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Cape Canaveral, Florida
Four astronauts arrived at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday for the SpaceX crew’s second launch, which will take place this weekend.
For NASA, it marks the long-awaited start of regular crew rotations on the International Space Station, with private companies providing the elevators. There will be twice as many astronauts as the test flight earlier this year, and their mission will last a full six months.
Make no mistake: every flight is a test flight when it comes to space travel. But it is also true that we should be able to go to the International Space Station on a routine basis, ”said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, welcoming the astronauts to Kennedy.
The crew, three of whom are American and one of whom is Japanese, is scheduled to take off on Saturday night, as long as the approaching tropical storm Eta does not interfere. It will be a quick trip to the space station, a six-orbiting express that lasts less than nine hours.
The astronauts have named their capsule Dragon Resilience given all the challenges of 2020: coronavirus and social isolation, protests against racial injustice, and a particularly difficult election and campaign season. They have been in quarantine and have been taking safety precautions (masks and social distancing) long before that.
“It’s been a difficult year for everyone for many different reasons,” said crew commander Mike Hopkins after flying in from Houston. “We felt that if the name of our vehicle could give a little hope, a little inspiration, make people smile, then that is definitely what we wanted to do.”
All four will remain in orbit until spring, when their replacements arrive aboard another SpaceX Dragon capsule. The cargo version of the capsule will also continue to deliver regular food and supplies.
SpaceX’s Benji Reed said the company expects to launch seven Dragons over the next 14 months: three for the crew and four for the cargo.
“Every time a Dragon is launched, there will be two Dragons in space,” said Mr. Reed, director of mission management for the crew.
Meanwhile, the other NASA-contracted taxi service, Boeing, is not scheduled to fly with its first crew until next summer. The company plans a second pilotless test flight in a couple of months; the former suffered so many software problems that the Starliner capsule was unable to reach the space station.
NASA turned to private companies for space station deliveries (cargo, then crew) following the withdrawal of the shuttle fleet in 2011. American astronauts continued to travel on Russian rockets at increasingly high prices. The latest Soyuz ticket cost NASA $ 90 million.
SpaceX finally ended NASA’s nearly decade-long drought of astronaut launches last May, successfully delivering a pair of test pilots to the space station from Kennedy for a two-month stay. The returning capsule was examined by SpaceX after its crash, resulting in some changes for this second flight.
Engineers discovered excessive erosion in the heat shield due to scorching reentry temperatures; the company beefed up the vulnerable section for the next launch, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX vice president. Improvements were also made to the altitude measurement system for the parachutes, after the parachutes were opened a little too low on the first astronaut flight. More recently, two Falcon rocket engines were replaced due to contamination from a red lacquer used in processing. Engine changes delayed the flight for two weeks.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the SpaceX crew’s first flight was all the private boats full of onlookers that surrounded the capsule in the Gulf of Mexico after the August splashdown. Koenigsmann promises a bigger exclusion zone and more patrols for future returns.
The second crew has three veteran pilots and a rookie:
•Mr. Hopkins is an Air Force colonel and former space station resident who grew up on a pig and cattle farm in Missouri.
• Commander of the Navy. Victor Glover is the pilot and the only space rookie; He is from the Los Angeles area and will be the first African American astronaut to travel to the space station for an extended stay.
• Shannon Walker, a physicist born and raised in Houston, has also lived on the space station before; her husband, retired astronaut Andrew Thomas, helped build the outpost.
• Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese Space Agency, another former resident of the station, will become the first person in decades to launch three types of rockets; it has already flown on a US space shuttle and a Russian Soyuz.
They will be joined by two Russians and an American who arrived at the space station last month after its launch from Kazakhstan.
Hopkins and his crew will travel to the launch pad at Teslas, from SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s auto company, in spacesuits color-coordinated with the spacecraft. But underneath all the good looks are “a lot of amazing capabilities,” according to Glover.
“It is a very elegant capsule. But it has the advantage of having made great advances in technology since we last built spacecraft here in this country, “Walker said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Mr. Noguchi, who along with Ms. Walker joined the crew this year, is particularly excited to ride a Dragon. In Japan, the dragon is an esteemed mythical creature, “almost a trip to heaven”.
“It is a great privilege to learn to actually train the Dragon, to ride a Dragon,” he said. “SpaceX did a good job teaching Dragon Rider from scratch in six months.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press. The AP Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. AP is solely responsible for all content.
