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Shannon Walker, Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins of NASA will join Soichi Noguchi of JAXA on the first operational Crew-1 flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon.
POT
A Halloween launch for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station will not happen. Has been more tricks than treats for space launches lately.
SpaceX’s first regular operational mission (which means it’s not a test mission) to transport astronauts to the ISS was delayed to early November, NASA announced Saturday.
“The extra time will allow SpaceX to resolve an unexpected observation during a recent non-NASA launch attempt,” Kathy Lueders tweeted, Leader of NASA’s manned space flight program.
The delay is related to “unusual behavior of the gas generators in the Falcon 9 first stage engine,” according to NASA. The agency did not specify which Falcon 9 launch attempt. Most recently, on October 6, SpaceX sent more Starlink broadband satellites in orbit but also aborted an attempt to launch a Space Force GPS satellite on October 2.
Has been lots of recent reviews for SpaceX and other launch providers where the rockets didn’t take off for reasons ranging from weather to technical problems.
Space cheese and other strange objects we have put into orbit
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NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which includes SpaceX and Boeing, aims to end the agency’s reliance on Russian spacecraft to transport astronauts to the ISS. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker are still ready to take flight along with Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese space agency JAXA for Crew-1.
SpaceX has more than just the astronaut mission on its plate. He is also in charge of the launch of a NASA ocean monitoring satellite scheduled for November 10 and an upcoming cargo mission to the ISS. All of these are based on the Falcon 9 rocket system workhorse.
“With the high mission cadence SpaceX conducts, it really gives us incredible insight into this commercial system and helps us make informed decisions about the status of our missions,” Lueders said in the NASA statement. “Teams are actively working on this find in the engines, and we should be much smarter over the next week.”
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