SpaceX’s next manned mission won’t launch next month after all.
The crew-1, which will send four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, had been tentatively attacked by August 30. But the flight will now take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida “no sooner than in late September,” agency officials wrote in an update today (July 22).
SpaceX still has a manned mission underway: Demo-2, a test flight that launched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley onto the ISS on May 30. Demo-2 is set to end with a dip in the Atlantic Ocean on August 2, if weather and wave conditions allow.
Related: SpaceX’s historic demo-2 manned test flight in photos
Demo-2 was designed to show that SpaceX is ready to begin manned operational missions to the ISS with Crew Dragon and its Falcon 9 rocket. Elon Musk’s company has a $ 2.6 billion agreement with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to fly at least six of these missions. contracted, the first of which will be Crew-1. The next mission will be cleared for takeoff only after a thorough review of the Demo-2 data, SpaceX and NASA officials said.
Crew-1 will carry four space flights to and from the ISS: NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese Soichi Noguchi. The quartet will spend about six months on board the orbiting laboratory, which is the ISS standard period. Behnken and Hurley, by contrast, only receive a two-month orbital stay in Demo-2.
Boeing also has a NASA commercial crew contract, which the company will honor using a capsule called the CST-100 Starliner. However, Starliner is not yet ready to fly astronauts. The spacecraft must first send an unmanned test mission to the ISS, then not connect to the orbiting lab as planned during his first attempt last December. The makeup mission will likely launch later this year, NASA officials said.
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.
