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The four astronauts preparing to launch SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” boarded their spacecraft Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in a practice race for a launch to the International Space Station planned for Saturday. night.
Meanwhile, NASA and SpaceX managers monitored weather and sea conditions that could cause problems for the recovery of the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable first-stage thruster or the Crew Dragon itself in the event of an in-flight emergency.
NASA Commander Mike Hopkins, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi donned their black and white flight suits Thursday and rode in Tesla SUVs from the crew to the compound. seaside launch of the Falcon 9.
They took an elevator up to the launch tower, crossed the crew access arm, and entered their Crew Dragon spacecraft on top of the 215-foot-tall Falcon 9 launcher. A couple of hours later, the astronauts exited the capsule and returned to the crew rooms inside Neil Armstrong’s operations building and box at Kennedy.
Engineers continued to evaluate data from a test firing of the Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday before a Launch Readiness Review on Friday, during which SpaceX and NASA officials will decide whether to proceed with a launch attempt on Saturday to 7:49 pm EST (0049 GMT Sunday). ).
Kathy Lueders, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said Thursday there were no major technical issues under discussion ahead of the Launch Readiness Review.
“We’re obviously looking at the weather,” Lueders said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “Climate is a big problem, climate for multiple areas.”
Tropical Storm Eta passed through the northern Florida peninsula on Thursday and was forecast to head northeast toward the Atlantic Ocean. By Saturday, debris from the cyclone is expected to be east of the Canadian Maritime provinces.
The Falcon 9 rocket will head northeast from the Florida Space Coast to align with the space station’s orbital runway.
Mission managers will track winds, wave conditions, lightning strikes and rainfall at more than 50 locations in the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of the US, east of Canada and west of Ireland. . The Crew Dragon capsule could abort and fall in those areas in the event of a launch failure, and rescue teams would be dispatched to retrieve the astronauts.
A weather forecast issued Thursday for the Falcon 9 launch opportunity Saturday night shows a 70% chance of favorable liftoff conditions at the Florida spaceport. The top climate concern is cumulus clouds, according to the 45th US Space Force Meteorological Squadron.
The forecast does not take into account wind and wave conditions along the Crew Dragon spacecraft’s ascent corridor across the Atlantic, or the upper-level wind criteria for the Falcon 9 ascent through the atmosphere. .
Lueders said that SpaceX and NASA officials are also tracking the process of the football field-sized drone spacecraft that will be used to land the Falcon 9’s first-stage thruster.
“The drone craft that we need for the first stage to land is actually heading today,” Lueders told Spaceflight Now. “And with the way the seas are, and the way Eta is, we’re looking at how fast that drone ship can go out… So we’ll talk about that tomorrow as well in our Launch Readiness Review, where is it? ? Can you get organized in time for us to launch on Saturday? “
The launch Saturday night will kick off the Crew-1 mission, the first “operational” astronaut flight on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Hopkins and his crewmates will spend six months living and working on the International Space Station, before returning to Earth in Crew Dragon for a parachute-assisted landing at sea.
The next Crew Dragon launch, tentatively scheduled for March 30, 2021, with a new four-person space station crew, will use the same reusable Falcon 9 thruster that flies with the Crew-1 mission.
“Obviously the landing weather for the first leg is a big problem,” Lueders said. “This is the scenario we will use for Crew-2, so we care about it. It’s not that we never care, but this is an important stage. “
Lueders said NASA has a backup rocket available for the Crew-2 launch in case SpaceX fails to land the Falcon 9 booster on the Crew-1 mission. If there is a problem with the recovery of the Crew-1 rocket, NASA is considering launching the Crew-2 mission with the Falcon 9 thruster scheduled to launch the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich oceanography satellite later this month from California, Lueders said. .
“We have a backup in case something happens at this particular stage, but we have done all of our inspections at this stage,” Lueders said. “We have done all the work. We understand the hardware. So we’d really like to use this because it makes Crew-2’s job easier.
“One of the things that we are seeing is the use of the Sentinel-6 booster because it is a booster that we have also looked at,” Lueders said. “He must have had a flight. But … there are a couple of others out there. The good thing about SpaceX is that there is a variety of hardware that we can use. “
SpaceX’s “Just Read Instructions” drone ship departed from Port Canaveral on Thursday, heading for a position a few hundred miles northeast of Cape Canaveral.
“The second place we worry about weather … is launch weather,” Lueders said Thursday. “Then we have to watch the weather at the abortion track, so we’ll see all of them when we go through our Launch Readiness Review tomorrow, and then we’ll see if we go for the first day, following a path to target a launch on Saturday. at night, or if we go to Sunday. “
There is a backup launch opportunity available at 7:27 pm EST Sunday (0027 GMT Monday).
Once launch occurs, Crew Dragon will fly an automated rendezvous profile to connect with the space station, where Hopkins and his crewmates will join three other crew members currently living and working on the space station.
NASA officials formally certified SpaceX to transport astronauts during a two-day Flight Readiness Review on Monday and Tuesday, culminating a decade-long effort to design, develop and test the Crew Dragon spacecraft, the Falcon 9 rocket from human rate and validate the terrain of SpaceX. systems.
The test program was capped off by the test flight of a Crew Dragon capsule earlier this year with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board.
SpaceX fired the Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday afternoon at platform 39A, a day later than originally planned. SpaceX lowered the rocket onto platform 39A to replace components in the second stage purge system.
Lueders said NASA and SpaceX delayed the Launch Readiness Review one day after the delay in the Falcon 9 test firing.
“So with that move from Tuesday to Wednesday, we decided to move the LRR to Friday to make sure the team still had a couple of days to review the data and make sure we’re ready to go,” Lueders said.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ EstebanClark1.
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