022 on Pad 39A and final check outs, the Falcon 9 rocket B1062-5 will be made ready for launch.
The CRS 2 contract employs the Dragon 2 spacecraft, as the Dragon 1 spacecraft was retired at the end of the initial CRS contract after 19 CRS missions plus the COTS 2+ visit to ISS. CRS-7 was destroyed mid-flight by a broken COPV strut in the second stage.
Since its inaugural flight, Dragon 2 has flown 13 times; six crewed and seven uncrewed.
The Crew Dragon 2 capsule fleet will eventually grow in numbers. With the next new Crew Dragon being named Freedom by Crew-4, then Resilience, Endeavour and Endurance will begin to take turns being launched to Low Earth Obits mostly to the International Space Station, but also on tourist missions like Inspiration4.
The Inspiration4 flight profile close to the Hubble Telescope suggest, that an service or sightseeing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope is possible with at least two Crew Dragon spacecrafts with one of them lofting an airlock in the trunk and the other lofting the spare parts to refurbish or even upgrade Hubble.
Dragon A will dock to the airlock in Dragon B’s trunk, extract it and Dragon B will dock to the other end, so they are nose to nose with the airlock between them. Spacesuits in the airlock will enable the crew members 4-6 to egress into space upon arrival to Hubble, and a small Canadarm will capture Hubble.
Spare Parts for Hubble in Dragon A trunk such as new cameras, flywheels, computers, maybe even Hall effect plasma thrusters to raise Hubble's orbit or alter it. There is properly a long list of overdue service items ready to be repaired. After repairs performed on Hubble the Airlock can be brought to ISS as an extension module or become the first element on a private space station.
The Axiom Ax-1 science mission
Unique to this mission is the fact that the crew members largely had the opportunity to pick the experiments and focuses of their individual research.
For pilot Larry Connor, his projects stem from his long-standing support and funding for the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, and many of his experiments are in sync with those two organizations.
For the Mayo Clinic, Connor’s time on ISS will provide data on space travel’s impact on senescent cells — cells that have stopped dividing — and heart health.
In particular, senescent cells have been linked to multiple age-related diseases, and gaining a better understanding of them could lead to new treatments and therapeutics for age-related illnesses and conditions.
For the Cleveland Clinic, this research will focus on pre and post-mission high-resolution MRIs to study the effects of the spaceflight environment on spinal and brain tissue.
For Mark Pathy, his areas of research are paired with The Montreal Children’s Hospital, Canadian Research Universities, and The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
Using the theme “Caring for People and the Planet,” Pathy will take part in research projects in partnership with six Canadian universities and their investigators as well as proofs-of-concept with two tech startups, including the world’s first in-space demonstration of two-way holoportation — a mixed reality app for special lenses that receive two-way 3D projections as a hologram to communicate between users remotely.
For The Montreal Children’s Hospital and Child Health Research at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, Pathy will conduct research that aims to help unravel the mysteries surrounding chronic pain and sleep disturbances during space travel.
Other experiments and investigations will focus on Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome (SANS), which manifests through changes in visual acuity experienced by many astronauts on long-duration space flights and is considered a risk for deep space exploration.
In addition to biological research, Pathy will lead Earth observation activities to further analysis of the impact of climate change, urbanization, and other factors on the ecology and human habitation of North America.
Sponsored by Western University as well as The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, this research is intended to engage communities in addressing the environmental health and sustainability of the Great Lakes and their ecosystem, promoting conservation, restoration, protection, and reconciliation with the water, the land, and the Indigenous peoples of the watershed.
The only thing I didn’t find among the sources was a cargo manifest of, what I presume would be, crew supplies and science experiments in the fragile end.
Sorry I missed it. What I’m finding is more American alphabet soup. Yerk.
The Dragon Axiom Ax-1 crew
Axiom Ax-1 crew posing in Hawthorne Dragon assembly factory. (Credit: SpaceX)
With SpaceX as the launch/mission provider and Axiom as the customer, the Ax-1 mission marked the first fully private mission to the ISS. The four astronauts launched in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon C206 Endeavour spacecraft–marking the first third flight of a Dragon 2 spacecraft.
The Ax-1 mission was a planned 10 day mission with eight days at the ISS, one day for ascend and docking, and one day for undocking and descent. Once docked to the ISS, the visitors were on station with the Crew-3 astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron, and Matthias Maurer and MS-21 cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov.
Mission Commander for the Axiom Space Mission 1, Michael López-Alegría is a former NASA astronaut and test pilot. He was born on May 30, 1958, in Madrid, Spain.
Following graduation from Mission Viejo high School, López-Alegría joined the United States Navy, where he earned his Bachelor’s in systems engineering and later his Master’s in aeronautical engineering.
In 1981, López-Alegría became an instructor pilot at the Naval Air Station Whiting Field.
López-Alegría has flown on four previous spaceflights: Columbia on STS-73 in October 1995, Discovery STS-92 in October 2000, Endeavour STS-113 in November 2002, and seven months aboard ISS with Soyuz TMA-9.
On his four previous flights, he has conducted 10 EVAs for a total of just under 68 hours of EVA time. Despite this experience, López-Alegría will not be conducting an EVA on the Ax-1 mission, as NASA would not let him as a tourist.
Mission Pilot of the Ax-1 mission will be Larry Conner. Born in 1950, Conner is an American real estate agent and tech entrepreneur.
Connor is currently the head of the real estate investing firm Connor Group, which currently owns over 3-billion dollars in assets.
