Max Q: Oh my gourd

Hello and welcome Max Q. Will each October issue have a Halloween/Fall pun as the title? I WILL NEVER SAY IT. In this issue:

Takeoff for Crew-5 Russia's thoughts on the ISS News from Firefly, TK and more

By the way… We're just over ONE WEEK away from TechCrunch Disrupt, which returns live and in person to San Francisco October 18-20. Use this link to get 15% off passes (excluding online and exhibition).

SpaceX continues to set the industry standard for launch cadence, successfully completing three separate missions in the space of five days. The first was Crew-5 on Wednesday (more details below), followed by a Starlink mission just eight hours later. To top it off, it launched two satellites for Intelsat on Thursday evening.

Crew-5 was a milestone for a number of reasons. The mission (so named because it is SpaceX's fifth crewed mission with NASA's Commercial Crew Program) lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The four-person crew - which includes American astronauts Nicole Mann, mission commander, and Josh Cassada, mission pilot; JAXA Astronaut Koichi Wakata, Mission Specialist; and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, mission specialist – travel to the station in a Crew Dragon dubbed “Endurance”. It separated from the Falcon 9 rocket shortly after launch and arrived at the station on Thursday.

SpaceX has now sent 30 humans into space on eight human spaceflight missions. It is also the first time a cosmonaut has flown on a SpaceX Crew Dragon and the first time a cosmonaut has flown on a US spacecraft since 2002. Cosmonaut Kikina's place on the spacecraft is part of a recent agreement transporting astronauts between the United States and Russia. . US astronaut Francisco Rubio flew to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz last month as part of the deal.

Looking ahead, SpaceX's next CCP mission, Crew-6, will launch in February next year. The Ax-2 mission, Axiom Space's second private mission to the ISS, will follow in May.

Image credits: SpaceX

Russia is having internal discussions about continuing its participation in the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2024, despite statements made earlier this summer that the country will withdraw of the station's program by the middle of the decade.

Sergei Krikalev, head of manned space programs at Roscosmos, said on Monday that the Russian space agency is in talks to expand its "participation in the ISS program with our government and hopes to have permission to continue next year." < /p>

The about-face comes just months after Roscosmos director Yuri Borisov announced Russia's plans to leave the station after 2024 and instead build its own station in orbit. The ISS is operated in partnership between the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. America has committed to operate the station until 2030.

However, Krikalev admitted that a new Russian station might not be ready by 2025. "We know that won't happen very [quickly], so we'll probably keep flying [on the ISS] until we have new infrastructure that will allow us to ensure a continued human presence in low Earth orbit,” he said.