Dragon 2 is a class of partially reusable spacecraft developed, manufactured, and operated by the American space company SpaceX for flights to the International Space Station (ISS) and private spaceflight missions. The spacecraft, which consists of a reusable space capsule and an expendable trunk module, has two variants: the 4-person Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon, a replacement for the Dragon 1 cargo capsule. The spacecraft launches atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, and the capsule returns to Earth through splashdown. Crew Dragon's primary role is to transport crews to and from the ISS under NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a task handled by the Space Shuttle until it was retired in 2011. It will be joined by Boeing's Starliner in this role when NASA certifies it. Crew Dragon is also used for commercial flights to ISS and other destinations and is expected to be used to transport people to and from Axiom Space's planned space station. Cargo Dragon brings cargo to the ISS under a Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract with NASA, a duty it shares with Northrop Grumman's Cygnus spacecraft. As of January 2025, it is the only reusable orbital cargo spacecraft in operation.
Development and variants There are two variants of Dragon 2: Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon. Crew Dragon was initially called "DragonRider" and it was intended from the beginning to support a crew of seven or a combination of crew and cargo. Earlier spacecraft had a berthing port and were berthed to ISS by ISS personnel. Dragon 2 instead has an IDSS-compatible docking port to dock to the International Docking Adapter ports on ISS. It is able to perform fully autonomous rendezvous and docking with manual override ability. For typical missions, Crew Dragon remains docked to the ISS for a nominal period of 180 days, but is designed to remain on the station for up to 210 days, matching the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Crew Dragon Crew Dragon is capable of autonomous operation. SpaceX and NASA state that it is capable of carrying seven astronauts, but in normal operations, it carries two to four crew members, and as of January 2025, has never carried more than four. Crew Dragon includes an integrated pusher launch escape system whose eight SuperDraco engines can push the capsule up and away from the launch vehicle in an emergency. SpaceX originally intended to use the SuperDraco engines to land Crew Dragon on land; parachutes and an ocean splashdown were envisioned for use only in the case of an aborted launch. Precision water landing under parachutes was proposed to NASA as "the baseline return and recovery approach for the first few flights" of Crew Dragon. However, propulsive landing was later cancelled, leaving ocean splashdown under parachutes as the only option. In 2012, SpaceX was in talks with Orbital Outfitters about developing space suits to wear during launch and re-entry. Each crew member wears a custom-fitted space suit that provides cooling inside the Dragon (IVA type suit) but can also protect its wearer in a rapid cabin depressurization. For the Demo-1 mission, a test dummy was fitted with the spacesuit and sensors. The spacesuit is made from Nomex, a fire-retardant fabric similar to Kevlar. The spacecraft's design was unveiled on May 29, 2014, during a press event at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. In October 2014, NASA selected the Dragon spacecraft as one of the candidates to fly American astronauts to the International Space Station, under the Commercial Crew Program. In March 2022, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters that "We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing". SpaceX later decided to build a fifth Crew Dragon capsule, to be available by 2024. SpaceX also manufactures a new expendable trunk for each flight. SpaceX's Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities (CCtCap) contract values each seat on a Crew Dragon flight to be around US$88 million, while the face value of each seat has been estimated by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to be around US$55 million. This contrasts with the 2014 Soyuz launch price of US$76 million per seat for NASA astronauts.
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