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We are probably only a few days away from the first Spacex launching.
Elon Musk’s company has launched two people into space to date: NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, who traveled to the International Space Station on May 30 aboard a Crew Dragon capsule mounted on a Falcon rocket. 9. That test flight, called DEMO-2, marked the first commercial crewed launch and the first launch from US soil since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. But it was a test flight, with only two astronauts on board. , which lasted only 64 days with most of that time at zerogravity spent on the International Space Station (ISS). On November 14, if all goes according to plan, four astronauts will fly a Crew Dragon to the ISS and stay on the space station for six months. It will usher in the era of practical commercial spaceflight.
The mission, dubbed CREW-1, will deliver four of the seven members of Expedition 64 to the ISS: NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Expedition 64 is the term for this 64th group of people to inhabit and work on the ISS for the long term.
All four began quarantining themselves on October 31, a standard pre-launch move most important in the COVID-19 era, and arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for final preparations on November 8.
Related: Here are all the spacecraft that ever took an astronaut into orbit
(The other three members of Expedition 64, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, as well as NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins, are already aboard the ISS, having arrived on October 14 in a Russian Soyuz capsule. ).
Expedition 64 will last until April 18, 2021 and will increase the usual occupation of the ISS from six to seven. (The Crew Dragon capsule will remain, docked to the ISS, the entire time.) The astronauts will have work to do outside the station: spacewalks to power up an array of currently dormant science instruments connected to the outside of the station.
CREW-2’s Biggest Question
The Crew Dragon capsule has completed at least one successful astronaut launch in Earth orbit. But some concerns about the team remain.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 The rocket, part of a fleet that has been used for years to good effect, was aborted seconds before launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on October 2. That’s the same type of rocket that is configured to take CREW-1’s Crew Dragon capsule into space.
The aborted rocket, as Space News reported, it was supposed to launch a GPS satellite. But a red “masking lacquer” used to protect engine components had blocked a relief valve on a SpaceX Merlin engine used in the Falcon 9, making it dangerous to use.
Testing of other Merlin engines revealed similar problems, including two for the CREW-1 engine and another for the launch of an ocean science satellite now delayed on Nov.10. SpaceX replaced those engines, as well as the GPS 3 launch engines. The GPS 3 satellite successfully launched on November 5, which indicates that the replacement engines did their job.
Still, CREW-1 will now be only the second launch since the Merlin engine issue. Everything indicates that it will advance smoothly at 7:49 pm EST on Saturday, November 14 (12:49 am GMT on November 15) and will arrive at the ISS 8.5 hours later.
If the weather delays the launch from November 14 to November 15, NASA has said it will take the Crew Dragon 27.5 hours to reach the ISS.
Originally posted on Live Science.
