The recent launch of Crew Dragon has four people on board. Is that number a record number for any spacecraft other than the Shuttle? I can’t recall any other launch with more than three on board.
I don’t think I’d use the word “record” when it has to exclude the shuttle, but it’s a solid second place.
Well there was Sputnik 5 with a crew of 2 dogs, a rabbit, 40 mice, 2 rats, and 15 flasks of fruit flies.
Thanks @Telemark, that confirms my memory. It seems the maximum crew for Crew Dragon is seven, which is also the most ever launched by the Shuttle.
The capsule for Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket can take up to six people, although they haven’t launched anyone yet. But that’s suborbital and I don’t know if they have any plans to launch it into orbit on New Glenn. Probably do, though.
Hmm, wikipedia does not mention the rabbit or fruit flies. But I’ll take your word for it. Ignoring the latter, that’s a crew of 45 mammals. Gonna be hard to beat that.
They weren’t crew; they were passengers.
They did launch with eight on one occasion, STS-61-A in 1985. Also, on STS-71 in 1995 they launched with seven and visited the Russian space station Mir where they dropped off two crewmen and picked up three. So they returned from orbit with eight people all together.
It makes complete sense of course.
But given how few people were/are orbiting the Earth, the idea of a spacecraft returning with more people than it took off with somehow really cues my Twilight Zone eery music. Are we sure Major Tom isn’t a shape-shifting Alien? Like you-bet-your-planet sure? Weeee-oooh Weeee-oooh!
Eh, is there really a distinction on spacecraft? The current Crew Dragon is running on FSD[*], so its crew are technically all passengers. But they still have titles of Commander, Pilot, and Mission Specialist.
[*] FSD = Full Self Drive
Maybe a hitchhiker or a stowaway.
So what title did the rabbit have? How about the mayflies? What were their duties in the event of an emergency? Did they all file mission reports upon completion?
The latest Crew Dragon launch has five passengers, of course:
Hopefully there are no throttle knobs to unscrew.
Definitely not a stowaway. Everyone knows that it’s impossible to land a spacecraft with a stowaway aboard: You have to kill and jettison her to make the equations work.
Chief Martian Frustrator.[*]
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[*] Ehhh, What’s up Doc?
The current Crew Dragon lands on parachutes, which aren’t too sensitive to extra mass (a modest amount just results in a slightly harder landing). However, the original proposals used a powered landing, which is highly mass-sensitive. There’s no way around the rocket equation. That said, there would have been enough spare margin for a typical stowaway, plus the parachutes were always there as a backup.
Tangentially, the Dragon capsules always had excellent downmass capability. The cargo Dragon was a big improvement over Soyuz in that regard, and allowed bringing massive experiments back.
You may not have heard of this story, but Chronos was referencing an old (but I thought fairly well known) SF story called “The Cold Equations”. In it, someone stows away on a spaceship. The ship’s fuel is closely matched to its expected journey so that it can’t make it to its destination with the extra weight. So the pilot is forced to eject her from the ship.
I’m well aware of the story, and participated in one of our old threads on it, where a few people seemed not to like the idea that physics trumps all. While the setup of the story is fairly contrived, the reality is that the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation does put a hard limit on how much delta-V you get with a particular mass ratio, and no amount of wishful thinking can get around that.
Parachutes are a little different though. Exceed the design mass and you touch down a little faster than intended, and run a risk of them tearing apart. There’s an element of “luck” not present with powered landings.
Yeah I figured you probably knew about the story, but just wanted to make sure. Also, there are likely others who aren’t familiar with it.
And with current rockets, stowaways would cause problems long before fuel would be an issue. The rocket would be out of balance on takeoff and the whole launch would likely go wrong. But this is the wrong thread to discuss that story, since there’s already one out there.
Yep. Nice reference by Chronos in any case.
Getting back to the OP, I do wonder if SpaceX will ever launch seven on the Dragon. I’m certain they will never do so for NASA; the agreement there was for four, and with the cargo configuration they weren’t able to get seven in there without exceeding some gee limits. But that’s not an issue for commercial flights, and so they might be able to hit the original target in that case. Plus there’s a bit more of an interest in reducing the per-seat cost for commercial flights.
Richard Nixon Apollo 11 Contingency Speech #4:
Xkcd 1484
Sometimes you have to do the same thing to surface your submarine. Or at least you think you do.
All true. Sorta.
Physics puts hard limits on all these things, including parachute aerodynamic performance, landing impact shock absorber performance, etc., etc. Exceed any of them and Mother Nature will make you her bitch.
The big difference IMO is we can afford (in both dollar budget and mass budget) to overbuild e.g. parachutes. Not so fuel tanks and fuel supplies. So any given unplanned-for overage is far more likely to be critical on fuel planned to the gnat’s ass than on parachutes with 150+% safety margins plugged in.
Scale matters too. An extra human aboard e.g. Apollo 11 at launch might have become a real big deal by the time they got near the Moon. An extra human aboard a SpaceX Starship lofting a 100 metric ton payload to LEO? Totally lost in the sauce of random variation in engine performance.
Not sure 7 is anything but Muskian wishful thinking. Not that Starliner is any better.
The Apollo CSM could carry 5 and the Skylab rescue (never flown thankfully) was configured for it.