A SpaceX astronaut family: Megan McArthur is about to pilot the spaceship her husband, Bob Behnken, flew last year
Megan McArthur is about to pilot the SpaceX spaceship that her husband, Bob Behnken, flew last year.
Together, the married astronauts are raising a son, Theo, and flying commercial missions for NASA.
Their last year has involved astronaut training, rocket launches, and calls to the space station.
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Last spring, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Megan McArthur took their son to see SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launch cargo to the International Space Station. They wanted him to feel the rumble of the rocket’s engines, hear its roar, and follow it out of view — before either of them were on board.
“He could watch a big rocket launch with both mom and dad there, and we could talk to him about it,” McArthur recently told reporters in a call.
Soon thereafter, Theo, who was 6 years old at the time, waved goodbye to his dad, and Behnken climbed into SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship to pilot the world’s first crewed commercial spacecraft. That demonstration mission carried Behnken and his crewmate, astronaut Doug Hurley, to the ISS in May, where they stayed for nine weeks.
Now, McArthur is preparing to pilot that same spaceship on a mission called Crew-2 — SpaceX’s second routine astronaut flight — which is set to launch on Thursday. It’s literally the same capsule, refurbished. Behnken and Hurley named it Endeavour, after the last Space Shuttle.
Getting assigned to the Endeavour was “a neat surprise, and kind of a fun twist on the whole thing,” McArthur said. “I’m going to launch in the same seat. So that is kind of a fun thing that we can share, you know, I can tease him and say, ‘Hey, Can you hand over the keys? I’m ready now to go.'”
McArthur’s been to space once before, to help repair the Hubble Space Telescope, but has never set foot on the space station. She said she’s “super excited” for the mission.
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