SpaceX’s final Crew Dragon to roll out of the factory floor has officially arrived at the International Space Station after a successful launch with the crew of Axiom-4. With that, it brings SpaceX’s total to five crew-capable Dragon spacecraft for government and commercial use.
Axiom arrives. Dragon Grace, serial number C213, lifted off from the historic LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center early Wednesday morning with the four-person crew of Axiom-4 inside. After several weeks of delays due to a leak on the Russian side of the ISS, NASA finally signed off on the launch. However, the agency has yet to update the public on the current status of the leak.
The crew of Axiom-4 is all made up of professional astronauts. Its commander, Peggy Whitson, is flying on behalf of Axiom, but the remaining three are all sponsored by their nation’s space programs. This is a drastic shift from Axiom-1’s mostly commercial nature.
Dragon Grace docked with the ISS Thursday morning at 6:31 A.M. ET, about 30 minutes early. The short-term crew of four will join the long-term crew of seven currently on the station, bringing the current number of ISS inhabitants to 11. In total, there are 14 people in space, including the three on China’s Tiangong space station.
The final Dragon. Almost since SpaceX‘s inception, the company has been working on and building Dragon spacecraft. It started with Dragon 1, a cargo spacecraft that was used for the first round of NASA Commercial Resupply Services contracts to the ISS. This work led to the development of a crew-rated version of the Dragon, called Crew Dragon, for the Commercial Crew Program. That later spun off the Dragon 2 vehicle, a cargo version of the new Dragon design.
For a few years now, we’ve known that SpaceX would be stopping production of the Crew Dragon spacecraft around this number, given current demand and the expectations of Starship replacing it long-term.
Coincidentally, the launch of SpaceX’s final brand-new Crew Dragon lined up with a recent spat between Elon Musk and President Trump, where Musk briefly stated he would decommission the Dragon spacecraft. This is obviously not happening, and the ending of Dragon’s production has been planned for many years now.
What’s next? For SpaceX, it plans to eventually crew-rate its Starship launch vehicle. While right now the vehicle’s development program has hit a rough patch with three incomplete flights and the loss of another vehicle on the test stand, the company still believes Starship is its rocket of choice for everything.
The fully reusable rocket could be used for LEO, lunar, and eventually Martian crewed missions with enough refuelings from tankers. SpaceX has also talked about using Starship for point-to-point flights around Earth, competing directly with the airline industry.
However, SpaceX officials have stated that at least 100 successful flights are needed before even thinking about launching a crew. That could be an arbitrary number, but it shows how much experience SpaceX wants first with Starship before humans step on board.
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