SpaceX Dragon
reusable cargo spacecraft by SpaceX
Dragon is a family of spacecraft developed and produced by American public space transportation company SpaceX.
The first variant, later named Dragon 1, flew 23 cargo missions to the International Space Station (ISS) between 2010 and 2020 before retiring. Design of this version, not designed to carry astronauts, was funded by NASA with $396 million awarded through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program and contracted to ferry cargo under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program.
An improved version, the Dragon 2, was introduced in 2019 and has both crewed and cargo versions. The first un-crewed flight test (Demo-1) took place in March 2019, followed by a crewed flight test (Demo-2) in May 2020. Since those flight tests, the Crew Dragon has become one of the primary spacecraft ferrying crew to and from the ISS. The Cargo Dragon continues to carry cargo under the CRS program.
SpaceX has also proposed versions named Red Dragon for Mars exploration and Dragon XL to provide Gateway Logistics Services to the Lunar Gateway.
Name
SpaceX's CEO, Elon Musk, named the spacecraft after the 1963 song "Puff, the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul and Mary, reportedly as a response to critics who considered his spaceflight projects impossible. Early on, it had been named Magic Dragon, and t-shirts had been printed with this name. A crew capsule mockup model named "Magic Dragon" was also created to show to VIPs prior to program start. As late as September 2012, SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson was still referring to it as "The Magic Dragon, Puffed to the sea." That was his caption to a photo of the capsule several months after it had completed its COTS 2 demo flight where the spacecraft had accomplished its first docking with the ISS. This song, ostensibly composed for children, had long been associated with perceived references to smoking marijuana.
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This entry incorporates text from “SpaceX Dragon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.