Success of SpaceX's Crew Dragon mission heralds new era in space

ON FRIDAY, the capsule of Crew Dragon, a spacecraft designed by SpaceX for manned space flight, successfully splashed down in the Atlantic after finishing its debut unmanned test flight. Xu Luyuan, a postdoctoral researcher of planetary geology at Macao University of Science and Technology, comments:

Many hail the success of the mission as giant progress for SpaceX, but it also marks a big step forward for human space exploration. Compared with the past manned space flights, Crew Dragon has made progress in several aspects.

In terms of safety, the recognized standard for space shuttles is that the loss of astronauts should be fewer than one person every 90 flights. The US space shuttles lost 14 in their 135 flights. The SpaceX spacecraft is widely expected by experts to meet that standard. For that purpose, it successfully tested its escape capsule as early as 2015, then completed thousands of hours of escape tests before making its maiden flight this month.