Next NASA, SpaceX astronaut flight to launch no earlier than October

• NASA announced on Friday that its next mission with SpaceX will not begin in early October.
• The mission, called Crew-1, will transport four astronauts to the space station and back: Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Mike Hopkins, and Soichi Noguchi.
• It was originally intended to launch in early September, but NASA said the change would undermine the schedules for other astronauts going to and from the International Space Station.
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SpaceX and NASA will not launch their next batch of astronauts until October 23, the space agency announced on Friday.

That pushed back the expected launch date of the Crew-1 mission, which was originally intended to launch in early September.

Crew-1 is technically the first official, contracted astronaut mission of SpaceX for NASA, because the one that recently completed it was a demonstration. The successful completion of that test, called Demo-2, paved the way for at least six more planned ISS missions as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

NASA said in a press release that it pushed back the launch “to best meet the needs of the International Space Station” by coordinating with the schedules of other astronauts going to and from the ISS. That includes NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who are slated to explode on a Russian Soyuz rocket on October 14. The Crew-1 mission will also wait for NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner to return to Earth from the space station on October 22.

Plus, the new timeline will be able to interest the Crew-1 astronauts staying on the ISS with those of the Crew-2 mission members scheduled for spring.

NASA also said it is still packing data versions and certification processes after the Demo-2 mission, an important step in the preparation for Crew-1.

Meet the Crew-1 crew

Crew-1 includes NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Mike Hopkins, and Victor Glover, as well as JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Hopkins is intended to be the commander of the mission, Glover the pilot, and Walker and Noguchi mission specialists.

The team plans to stay the standard six months on the ISS, during which they will conduct space walks, conduct scientific experiments and work on regular station maintenance.

In partnership with SpaceX, NASA is reducing its confidence in Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which have recently cost up to $ 90 million per seat. NASA has been unable to launch its own astronauts into US systems since 2011, when the spacecraft program ended. A seat on a SpaceX shuttle is projected to cost $ 55 million, although that figure does not include the funding NASA gave the company to develop its new Crew Dragon spacecraft in the first place.