NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Mission Overview

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission will take NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev to and from the International Space Station. Their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft “Freedom” launched at 5:15 a.m. EST Friday, Feb. 13 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the crew arrived at the space station on Saturday, Feb. 14 to kick off their long-duration science expedition. Learn more about this crew and their mission: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/nasas-spacex-crew-12/

What is said in the film

The purpose of Commercial Crew missions is to have an opportunity to launch astronauts to Low Earth Orbit and beyond from American soil. We want to have multiple ways of getting to and from the space station. The whole idea of launching on a commercial spacecraft is so that NASA, ESA, and the others can focus on further exploration. When Crew-12 launches to the International Space Station, our goal is to integrate with the crew that's already up there and be able to operate and maintain the space station. While we’re there, we're going to do all sorts of upgrades to the space station.

We're going to maintain current experiments, start new experiments. We do research on the International Space Station because it provides a very unique and novel environment that we cannot replicate here on Earth. Every experiment that we've ever done here on Earth has this omnipresent factor, this gravitational vector. So you can imagine if you remove a really large variable like that, there might be a wealth of anticipated outcomes, but there also may be some things that we don't know about. And that's the aspect of basic science that appeals to me so much, because the joy of science is these unexpected outcomes.

The ultimate goal is to really understand how the human body works in space, and how to build technologies that are more sustainable and more reliable for future exploration. All of the results from this research that we have can now be applied to an even more challenging environment, to understand more of what it's going to be like to live and work around the Moon, and hopefully soon on the surface of the Moon. The same is true for Mars. International cooperation is so important because space is really challenging. I think one of the great parts of the International Space Station is that we do it all together as a human race, as humanity pushing forward out into the stars.

It's like the ultimate potluck dinner. Everyone brings its signature dish, its own expertise, and then we're sharing and gathering, sharing resources, sharing knowledge, sharing scientific experiments. I think it's part of human nature that we use this exploration to make our lives better here at home, and then also satisfy that natural human curiosity to see what's over that next hill. If we didn't have this within us, this inherent capacity to look around the corner, to go further. We never would have even uncovered all of the continents or oceans on this planet.

It pushes us to imagine more, to find solutions. It is about exploration. It is about science. It is about all of these spinoffs and potential applications that we can bring back to everybody on Earth. Pushing the boundaries...

it’s kind of natural for me. Natural, I think, for a lot of people to want to see where we can go next and what is the next thing that we can develop. And for me, it's all about sharing this mission. It's not my mission or Crew-12's mission. It's really a mission for all of humanity and civilization, for our entire planet.

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