Crew Dragon flies dozens of people to orbit

Since restoring US human launch capability in 2020, SpaceX's five Crew Dragon spacecraft have become the workhorse of human spaceflight. By mid-2025 they had flown 18 crewed missions carrying roughly 70 people — a mix of NASA astronauts on Space Station rotations and private citizens on commercial flights such as Inspiration4 and the Polaris program.

For nearly a decade after the Shuttle's 2011 retirement, the United States had to pay Russia to fly its astronauts. Crew Dragon ended that dependence and did it at far lower cost, while adding an entirely new category — privately funded human orbital spaceflight — that had never existed before.

Each capsule is reused across multiple missions, and Dragon also flies cargo runs to the Station, giving SpaceX an end-to-end human and logistics pipeline to low Earth orbit. That reliable, high-cadence access is the foundation commercial space stations and future deep-space crews will be built on.