SpaceX is forging in advance with preparations for its subsequent NASA astronaut mission, currently slated for a late October start.
The Crew Dragon capsule that will start the Crew-1 flight to the International Space Station arrived in Florida on Tuesday (Aug. 18), NASA officers said in an update Friday (Aug. 21).
The spacecraft made the vacation from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and is now currently being processed at enterprise services at Cape Canaveral Air Power Station. Crew-1 will elevate off from NASA’s close by Kennedy Place Middle no previously than Oct. 23 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Related: A driving-the-scenes glimpse at SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule (photos)
The to start with phase of that rocket has been in Florida due to the fact July. The upper phase is at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas, the place it performed a “static fire” exam on Tuesday, NASA officials said. (Static fires are program trials in which a rocket fires up though remaining tethered to the floor.)
Crew-1 is the initial operational crewed mission that SpaceX will fly to the station for NASA beneath a $2.6 billion contract that Elon Musk’s enterprise signed with the company in 2014. The flight will carry four astronauts: NASA’s Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese spaceflyer Soichi Noguchi.
SpaceX by now has a person crewed mission beneath its belt — the modern Demo-2 exam flight, which despatched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbiting lab for a two-month remain. Crew-1 will previous about six months, the common stint for astronauts on the station.
Like SpaceX, Boeing holds a industrial crew agreement with NASA, which the aerospace giant will satisfy applying a capsule known as CST-100 Starliner. Starliner is not but completely ready to fly astronauts the spacecraft must very first ace an uncrewed take a look at flight to the station, a mission scheduled to acquire spot afterwards this yr.
Starliner tried out this test flight after right before, in December 2019, but suffered a glitch in its onboard timing procedure and obtained stranded in an orbit as well small to make it possible for 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 lookup for alien daily life. Comply with him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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