The first operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts on board is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than October 23, following a formal certification review to assess data from the two-man test flight of the Crew Dragon who concluded earlier this month told NASA Friday.
The crew of four people on Crew Dragon’s next mission was set to explode in late September, but NASA announced Friday that the launch would be postponed to October 23 to better fit within the International Space Station’s busy schedule. crew and freight deliveries.
Rhyme Commander Mike Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will ride the Crew Dragon spaceship in orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket off Route 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
Adopted for a launch on October 23, the four-person crew will cancel EDT (0947 GMT) at 05:47 a.m. for a pre-climb in orbit. The launch time could be slightly adjusted as the orbit of the International Space Station changes due to aerodynamic drag and possible reboost maneuvers.
A launch on Oct. 23 would put Hopkins and his crew on course to tackle the space station on Oct. 24, and begin a six-month expedition to the orbital research complex.
The Crew Dragon mission set for launch in October will be the crew’s first regular flight rotation to the space station. Designated Crew-1 follows the mission the first Crew Dragon flight to the station on a demonstration mission with astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken.
Hurley and Behnken launched on SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission May 30 from the Kennedy Space Center and docked the next day at the space station. The launch marks the first time astronauts have flown into orbit from American soil since the spacecraft retired in 2011.
The Demo-2 test flight concluded August 2 with Hurley and Behnken’s August 2 splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Although NASA and SpaceX say the Crew Dragon spacecraft performed well on the 64-day test flight, officials plan a review in late August and early September to assess data from the Demo-2 mission and formally certify the Crew Dragon for regular crew rotation missions lasting up to seven months.
SpaceX is under contract with NASA for at least six “post-certification” crew rotation missions to the space station through 2024. Through a series of funding agreements since 2011, NASA has allocated more than $ 3.1 billion to SpaceX for development, testing and operational flights of the commercial spaceship Crew Dragon.
“NASA’s certification of SpaceX’s crew transportation system allows the agency to direct astronauts to the space station, ending only trust in Russia for access to space station,” NASA said Friday.
In a statement released Friday, NASA said that the launch of the Crew-1 mission from the end of September was postponed until no later than October 23 to ‘meet space travel for the upcoming rotation of the Soyuz crew and the best of’ meets the needs of the International Space Station. ”
The launch of the Crew Dragon on October 23 and docking on October 24 will follow a Russian Soyuz crew rotation in mid-October.
Russian engineers prepare the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft for launch on October 14 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Russian Commander Sergey Ryzhikov, cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins.
The Soyuz MS-17 crew will dive with the space station a few hours after launch, along with station commanders Chris Cassidy and Russian flight engineers Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner for a week-long crew transfer.
Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner will leave the space station on October 21 and go to the landing in Kazakhstan, leaving the three-person Soyuz MS-17 crew on orbit waiting for the arrival of the Crew-1 astronauts on October 24, which increases the size of the station crew to seven.
Two U.S. refund missions are also planned for launch for the space station before the end of the year.
A commercial supply ship Northrop Grumman Cygnus is set for liftoff Sept. 29 from Wallops Island, Virginia, on top of an Antares rocket. The cargo ship Cygnus will arrive at the station on October 3 with several tons of experiments, delivery facilities and other hardware.
A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship could launch from Cape Canaveral as soon as November. That mission will be SpaceX’s 21st cargo launch to the space station, but the first to deploy a new design for supply transport based on an unpilote version of the Crew Dragon spaceship.
The timing of the launch of the Crew-1 mission in October will mark the landing of the Hopkins crew in late April, about one month after the planned launch and docking of the next Crew Dragon flight – known as Crew -2 – next spring. NASA wants to overlap at least several weeks between the Crew-1 and Crew-2 astronauts on the space station.
During that period, Russia has plans to launch a fresh Soyuz crew mission to the space station to replace Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins. With eight Crew Dragon astronauts and six Soyuz crew members arriving and departing at the station next April, the research post could briefly host 14 astronauts and cosmonauts, breaking the record for most people in space at the same time.
Boeing is also preparing for a second unpilote test flight of its Starliner crew capsule later this year, but officials have not announced a launch date for the mission. The Starliner will dock with the space station in a repeat of an unpilote demonstration flight in December 2019 that failed the orbiting research lab.
If that flight goes well, Boeing could launch for the first time in 2021. Astronauts to the space station on their commercial Starliner spacecraft. Like SpaceX, Boeing is under contract with NASA for at least six operational Starliner crew rotations to the station.
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