So you want to go to space. Of course you do. And luckily
for us, human space flight is finally becoming accessible to people outside the elite
ranks of the astronauts. This is almost entirely thanks to the revolutionary vehicle that
is the SpaceX Crew Dragon. There has never before been an easier, more
convenient, or cheaper way to put human beings into outer space, and I
mean real space, not that virgin blue origin little hop over the line of
technicality. We are going to orbit, friends, and this is what it's
going to be like. This is the space race. Let's meet our chariot
to the gods. The SpaceX Dragon Capsule. This goes back to the very
early days of SpaceX and was one of the first products they developed, alongside
the Falcon nine. Version one of the Dragon capsule began operation in twenty ten
as a supply ship for the ISS and flew twenty three cargo missions over ten
years. This proven success and reliability led space to develop Dragon two in twenty
fourteen with support from the NASA Commercial Crew Program. Dragon two completed its first
demo flight in twenty nineteen, and on May thirtieth, twenty twenty, became
the first American rocket to fly a crew into orbit since the Space Shuttle.
Actually, Dragon was the first US made crew rated space capsule since the Apollo
program, so this was a much needed vehicle. Unlike those old Apollo capsules
that were cramped industrial and confronted astronauts with a dashboard full of esoteric lights,
switches, and meters that they could never fully understand, the Dragon is sleek
and modern both inside and out. The capsule itself is sixteen feet tall by
thirteen feet wide, and it sits on top of the trunk section, which
adds another twelve feet in length. This is the main source of power for
the Dragon and also serves as a literal trunk for unpressurized cargo. The Dragon
has one mechanical hatch located in the tip of the nose cone that reveals either
a docking port or a cupula window depending on the mission profile, and one
side door for the crew to enter and exit while on Earth. The exterior
of the Dragon is painted in SpaceX white and is perfectly smooth, revealing only
a couple of small windows and the various thruster ports. There are two kinds
of propulsion on the Dragon, Draco thrusters, are grouped into small clusters all
around the capsule with nozzles pointing out at different angles. There are sixteen of
them in total, and this is how SpaceX maneuvers the vehicle and controls orbital
altitude. Each thruster is a tiny rocket engine that uses hypergolic propellant, which
means two chemicals that self combust on contact are combined in the thrust chamber to
generate force. SuperDracos are the capsule's main engines. They are concealed inside the
four large ridges that surround the Dragon, with two engines per ridge. These
are high thrust, hypergolic rocket engines that are around two hundred times more powerful
than the maneuvering thrusters. Super Draco's are also capable of deep throttling control.
SpaceX had originally experimented with the idea of using these engines for a propulsive landing
of the Dragon capsule, but ended up scrapping that in favor of the more
tried and true parachute ocean landing. Now, ideally, we don't want to
see these super Draco engines in action during our flight. These are abort system
engines and their only job is to get the crew as far away from the
rocket booster as fast as possible before something explodes. This is why the trunk
section is fitted with aerodynamic fins. They obviously don't serve any purpose in space,
and the Falcon nine doesn't need them for launch. Those fins are to
keep the Dragon stable in the event that it has to fly through the air
on its own. Inside the Dragon is where things get even more unconventional.
The interior volume is huge by space capsule standards, with nine point three cubic
meters of pressurized volume, and can seat four passengers comfortably. By comparison,
the currently used Russian so used vehicle has just around four cubic meters of habitable
space in its descent module and carries three people max. Ahead of the crew
is a simple layout of three large touch screen monitors and that's it. No
analog controls, and that's because, as a modern spacecraft, Dragon flies fully
autonomously, and if there is any need for manual input, it's done remotely
by the ground crew, not the passengers. This makes perfect sense, but
even the Boeing Starliner that was developed at the same time as the crew Dragon
still has a giant panel of buttons switches and levers, so dragon is still
very unique. Okay, so we know our vehicle. Now we need to
prepare for launch. It's time to suit up. Each SpaceX crew member is
going to receive their own custom tailored pressure suits and three D printed helmet.
