After a two-week delay to assess concerns with the Falcon 9 rocket engine, NASA and SpaceX have set November 14 as the target launch date for the International Space Station’s first operational crew dragon flight, launching a half-year mission. Three U.S. Orbiters of astronauts and P Japanese Japanese space flyer.
NASA announced the date of the new target launch late Monday night. The Crew Dragon spaceship is set for a liftoff from Pad 39 on November 14 at 7:49 p.m. at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If the mission explodes as scheduled, the Crew Dragon and its four-person crew will move to an automatic linkup with the Harmony module of the International Space Station on November 15 at 4:15 p.m. (0915 GMT). After launch let a
NASA Commander Mike Hopkins of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, spacecraft pilot Victor Glover and mission experts Shannon Waker and the crew at the Sochi Noguchi space station will ride on the Dragon spaceship. At the international research outpost, Hopkins and his crew will be joined by space station commander Sergei Ryazikov, Russian flight engineer Sergei Kud-Sverkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who will for the first time increase the lab’s long-term crew to seven.
The mission, scheduled to launch next month, has been named Crew-1. It follows the space station’s 64-day crew dragon test flight that began in May with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behneken.
A successful test flight set the stage for launching regular SpaceX crew rotation flights to the space station under NASA’s contract.
The Crew-1 launch was delayed from Oct. 31 to give time for SpaceX and NASA engineers to investigate a potential issue with the Merlin rocket engine on the Falcon 9 rocket.
The engine’s concern appeared during an attempt to launch a Falcon 9 rocket with a GPS satellite at Cape Canaveral on October 2, controlling the computer’s final second count of leaving the mission just two seconds before the liftoff.
Aaron Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, tweeted after the abortion that the countdown was shut down after an “unexpected increase in pressure in a turbomachine gas generator”, referring to equipment used on the rocket’s Merlin’s main engines. The gas generators on the Merlin 1D engine run the turbopumps of the engines.
After the GPS launch, SpaceX fired engines from the Falcon 9 rocket and took it to a testing facility in McGregor, Texas for further investigation. Last week, NASA said it would replace one of the Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 rocket for the SpaceX Crew-1 mission. .
“The Crew-1 mission will launch a few days after the 10-day scheduled launch of NASA’s Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich mission on SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on November 10, after a full review of the launch vehicle demonstration,” NASA said in a statement Monday.
NASA and SpaceX officials plan to brief reporters on the Merlin engine investigation on Wednesday.
During the engine investigation, SpaceX has continued to launch missions with the company’s own Starlink Internet satellites. Successful Ct. 18 and Oct. Three successful flights of 24 successfully launched 180 Starlink satellites into orbit.
SpaceX U.S. Army’s next GPS Navigation Satellite is scheduled to attempt a second launch from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 4 at 6:30 a.m. EST (2328 GMT). U.S. A Space Force spokesman gave questions to SpaceX about the engine investigation, and a SpaceX spokesman did not answer questions from Spaceflight Now.
The November 4th opportunity for the Falcon 9 rocket with the Army’s GPS3 SV04 mission, a close launch of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from EST (2258 GMT) at 5:58 p.m. Nov. 3 .. ULA’s Atlas rocket Rocket U.S. The government’s spy satellite agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, will carry a classified payload into orbit for fees.
If the Atlas 5 launch is delayed by a day, the Falcon 9 flight with GPS satellite is likely to be delayed by 24 hours until November 5.
Aside from the GPS, Sentinel-6 and Crew-1 missions, SpaceX has many more Falcon 9 flights in its backlog that could launch as early as next month.
These include the launch of the second classified for NRO on the Falcon 9 rocket, and the Falcon 9 flight with the second batch of Starlink Internet satellites.
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