SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule for future NASA astronaut launch arrives in Florida
SpaceX is forging ahead with preparations for its future NASA astronaut mission, now slated for a late Oct launch.
The Crew Dragon capsule that will start the Crew-1 flight to the Global Space Station arrived in Florida on Tuesday (Aug. 18), NASA officials reported in an update Friday (Aug. 21).
The spacecraft created the excursion from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and is now staying processed at enterprise amenities at Cape Canaveral Air Pressure Station. Crew-1 will carry off from NASA’s nearby Kennedy Room Center no earlier than Oct. 23 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Relevant: A behind-the-scenes seem at SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule (photos)
The to start with phase of that rocket has been in Florida given that July. The upper stage is at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas, the place it performed a “static fireplace” exam on Tuesday, NASA officials stated. (Static fires are routine trials in which a rocket fires up when remaining tethered to the ground.)
Crew-1 is the initial operational crewed mission that SpaceX will fly to the station for NASA under a $2.6 billion contract that Elon Musk’s enterprise signed with the agency in 2014. The flight will have four astronauts: NASA’s Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese spaceflyer Soichi Noguchi.
SpaceX now has one crewed mission beneath its belt — the modern Demo-2 exam flight, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbiting lab for a two-month continue to be. Crew-1 will very last about 6 months, the common stint for astronauts on the station.
Like SpaceX, Boeing retains a commercial crew contract with NASA, which the aerospace large will fulfill applying a capsule identified as CST-100 Starliner. Starliner is not yet all set to fly astronauts the spacecraft will have to 1st ace an uncrewed test flight to the station, a mission scheduled to choose put afterwards this year.
Starliner tried out this check flight after just before, in December 2019, but endured a glitch in its onboard timing technique and got stranded in an orbit way too reduced to let a meetup with the station.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien daily life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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