SpaceX is forging forward with preparations for its upcoming NASA astronaut mission, presently slated for a late Oct launch.
The Crew Dragon capsule that will start the Crew-1 flight to the Global Room Station arrived in Florida on Tuesday (Aug. 18), NASA officials explained in an update Friday (Aug. 21).
The spacecraft made the journey from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and is now being processed at organization facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Drive Station. Crew-1 will elevate off from NASA’s close by Kennedy Area Center no previously than Oct. 23 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Related: A behind-the-scenes search at SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule (shots)
The initially stage of that rocket has been in Florida considering the fact that July. The higher stage is at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas, where it performed a “static fire” check on Tuesday, NASA officials claimed. (Static fires are program trials in which a rocket fires up although remaining tethered to the ground.)
Crew-1 is the first operational crewed mission that SpaceX will fly to the station for NASA beneath a $2.6 billion agreement that Elon Musk’s firm signed with the agency 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 one particular crewed mission under its belt — the the latest 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 six months, the standard stint for astronauts on the station.
Like SpaceX, Boeing holds a professional crew deal with NASA, which the aerospace large will fulfill employing a capsule named CST-100 Starliner. Starliner is not but all set to fly astronauts the spacecraft will have to initial ace an uncrewed examination flight to the station, a mission scheduled to take put later this 12 months.
Starliner tried using this exam flight at the time in advance of, in December 2019, but endured a glitch in its onboard timing process and received stranded in an orbit too small to allow 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 lifetime. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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