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In Florida on Sunday, a rocket and capsule built by SpaceX will carry crew members to the International Space Station. NASA’s mission follows a successful demonstration of the same spacecraft that launched in May and returned two astronauts to Earth in August. Here’s what you need to know about the launch.
What is SpaceX launching?
Four astronauts, three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, propelled to orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their Resilience capsule. They are heading to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.
This is the first of what NASA calls “operational” flights of the Crew Dragon. In May, there was a demonstration mission, with two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, on board. That launch, in a capsule called Endeavor, was the first time that a manned mission took off from the United States to orbit since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles in 2011. Their return was also the first water landing for astronauts to aboard an American spaceship. since the Apollo capsules stopped flying in the 1970s.
NASA has relied on Russian Soyuz rockets to get its astronauts to the space station. That has become increasingly expensive, coming in at a cost of more than $ 90 million per seat.
When is the launch?
The Crew-1 mission is scheduled to launch at 7:27 pm ET Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA television will broadcast the coverage starting at 3:15 pm
The astronauts will arrive at the space station around 11 p.m. ET Monday, a journey of about 27 hours.
Forecasts currently give a 50 percent chance of favorable conditions at the launch pad. SpaceX and NASA are also monitoring further out into the Atlantic Ocean. The weather and waters should be fairly calm in case something goes wrong during the climb into orbit and the Crew Dragon needs to make an emergency landing (adverse weather conditions led to a postponement of the previous Saturday’s launch date) .
If Sunday’s release is delayed, there is a backup opportunity on Wednesday.
Who are the astronauts?
Michael S. Hopkins, 51, a colonel in the United States Space Force, is the commander of the flight. (Colonel Hopkins is also the first member of the newly created US Space Force to go into space.) He was one of nine astronauts selected by NASA in 2009. He made a previous trip to the International Space Station, in 2013 and 2014, spending 166 days in orbit.
Shannon walkerThe 55-year-old was on the space station in 2010. Dr. Walker has a Ph.D. in space physics from Rice University, where she studied how the solar wind interacted with the atmosphere of Venus.
Soichi noguchiA 55-year-old astronaut from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will make his third trip to space. He was a member of the Space Shuttle Discovery crew in 2005 on the shuttle’s first launch after the loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts more than two years earlier.
During that visit to the International Space Station, Mr. Noguchi conducted three spacewalks. That included one to test techniques developed to repair damage to heat tiles on the shuttle similar to what had doomed Columbia when it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. In 2009 and 2010, he spent five months in orbit as a member of the space station crew.
Victor gloverThe 44-year-old, selected by NASA in 2013 to be an astronaut, will make his first space flight. He will be the first black NASA astronaut to serve aboard a space station crew. Glover’s achievement is remarkable to NASA, which has worked to highlight the “hidden figures” in its history, but has so far sent only 14 black Americans out of a total of more than 300 NASA astronauts into space.
He will not be the first black astronaut aboard the station. But its originators from NASA were members of the space shuttle crews during the station’s construction and only completed brief stays at the outpost.
Allyson Waller contributed reporting.
