NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 Mission Overview

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission will carry NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin of Roscosmos to the International Space Station. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft will launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the company’s eighth crew rotation mission for NASA. Learn more about the crew and mission: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/nasas-spacex-crew-8/

What is said in the film

I view Crew-8 like an Olympic torch bearer. Each nation that host the Olympics has, you know, these torchbearers that go along and they... you know, they make a scene of it and they... each person passes the torch and lights the torch and passes it on to the next person. And that's where I see Crew-8.

We are keeping the flame of human presence in low Earth orbit alive by going up there, maintaining the space station, continuing to do science. Well, the International Space Station is by far the largest laboratory that we've ever had in flight, obviously the largest human made structure in low Earth orbit. So whatever we can do in space to look at different types of materials, to look at ourselves without the force of gravity to discover its true nature, we can develop better countermeasures back here on Earth. You know, the International Space Station, as capable as it is, becomes like a low-Earth orbit wind tunnel, if you will. It gives us a platform to test things before we venture away from low Earth orbit towards the moon and eventually long transits towards Mars and eventually to asteroids.

It’s work having to do with various scientific components. It's material science, it's biology. So there's a vast spectrum of tasks that we address while we stay on the station. Each individual will be an experiment in and of themselves. How our cells behave, how our blood changes, how our bone density changes, muscle mass.

We're looking at everything to figure out countermeasures for the human body so that it can live longer and longer outside the Earth's protection. Working and training with Crew-8 is absolutely awesome. We have a diverse group of academic and intellectual backgrounds that come together and also an international component. We are four, I would say, almost as different personalities as you could possibly imagine. Working on this flight, we work really well as a team and we're ready to go.

The chemistry we've kind of developed I think is really quite magic. This mission has brought us together in a way that I don't think any other circumstances ever would. The ISIS is, I would say, a very critical stepping stone in human exploration beyond low earth orbit. Every time we launch four more people to space, we're building our sample size and our understanding of the human body and the things that happen to it in a zero gravity environment. That sets us up to go to the Moon.

It sets us up to go to Mars. So for us, we are just carrying that torch to go increase that sample size and be a part of the team that moves human knowledge of space travel further.

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