Dress-rehearsal countdown SpaceX crew sets stage for Dragon launch

Four The beginning of astronauts But this weekend a SpaceX Crew Dragon The spacecraft crashed on top of the Falcon 9 rocket at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday for a dress rehearsal countdown, while engineers reviewed preparations and kept tabs on coastal weather in the wake. Tropical Storm Eta.

Crew-1 commanders Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Waker and Japanese astronaut Sochi Noguchi, dressed in futuristic-looking SpaceX pressure suits, went to launch the Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in White Tesla SUVs as if it were going to be Saturday, weather. Permission, for launch at 7:49 EST.

Observing the high-tech touch-screen display in the crew dragon capsule, the astronauts, who were strapped to the side, along with the SpaceX launch launch controllers named “Resilience”, were in the firing room at NASA’s launch control center, three miles from the pad.

Now the next major targets will come on Friday when NASA and SpaceX administrators and engineers will review launch launch readiness to make a final assessment of the team’s readiness for flight, following strict coronavirus protocols.

Forecasters are forecasting a 70% chance of acceptable weather on Saturday evening at the Kennedy Space Center. Estimates are no less accurate when it comes to wind and sea states in the Atlantic Ocean when the Falcon 9 spacecraft will propel the crew dragon into orbit.

The first phase recovery of the Falcon 9 requires a relatively calm sea, which the company now plans to reuse for a crew dragon flight six months later. And generally mild conditions are required with a complete route of flight in a defective condition that can force the crew to make an emergency scatter.

“We’re clearly looking at the weather. The weather is a big deal, weather for many areas.” Kathy Luders, NASA’s head of space research, told Spaceflight now Friday. “The droneship we need to get there in the first phase has really taken off today. And the way the sea is and the way it is, we’re seeing how fast that droneship can make it.”

If the droneship is not at the station on time, the launch will be largely delayed.

“The landing weather for the first phase is a big deal,” Luders said. “That’s the phase we’ll use for Crew-2, so we take care of it. It’s not that we never care about them, but this is an important phase.”

After crossing Florida on Wednesday, the tropical Storm Eta was expected to follow the route parallel to the East Canal to North Carolina and then continue across the Atlantic. By Saturday morning, the center of the storm should be east of the sea east of Boston.

SpaceX monitors data from up to 50 buoys that measure wind and wave height along the route, which will be analyzed before the final decision to proceed with the data launch.