The suit is designed to maintain an earthlike condition on the inside, even in
a total vacuum, so that means breathable air, stable temperature, and most
importantly, an atmospheric pressure comparable to Earth's sea level. Obviously, we don't
want to suffocate, but a pressure loss is a definite worst case scenario because
a lowered ambient pressure will lower the boiling point of water and eventually your blood
will start to vaporize inside your body. So let's not do that. Just
like those super Draco engines, we don't want to actually see these pressure suits
do their job because that means something has gone terribly wrong, but we are
happy to have them just in case. Unlike previous flight suits that were bulky
and modular, the SpaceX one is thin, flexible, and all one piece,
so you just unzip the en sam of the pants and kind of go
in from the bottom. All of your communication systems and vital signs monitoring is
going to be built into the flight helmet. On the day of the launch,
things are going to happen pretty fast. At three hours prior to launch,
we begin to suit up in the NASA Space Flight Center and get a
final technical briefing before the main event. The crew of four, outfitted in
flight suits, are then ferried to the launch site in a fleet of Tesla
Model xsuvs. The Falcon wing side doors make it incredibly easy to hop in
and out with the suit on. Around one hour prior to launch, we
take an elevator up two hundred and fifty five feet to the crew access arm
of the launch tower. At the top there's a landline telephone if you want
to say any final words to friends and family, just a reminder that flying
to space on a rocket is an incredibly dangerous activity. Next, we traverse
the walkway to the awaiting dragon. The ground crew helps us in through the
capsule's side door and secure us down to the seats. The heels of your
boots have a clip that secures your legs into the floor so they don't jostle
around during launch. The life support tether from your chair plugs into a port
on the five of your flight suit, and this allows a flow of cooled
nitrogen and oxygen to move through your suit, maintaining temperature and air quality.
At this point, the flight suit is fully integrated with the Dragon capsule.
The onboard computer is monitoring your vital signs and providing a customized life support experience.
It's all quite luxurious. At a round T minus forty five minutes,
the ground crew is going to bid us all farewell and seal the capsule.
Then the crew access arm will retract. Once the arm is clear, we
are going into final countdown. Prep visors down on the helmets and secured into
the seats. We need to arm the launch escape system. This is one
of the very few operations that has to be done from within the capsule.
We are going to hear a very loud thump as the hypergolic fuel tanks are
primed for the super Draco engines. If SpaceX detects any kind of anomaly in
the Falcon nine booster on ascent, then those eight engines will fire up to
sixteen thousand pounds of thrust per nozzle in about one hundred milliseconds, and that
is going to propel the Dragon away from the rocket at a blistering speed.
It's not going to be fun, but the Dragon will travel about half a
mile in just seven seconds. Next up, we are going to begin propellant
loading of the Falcon nine. This is unique for SpaceX to fuel the rocket
with the crew on board. Typically it's done the other way around, but
there are only two other crew rated rockets in the world right now, so
what's typical From the cockpit, We're actually going to be able to hear the
valves opening and the ultra chilled propellant flowing through the rocket. It's supposedly like
a fluttering sound and a low hum. In the meantime, we have our
three display screens that provide all of the information about the rocket and the status
of the flight plan, basically everything that you normally see on a SpaceX live
stream, plus even more technical data. And then there's the final countdown and
liftoff. The nine Merlin engines at the base of the Block five Falcon booster
are going to generate about one point eight million pounds of thrust. After just
thirty seconds, the rocket will be traveling five hundred kilometers per hour at an
altitude of two kilometers above sea level. One minute into the flight, the
rocket will break the sound barrier and reach supersonic speed. Assuming everything goes smooth
and we don't need to abort. The next major event comes at around two
minutes and thirty skins with a booster engines cut off and we have the first
stage separation. Now we are moving at over six thousand kilometers per hour at
an altitude of over eighty kilometers, and the upper stage vacuum engine has kicked
on to bring us to orbital velocity. Around nine minutes into flight, we
reach twenty seven thousand kilometers per hour in two hundred kilometers of altitude. The
second engine has done its job and shuts down. We are now experiencing zero
g's and that should be indicated by a floating stuffed animal in the capsule,
assuming we have good orbital insertion. At around twelve minutes, the second stage
will separate from the dragon and we are simply coasting in space, circling the
Earth. After fifteen minutes, we can go visors up and unbuckle from the
seats to begin free floating in the capsule. At this point, the flight
suits are no longer needed. Thankfully, we're through the most dangerous period for
now. At this point, we are looking at one of two mission profiles.
