Originally planned to fly the mission after
Crew-1, Crew Dragon C207 was reassigned to fly Crew-1 after an anomaly during a static fire test destroyed capsule
C204 intended to be re-flown on the
Crew Dragon In-Flight Abort Test. The spacecraft
C205 intended to be used on the
Demo-2 mission replaced the destroyed spacecraft for the in-flight abort test.
C206 intended for use with the Crew-1 mission, was reassigned to the Demo-2 mission. On 1 May 2020, SpaceX said that spacecraft C207 was in production and astronaut training underway. Crew Dragon C207 arrived at SpaceX processing facilities in Florida on 18 August 2020. At a NASA press conference on 29 September 2020, commander
Michael Hopkins revealed that C207 had been named
Resilience. The trunk was attached and secured to the capsule on 2 October 2020 at Cape Canaveral.
Resilience was first launched on 16 November 2020 (UTC) on a
Falcon 9 from the
Kennedy Space Center (KSC),
LC-39A, carrying NASA astronauts
Michael Hopkins,
Victor Glover, and
Shannon Walker, and
JAXA astronaut
Soichi Noguchi on a six-month mission to the International Space Station. The
docking adapter, normally used to dock with the International Space Station, was replaced by a
domed glass window for the
Inspiration4 mission. This allows for 360-degree views of space and the Earth, similar to those provided by the
Cupola Module on the
ISS. For
Polaris Dawn mission, as Crew Dragon capsules lack an
airlock, several modifications have been made to the interior of
Resilience. Extra nitrogen and oxygen tanks have been installed, a hatch with a ladder called the "skywalker" has replaced the
docking port, and the forward hatch has been motorized. To validate their procedures, Resilience underwent multiple cycles of venting and repressurization in a large vacuum chamber. The crew also spent two days in a chamber validating their pre-breathing protocol and wearing their EVA suits in a vacuum.The mission will also be the first crewed operational test of Dragon laser interlink communication via
Starlink. If successful, it would potentially decrease
communication latency and increase
data bandwidth for human spaceflight. On 1 April at 01:46 (
UTC),
Fram2 launched aboard a
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, becoming the first
crewed spaceflight to enter a
polar retrograde orbit, i.e., to fly over Earth's poles. For that mission the domed window was reinstalled. == Flights ==