Crew Dragon astronauts will obtain a uncommon area medal from the White Home

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris will award Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken with the Congressional Medal of Honor in Area. Former NASA astronauts launched on the debut flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in Might 2020.

Hurley, the spacecraft’s commander, and Behnken, its pilot, will obtain the Medal of Valor displayed through the Demo 2 mission to the Worldwide Area Station. Their debut mission was a whole success, and since that groundbreaking flight, NASA has flown 5 operational missions aboard Crew Dragon, in addition to two personal area flights.

The Crew Dragon mission has offered NASA with the one option to get to the area station aside from Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, sparing the area company the embarrassment of getting to depend on Russia for that transport amid escalating tensions over the battle in Ukraine.

Exterior of area circles, the Area Medal is not a very well-known honor, particularly because it hasn’t been awarded in practically twenty years. Nonetheless, the medal is prestigious and is usually solely given to astronauts who’ve died throughout spaceflight.

For greater than 4 many years, the Congressional Area Medal of Honor was simply rewarded as much as 28 astronauts. Of those, 17 have been posthumously given to the crews of the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia spaceships.

The US Congress licensed the president to award the medal to “any astronaut who, within the efficiency of his duties, distinguished himself solely by benefit and contribution to the well-being of the nation and humanity.”

President Carter introduced the primary awards to Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad; Gus Grissom of Gemini; and Alan Shepard and John Glenn of Mercury in 1978. When not awarded posthumously, the award went to pioneers comparable to Shannon Lucid, who made a long-duration spaceflight aboard the Mir area station, or to astronauts who have been the primary to fly new automobiles. comparable to John Younger and Robert Crippen on the area shuttle.

Over the following two years, further astronauts will pioneer new spacecraft and should develop into eligible for the medal.

Later this spring, as early as April, Butch Willmore and Suni Williams will make the primary crewed launch of a Boeing Starliner spacecraft to the area station. Then, probably in late 2024 or early 2025, 4 astronauts will fly aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft across the moon. These 4 crew members for the Artemis II mission, which is predicted to incorporate a Canadian astronaut, are prone to be named this spring.