Since 2020, SpaceX has been the leader in launching crews to space for NASA. However, NASA’s bet on turning its Commercial Crew Program winners into commercial options has paid off with several missions in the books or planned that are for entirely private customers. Here’s a list of every crewed flight from SpaceX and who flew on it.
Since 2020, SpaceX has launched 15 crewed flights to space, 10 for NASA and four for commercial customers.
SpaceX crewed launches at a glance
Number of crewed launches: 15 (NASA: 10, Commercial: 5)
Number of crew: 56 (Government: 41, Commercial: 15)
Destinations: ISS (13), LEO (2)
Dragons: 4 (Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, Freedom)
SpaceX’s continued dominance over Boeing
Boeing was always favored to be the unofficial winner of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. They were supposed to beat SpaceX to space by a long shot due to their decades of experience with the Shuttle and ISS. However, Boeing just recently got its first crewed test flight off the ground, and it ran into problems. SpaceX is so far ahead that Starliner’s future as a commercial competitor is not even talked about.
Since 2020, SpaceX has expanded its fleet of Crewed Dragon spacecraft from one to four and tallied up 10 missions. These flights included many firsts like Inspiration4, the first fully commercial spaceflight, and Axiom-1, the first fully commercial mission to the ISS. Several more Axiom flights are planned as well as commercial missions from Polaris, the successor of Inspiration4. Meanwhile, Boeing is just trying to complete its original NASA-paid flights.
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A prequel to crewed Starship flights
All of this looms beneath the shadow of a much larger program that would bring humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. This of course is known as Starship and is being developed currently down at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas. While the rocket has only launched once, and not very far, there is already a list of people getting ready to fly it to space.
The first will be Polaris. Currently, the focus of the Polaris Program is Polaris Dawn, a high-altitude Crewed Dragon flight that will test what SpaceX is capable of on its own. Later on in the program Polaris plans to perform the first crewed Starship mission. However, no details as to what that will look like are public.
A second mission was dearMoon, a flight around the Moon crewed by artist and musicians with a mission to inspire. However, Yusaku Maezawa canceled the mission in early 2024 due to development delays with Starship.
Starship has the ability to disrupt the launch service industry, when that will happen will be determined on the rocket’s development milestones. But every crew SpaceX launches on its own into space is experienced gained for its true goal, making life multi-planetary.
List of crewed SpaceX Dragon launches
| Dates (UTC) | Mission | Crew | Destination | Dragon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 30 – August 2, 2020 | DM-2 | Doug Hurley Bob Behken | ISS | Endeavour |
| November 16, 2020 – May 2, 2020 | Crew-1 | Micheal Hopkins Victor Glover Soichi Noguchi Shannon Walker | ISS | Resilience |
| April 23 – November 9, 2021 | Crew-2 | Shane Kimbrough Megan MuchArthur Akihiko Hoshide Thomas Pesquet | ISS | Endeavour |
| September 16 – 18, 2021 | Inspiration4 | Jared Issacman Sian Proctor Hayley Arcenaux Chris Sembroski | LEO | Resilience |
| November 11, 2021 – May 6, 2022 | Crew-3 | Raja Chari Robert Hines Matthias Maurer Kayla Barron | ISS | Endurance |
| April 8 – 25, 2022 | Axiom-1 | Micheal López-AlegrÃa Larry Connor Eytan Stibble Mark Pathy | ISS | Endeavour |
| April 27 – October 14, 2022 | Crew-4 | Kjell Lindgren Robert Hines Samatha Cristoforetti Jessica Watkins | ISS | Freedom |
| October 5, 2022 – March 12, 2023 | Crew-5 | Nicole Mann Josh Cassada Koichi Wakata Anna Kikina | ISS | Endurance |
| March 2 – September 4, 2023 | Crew-6 | Stephen Bowen Warren Hoburg Sultan Al Neyadi Andrey Fedyaev | ISS | Endeavour |
| May 21 – May 31, 2023 | Axiom-2 | Peggy Whitson John Shoffner Ali AlQarni Rayyanah Barnawi | ISS | Freedom |
| August 26, 2023 – March 12, 2024 | Crew-7 | Jasmin Moghbeli Andreas Mogensen Satoshi Furukawa Konstantin Borisov | ISS | Endurance |
| January 18 – February 9, 2024 | Axiom-3 | Michael López-AlegrÃa Walter Villadei Alper Gezeravcı Marcus Wandt | ISS | Freedom |
| March 4 – Current | Crew-8 | Matthew Dominick Michael Barratt Jeanette Epps Alexander Grebenkin | ISS | Endeavour |
| September 10 – 15 | Polaris Dawn | Jared Issacman Scott Poteet Sarah Gillis Anna Menon | LEO | Resilience |
| September 28 – Current | Crew-9 | Nick Hauge Aleksandr Gorbunov | ISS | Freedom |
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