SpaceX is forging forward with preparations for its future NASA astronaut mission, currently slated for a late Oct launch.
The Crew Dragon capsule that will launch the Crew-1 flight to the Global House Station arrived in Florida on Tuesday (Aug. 18), NASA officials claimed in an update Friday (Aug. 21).
The spacecraft built the trip from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and is now remaining processed at firm services at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Crew-1 will raise off from NASA’s nearby Kennedy Area Heart no earlier than Oct. 23 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Similar: A at the rear of-the-scenes glimpse at SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule (photographs)
The to start with stage of that rocket has been in Florida considering the fact that July. The higher phase is at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas, where it performed a “static hearth” take a look at on Tuesday, NASA officials explained. (Static fires are regimen trials in which a rocket fires up when remaining tethered to the ground.)
Crew-1 is the 1st 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 have four astronauts: NASA’s Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese spaceflyer Soichi Noguchi.
SpaceX currently has one particular crewed mission below its belt — the the latest Demo-2 test flight, which despatched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbiting lab for a two-month continue to be. Crew-1 will last about six months, the normal stint for astronauts on the station.
Like SpaceX, Boeing holds a commercial crew deal with NASA, which the aerospace giant will fulfill using a capsule termed CST-100 Starliner. Starliner is not yet prepared to fly astronauts the spacecraft should to start with ace an uncrewed check flight to the station, a mission scheduled to just take location later this 12 months.
Starliner tried using this take a look at flight the moment just before, in December 2019, but endured a glitch in its onboard timing program and bought stranded in an orbit much too low 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 lifestyle. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.