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SpaceX is going to cease production of its Crew Dragon human spaceflight capsule, capping its existing fleet at four.
The company's president Gwynne Shotwell confirmed the move in a statement to Reuters on Monday. She said SpaceX was in the process of finishing its final capsule, after which it would only be manufacturing components so that existing ones can be refurbished.
The move comes as SpaceX focuses on its Starship rocket—an upcoming spacecraft that is at the heart of SpaceX's ambitions of taking astronauts to the moon and Mars.
Though many prototypes have carried out test flights, Starship is yet to reach space and its enormous booster stage is yet to fly at all.
Crew Dragon, on the other hand, is flight-proven and has been instrumental in ending U.S. reliance on Russia to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
First Crewed U.S. Launch For Nearly a Decade
Crew Dragon first reached Earth orbit in March, 2019, on its Crew Dragon Demo-1 mission. It was the capsule's first flight test, launched atop one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 rockets.
The capsule successfully traveled to the ISS, docked, and undocked several days later before returning to Earth and parachuting into the Atlantic Ocean.
But it was the subsequent test flight, Demo-2, that raised the stakes and gripped the nation as it was the capsule's first manned flight. Crucially, it was also the first time in nearly a decade that U.S. astronauts had launched into space from U.S. soil.
On May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley climbed aboard a Crew Dragon capsule and launched to the ISS in a mission that served as demonstration of SpaceX's crew transportation system.
"A new era of human spaceflight begins as American astronauts once again launch on an American rocket from American soil to low-Earth orbit for the first time since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011," NASA wrote.
From the end of the Space Shuttle Program until that day, the U.S. had relied on Russia and its Soyuz capsules for ISS transport.
First All-Civilian Spaceflight
Crew Dragon broke another record in September 2021 when it launched an all-civilian crew into space for the first time ever as part of the Inspiration4 mission.
The crew consisted of Hayley Arceneaux, childhood cancer survivor and physician assistant; Jared Isaacman, billionaire and founder of payment processing company Shift4 Payments; Sian Proctor, geoscientist and science communicator; and Chris Sembroski, a data engineer and air force veteran.
The crew orbited Earth for about three days without a professional astronaut on board.
They safely returned to Earth by landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission ended up raising more than $243 million dollars for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Longest U.S. Orbit For Crewed Craft
In February last year, a Crew Dragon capsule broke the record for the longest time spent in space by a U.S. crew vehicle. It was also its first operational non-demo flight, called Crew-1.
The Crew Dragon capsule Resilience launched on November 15, 2020, atop a Falcon 9 rocket, linking up with the ISS the following day. Its crew disembarked and entered the ISS.
Some 84 days later, the capsule was still attached to the station, meaning it had broken a U.S. record previously set in 1974 by the Skylab 4 mission, in which three astronauts flew on an Apollo spacecraft to NASA's Skylab space station.
The record was beaten soundly, too. Overall the crew remained on the ISS for 167 days and spent 168 days in orbit in total. The capsule returned to Earth by splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico in May, 2021.
