Boeing was competing with SpaceX for a private ride to the International Space Station (ISS). The suspense lasted until May 2020, when SpaceX successfully completed the first crewed flight of its Dragon capsule. Four years later, Boeing’s Starliner capsule continues to drag its feet. Its first crewed flight, scheduled for early May, then mid-May, then last Saturday, is now set to take place this Wednesday. Boeing’s problems with its airliners have raised many doubts about Starliner. Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk will oversee the mission from Houston.
Starship’s fourth flight is also expected to take place this week, from Texas. After two explosions before reaching orbit in 2023, SpaceX’s giant rocket experienced relative success last March, only the re-entry into the atmosphere having been a failure. Elon Musk now wants to prove that his “failure-success” approach is the right one to explore the cosmos in an affordable way. In recent weeks, astrophysicists have proposed that Starship could be used to bring Mars samples gleaned by the Perseverance rover back to Earth. And an Artemis lunar program based solely on Starship is also mentioned.
The Chinese lunar probe Chang’e 6 landed on the far side of the Moon in early June. This is the second Chinese mission to land there – no other nation has set foot there. The objective of Chang’e 6 is to bring back lunar samples, which could notably explain why 1% of the far side is made up of volcanic plains covering 31% of the visible side of the Earth. In early May, NASA chief Bill Nelson expressed concern that China was laying claim to the Moon’s resources, including its water, with its exploration program expected to culminate with a human mission by the end of the decade .
The first private space shuttle, Dream Chaser, is expected to make its first orbital flight this summer. Financed by the American Department of Defense, it will not be habitable. This is not the only space shuttle tested in orbit. The American and Chinese armies have been testing their X-37 and Shenlong shuttles respectively since 2010 and 2020. X-37’s sixth flight, which set a record 908 days, ended in 2022. Meanwhile, the Middle Kingdom made headlines with mysterious tests of the third Shenlong (divine dragon) flight this spring.
Since 2021, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule has been used for private manned missions. During the summer, tech billionaire Jared Isaacman will use it for the first private spacewalk, as part of the Polaris Dawn mission. The Polaris program plans two other private missions and signed a non-financial agreement with NASA in 2022 to explore the possibility of a Polaris mission saving the Hubble Space Telescope. Launched in 1990, it is expected to die in less than 10 years. The last Hubble upgrade mission, with the Space Shuttle Atlantis, was in 2009.