Connor is a private pilot and has competed in several aerobatic competitions. Axiom Space Mission 1 will be Conner’s first space flight.
Mission Specialist 1 on the Ax-1 mission, Mark Pathy is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist. Being the CEO of Mavrik, a private Canadian investment company, Pathy has a long history of being a company executive. He was formerly the CEO of Fednav, a private shipping company, and was the chairman of Stingray Group.
Ax-1 will be Pathy’s first space flight. According to Christopher Reynolds, he paid $50 million for this flight.
Mission Specialist 2 on the Ax-1 mission is Eytan Meir Stibbe. Stibbe is a Colonel in the Israeli Air Force.
In 1985, he co-founded Elar which establishes infrastructure in developing countries, including cell phone networks, naval defense systems, and other agricultural development projects. In 2011, he sold his share and invested in the company Mitrelli, an engineering, procurement, and construction company. He sold his shares of this company in 2018.
Axiom Space Mission 1 will also be Stibbe’s first space flight.
Crew Dragon 206-3 Endeavour
The Crew Dragon that supported the Axiom Space Mission 1 is the first operational Crew Dragon: C206. This Dragon has previously supported DM-2 SpaceX Demonstration Mission 2 and Crew-2 USCV-2 missions; the spacecraft–whose name was announced shortly after the launch of DM-2–was named ‘Endeavour' by Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as a tribute to the hard work by the SpaceX and NASA teams.
Between Endeavour’s first and second flights (DM-2 and Crew-2, respectively) it underwent a large amount of refurbishment and upgrades. These included upgrades to its abort system, upgrades to the structure of Dragon, and replacing the old heat shield after slightly higher than expected rates of heat-shield erosion.
Following the Crew-2 mission, ‘Endeavour' was recovered from the Gulf of Mexico on November 9, 2021 by GO Navigator. It was then taken to SpaceX’s Dragon Land–the place where SpaceX refurbishes Dragons.
This process took longer than usual due to the large amount of leaked urine, which was trapped under Dragon’s floor boards when the urine collection system leaked after a tube failure. To ensure this unforeseen problem doesn’t happen again, SpaceX switched to welding the tube instead of gluing it.
Besides the change to the waste management systems, the rest of the refurbishment was light: the critical main components of Dragon have held up very well.
The most notable upgrade made to the Dragon fleet is an upgraded SuperDraco abort system. The amount of propellent stored on the vehicle has increased, which allows for Crew Dragon to launch in stronger offshore winds, while ensuring the crew’s safety.
The propellant used in an emergency escape situation by the SuperDraco doubles as regular thrust propellant used by the 20 smaller maneuver Draco thrusters.
After the LZ1 pad explosion SpaceX also replaced parts of titanium in the SuperDraco with steel equivalent parts, further increasing the safety of the abort system.
SpaceX also strengthened part of Dragon’s structure allowing Dragon to withstand stronger secondary splashes. A secondary splash is the splash after the initial splashdown that could damage the vehicle under certain conditions.
To ensure Dragon does not get damaged, NASA and SpaceX have strict splashdown weather criteria, and by strengthening the structure of Dragon these criteria were re-evaluated, increasing the amount of acceptable splashdown conditions.
Where to land the Dragon?
The opportunity for Axiom Ax-1 to return to Earth will be determined by the weather conditions on these seven splashdown zones in and around Florida's waters.
7 hazard areas for landing Dragon C206-3 - Recovery Location 7 Jacsonville has been chosen
The SpaceX Axiom Ax-1 mission in the Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, is scheduled to end its journey to the ISS at 01:10 UTC on April 25, 2022
The Crew Dragon spacecraft will aim for a splashdown near Jacksonville, one of three targeted landing zones in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.
Endeavour in a 223 x 380 km orbit will after the trunk is jettisoned at 12:11 EDT - 16:11 UTC, perform its deorbit burn at 12:16 EDT - 16:16 UTC and close the nose hatch cover. Then Endeavour will reorient itself with its heat shield forward and enter the Earth's atmosphere at 17:06 UTC.
Four minutes before splashdown, the drogue parachutes will deploy at about 18,000 feet in altitude while Crew Dragon is moving approximately 350 miles per hour, and less than a minute later, the main parachutes deploy at about 6,000 feet in altitude while the spacecraft is moving approximately 119 miles per hour.
For normal crew rescue and recovery operations, the NASA and SpaceX teams select two primary splashdown locations from the seven possible locations about two weeks prior to return, with additional decision milestones taking place prior to crew boarding the spacecraft, during free flight, and before Crew Dragon performs a deorbit burn.
NASA and SpaceX closely coordinate with the U.S. Coast Guard to establish a 10-nautical-mile safety zone around the expected splashdown location to ensure safety for the public and for those involved in the recovery operations, as well as the crew aboard the returning spacecraft.
The SpaceX recovery fleet is up to the task again with a different LZ’s. We need more Marmac’s
For the return of Ax-1, SpaceX positioned Megan (formerly known as GO Searcher) off of the eastern coast of Florida near the primary Jacksonville landing zone. In the Gulf of Mexico, Shannon (formerly GO Navigator), was waiting near the Panama City and Tallahassee landing zones as a backup.
Two fast boats will be securing Axiom Ax-1 Dragon and ensuring the spacecraft is safe for the recovery effort. As the fast boat teams complete their work, the recovery ship crew will move into position to hoist Crew Dragon onto the main deck of the ship with the astronauts inside.
Once on the main deck, the crew will be taken out of the spacecraft and receive medical checks before a helicopter ride to shore.
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