If we are on our way to the ISS, then it's going to
take about one day for the capsule to slowly move into a rendezvous trajectory to
meet the station and dock. In this case, we are going to manually
unwind the nosecone cap to reveal a docking port that will use to transfer into
the ISS. But that's not all the Dragon capsule is being used for these
days, we could be some of the lucky few who have taken this vehicle
out for a pleasure cruise through low Earth orbit, much like the inspiration for
Crew as seen in the Netflix documentary series. That mission profile spends around three
days in orbit, and since the docking port is not going to be necessary,
SpaceX outfits the Dragon with a cupula window that is revealed underneath the nose
cone, and it's a glass dome that you can fit your whole head inside
and see the entire perimeter of the Earth all at the same time. All
Right, Eventually someone's going to have to use the space toilet, so let's
talk about it. Luckily, this is something that has gotten a lot more
dignified over the history of human spaceflight. Alan Shepard, the first American in
space, had to pee his own pants in the Mercury capsule. This evolved
into a tube that the astronauts would stick their junk into. They were only
sending dudes to space back then, and as longer duration space flight became a
thing, astronauts were issued a sack for their Yeah. Anyway, that's now
evolved into a vacuum suction powered toilet that was first installed on the Space Shuttle
and is also used on the ISS. The Dragon has one too. It's
just above the side door, kind of in the ceiling. From the cruise
perspective, the unit is kind of sewed away in an alcove built into the
wall. It's basically a collection of fans, valves, suction hoses, dehumidifiers,
and storage tanks. You also do get a curtain for privacy. Apparently,
the zero G environment has a pretty immediate and unpredictable effect on your body
systems, and astronauts have reported that everybody ends up using the space toilet within
a couple of hours into the flight, so you can't just hold it.
Okay, So we've either completed our stay on the ISS or enjoyed a couple
of days soaring high above the world as space tourists. Either way, we
need to get back down. There are seven potential landing sites along the Florida
coast, either in the Gulf of Mexico or the open Atlantic Ocean. The
ground crew is going to determine which landing site is the most optimal according to
weather conditions and other safety factors. The SpaceX team at mission Control is going
to begin to gradually move the Dragon into its final orbital trajectory, basically just
steadily dropping the parage, which is the lowest altitude of each orbit, until
the Dragon is on course to re enter the atmosphere. This is where things
get dangerous again, so it's suits on, visors down and strapped in for
the ride. When all systems are go, the Dragon capsule is going to
separate from the trunk module and the Draco thrusters will fire to point the heat
shield down towards the Earth and set the final approach angle. From here,
the Draco thruster can still autonomously make small adjustments to our trajectory as we fall.
Worst of all, the communication system is going to go dead for seven
minutes through the most intense period of re entry, so if anything goes wrong,
we won't have any warning about it. We will just explode, not
that we could really do anything about it anyway. The capsule is going to
come in at a speed of around twenty eight thousand kilometers per hour, and
that is going to impact the air with so much force that the gases will
compress and combust into screaming hot plasma reaching around nineteen hundred degrees celsius. The
heat shield tires are absorbing that energy and then partially vaporized. This is what's
called an a blade of heat shield. By having the outer layer of the
tiles purposefully erode away, they are moving heat build up away from the capsule.
We are going to remain at a pretty comfortable temperature inside the flight suit
with the capsule life support system flowing cooled air through the umbilical connection that is
then distributed throughout the suit. The resistance from the atmosphere is going to slow
the dragon down to just five hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, which is
going to exert a force of between four and five times the force of Earth's
gravity on the crew inside. We are going down back first, so it's
not going to feel like whiplash in a car, will be pushed into the
seat, just like at liftoffs. Once the fire has dissipated, the communication
system is going to come back online and the ground crew is going to let
us know to prepare for shoot deployment. First two drug shoots go for the
initial slowdown, and those are followed by four main shoots, and that brings
the speed down to just twenty four kilometers per hour before splashdown. Once in
the water, we are going to be met by a SpaceX crew on a
barred ship. They're going to get the capsule hooked up to a crane and
lifted on deck. At this point, the pristine white paint on the Dragon
is going to be charred into different shades of gray and black. But we
are going to be safe and comfortable inside as we wait for the all clear
to open the hatch. Before they can get us out, the crew has
to plug all of the draco thruster nozzles. The hypergolic fuel is incredibly toxic
and we want to make sure that no one gets a faceful of vapor,
so the ship's crew are all wearing respirator masks. During this onboarding procedure.
Once we're sure that the toxic gas has dissipated, then the capsule slides over
the egress platform and the side door gets popped open. From there, the
crew is assisted as they awkwardly have to crawl and slide out of the capsule.
Depending on how long we were just in space, we may or may
not be able to walk with some assistance to keep our balance. And that's
it. We just went to space and back again. From here, the
Dragon is going to be fully refurbished so that the capsule can do the whole
process all over again. And that is what life inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule
is like.