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So when seeing this I had two questions, one of which I've found the answer to, one of which still remains a mystery. 1. Why only two astronauts? and 2. How m

• ape4 6y ago
  Minimum number of astronauts in case of disaster
• hoorayimhelping 6y ago
  >Why not 4 astronauts? You've been in the teamwork game a long time, right? You know that each new team member added to a team does something like double or quadruple communication overhead. They're trying to work out the kinks - they're going to with a small team of experienced people to stay focused. There's probably also a limit to how many people they want to keep track of on ISS, like you said. It's also less risky like you said - you need two people in case one gets incapacitated, and also for psychological support, but you don't want to risk any more people on the maiden voyage than you have to. >Compared to Soyuz [4], which cost NASA $80m/astronaut, that's a saving but not as much as I would've thought. There's more to it than costs. We now have the agency to launch as many astronauts as we want, when we want, rather than filling in a vacant seat the Russians have. Something not considered in just costs is we can also charge other nations for rides on our rockets, and as long as it's less than $80m, we'll make profits and it'll be a win for those nations who'd normally ride on Soyuz.
  • walshemj 6y ago
    Reduces risk for the first flight
• InTheArena 6y ago
  Edited - wrong number of seats for the next mission. NASA asked SpaceX to change the configuration of the capsule to only support 4 astronauts for two reasons. The first is that they wanted a more mellow Load profile on the passengers in the case of a high-altitude (almost orbit) abort, so they wanted the seats in a different position. The first design had the seats fixed, and the screen pivoting down above them. This design has the seats pivoting, and the screen fixed. It also drops the maximum crew from 7 to 4. I’m not sure if SpaceX will use the larger configuration for their own private configurations. The other reason is that seven is a lot, and NASA doesn’t plan on sending that many up on a single mission. Seats 1 and four are empty on this mission. For future missions that only have three they will remove the extra seat. That said, the capsule seems amazingly spacious, for being a capsule. As far as costing, the contract was written similar to how NASA pays the Russians (though that number is upwards of 87 million per seat right now). SpaceX itself owns the rockets and the spacecraft - not NASA. Think of it as a airline seat. Finally, the vast majority of cost at this point are not the hardware - but rather the cost of complying with NASA’s testing. Everyone was assuming that NASA would do what they did with commercial cargo, and simply expect the cargo to show up with a minimal number of design reviews. With commercial crew, NASA took a much more proactive approach which led to a complete redesign of the capsule (SpaceX’s original plan was simply to reuse cargo), plus many many many design reviews. Finally SpaceX has full pricing control right now. SpaceX is running some pretty massive margins (from what I have heard) on everything - but they are flushing all of that money into the goal of getting starship and spaceship and their insane next generation engine up, as well as starlink. They have deliberately only lowered their costs below their competitors, soaking margin for a while.
  • _Microft 6y ago
    Crew-1 is flying four astronauts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USCV-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USCV-1
  • samcat116 6y ago
    They're also able to bring a decent amount of cargo with them with only the four seats.
• blueblisters 6y ago
  Yeah the per astronaut cost will still keep human spaceflight an R&D and tourism project. I, for one, was hoping we would get to see some things being done in space that are currently too expensive on earth (like superclean vacuums) or need microgravity.