NASA and its international partners named four astronauts to team a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station in spring 2021 — augmenting staffing on board the orbiting laboratory.

The group, all veterans of past ISS missions, will incorporate Akihiko Hoshide with Japan’s JAXA space organization, Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency and NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur — who two months prior watched her husband Robert Behnken co-pilot the first-ever crewed flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.

Putting four astronauts on SpaceX’s spring 2021 mission, dubbed Crew-2, will bring the quantity of individuals staffing the ISS to seven, permitting “NASA to effectively double the amount of science that can be conducted in space,” the office said Tuesday.

Five individuals are as of now ready the ISS: Two Russian cosmonauts and NASA’s Chris Cassidy, Douglas Hurley, and Behnken, The last two showed up at the space station in May in the wake of directing SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on its historic journey. It denoted the first time in history that a commercial vehicle conveyed people into space and the first manned launch from US soil since NASA’s Space Shuttle retired in 2011.

Be that as it may, that mission isn’t over yet. Behnken and Hurley are relied upon to get back from the ISS when this end of the week, and their protected return could allow the Crew Dragon vehicle official certification as a human-worthy rocket. What’s more, that will make ready for a Crew Dragon capsule to be propelled on its first completely operational mission to the space station, Crew-1, which is scheduled for late September.

NASA has trusted that years will recover the ability to fly its own astronauts to and from the space station. After the Shuttle program finished, the space organization needed to depend on Russia’s Soyuz vehicles to ship NASA teams to the ISS, and the United States has paid Russia as much as $90 million for every seat for those trips.