SpaceX is forging ahead with preparations for its next NASA astronaut mission, at this time slated for a late Oct launch.
The Crew Dragon capsule that will start the Crew-1 flight to the Intercontinental Place Station arrived in Florida on Tuesday (Aug. 18), NASA officials mentioned in an update Friday (Aug. 21).
The spacecraft built the journey from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and is now getting processed at company amenities at Cape Canaveral Air Power Station. Crew-1 will carry off from NASA’s close by Kennedy Place Centre no earlier than Oct. 23 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Relevant: A at the rear of-the-scenes glimpse at SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule (images)
The 1st stage of that rocket has been in Florida considering the fact that July. The upper stage is at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas, where it executed a “static fireplace” take a look at on Tuesday, NASA officials mentioned. (Static fires are regimen trials in which a rocket fires up although remaining tethered to the ground.)
Crew-1 is the initially operational crewed mission that SpaceX will fly to the station for NASA underneath a $2.6 billion contract that Elon Musk’s company signed with the company in 2014. The flight will carry 4 astronauts: NASA’s Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese spaceflyer Soichi Noguchi.
SpaceX currently has one particular crewed mission underneath its belt — the current Demo-2 examination flight, which despatched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbiting lab for a two-thirty day period remain. Crew-1 will very last about six months, the common stint for astronauts on the station.
Like SpaceX, Boeing holds a industrial crew contract with NASA, which the aerospace giant will fulfill applying a capsule termed CST-100 Starliner. Starliner is not however all set to fly astronauts the spacecraft must 1st ace an uncrewed check flight to the station, a mission scheduled to just take put later on this year.
Starliner experimented with this check flight once ahead of, in December 2019, but suffered a glitch in its onboard timing procedure and bought stranded in an orbit as well reduced to let a meetup with the station.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book about the look for for alien lifestyle. Abide by him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Abide by us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Problem solver. Incurable bacon specialist. Falls down a lot. Coffee maven. Communicator.
