The rocket that will launch SpaceX’s first manned operational flight for NASA has arrived at its launch site in Florida.
The first stage of Falcon 9 rocket for the Crew-1 mission, which will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on August 30, arrived in the Sunshine State on Tuesday (July 14), agency officials said. The reinforcement made the long walk from the SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas, wrapped in a black protective cover.
The Falcon 9 will now undergo pre-launch processing at SpaceX facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA officials said. Cape Canaveral is next to KSC.
Related: SpaceX is already preparing for the Crew-1 mission
Crew-1 launch will send NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a SpaceX Dragon Crew Capsule. The quartet will remain on board the laboratory in orbit for about six months.
Crew-1 will be the first complete mission of at least six that SpaceX will fly under a $ 2.6 billion contract that the company signed with NASA in 2014. But it will not be the first manned flight for Elon Musk’s company.
That distinction is going to Demo-2, a test mission launched by NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS in late May. Demo-2 was the first manned orbital launch from the US since the final flight of NASA’s space shuttle program in July 2011. Since then, all astronauts had flown to and from the ISS aboard the spacecraft. Russian space Soyuz.
Behnken and Hurley are slated to return to Earth in the coming weeks. If Demo-2 continues to work well, SpaceX will be clear about the launch of Crew-1.
Although NASA recently approved the use of pre-flown SpaceX hardware on ISS manned missions, the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 that will fly Crew-1 are new.
Boeing also signed a contract with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program in 2014, a $ 4.2 billion deal that the aerospace giant will honor using a capsule called the CST-100 Starliner. However, Starliner is not ready to start flying astronauts; the capsule must first conduct an unmanned demonstration flight to the ISS.
This attempt, which is expected to launch later this year, will be Starliner’s second attempt on an unmanned ISS mission. During the first attempt, which was launched in December 2019, Starliner suffered a failure with his timer on board and he got stuck in too low an orbit to meet the ISS.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
