Crew Dragon Demo-1

No crew rode Dragon C204 when it lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on 2 March 2019. The capsule carried a test dummy named Ripley and around 180 kg of supplies for the station — enough mass to simulate a loaded spacecraft, but none of it human. Demo-1 was the uncrewed flight test that NASA's Commercial Crew Program required before any astronaut boarded a Crew Dragon.

Approximately 27 hours after launch, the capsule docked autonomously with the Harmony module of the International Space Station — the first autonomous docking of an American spacecraft to the ISS. It remained for six days, running systems checks, before undocking and splashing down in the Atlantic on 8 March 2019. The capsule assigned to fly the subsequent in-flight abort test was destroyed during a ground propulsion test in April 2019; Demo-2, the crewed flight, followed fourteen months after Demo-1.