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Takeoff time was shortened from Saturday night due to strong winds on the ground that would have made it difficult to land back for the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable booster stage, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted.
The newly designed Crew Dragon capsule, nicknamed “Resilience” by its crew, will now launch over Falcon 9 at 7:27 pm ET Sunday (0027 GMT Monday) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with three American astronauts and one from Japan.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020
The roughly eight-hour journey to the space station will be SpaceX’s first operational mission. A manned test flight with two crew members on board in August marked the first NASA astronaut spaceflight launched from US soil in nine years.
NASA officials signed off on the final Crew Dragon design earlier this week, ending a nearly 10-year development phase for SpaceX under the agency’s public-private crew program.
“The story that is being made this time is that we are launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” Bridenstine told a news conference at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday.
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Musk, who generally attends high-profile SpaceX missions in person, said Thursday that after conducting four coronavirus tests on the same day, two returned negative results and two returned positive results.
When asked if Musk will be in the launch control room for takeoff, Bridenstine said agency policy requires employees to self-quarantine and self-isolate after testing positive for the disease, “so we anticipate that will happen. “
It was unclear if Musk came into contact with the astronauts, but it is unlikely, as the crew has been in routine quarantine for weeks before their flight.
NASA contracted with SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to develop competing space capsules intended to replace its shuttle program that ended in 2011 and eliminate reliance on Russian rockets to send American astronauts into space.
Boeing’s first manned test mission with its Starliner capsule is scheduled for late next year.
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