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NASA and SpaceX have announced a 24-hour weather delay for their planned launch of four astronauts into orbit for America’s first full-fledged human mission using a privately owned spacecraft.
Take-off time slipped from Saturday to Sunday evening due to forecasts of ground wind gusts over Florida – remnants of storm Eta – that would compromise a return landing for the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable booster stage, they said. NASA officials.
The Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience by its crew, was rescheduled for launch at 7:27 pm Sunday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
The crew for the flight to the International Space Station includes three American astronauts: Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and mission commander Mike Hopkins, a U.S. Air Force colonel who is to swear an oath in the fledgling U.S. space force once aboard the ISS.
The fourth crew member is Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who made his third trip to orbit after flying the US spacecraft in 2005 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2009.
The journey to the space station – stretched from about eight hours to just over a day after the new launch time – is considered the first SpaceX “operational” mission for the Crew Dragon.
A test flight of the vehicle to and from the space station with two crew members aboard in August marked the first spaceflight by NASA astronauts launched from U.S. soil in nine years, following the end of the shuttle program.
NASA officials just signed the final Crew Dragon project earlier this week, concluding a nearly 10-year development phase for SpaceX as part of the space agency’s public-private crew program.
The advent of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon crew represents a new era of commercially developed spacecraft – owned and operated by a private entity rather than NASA – used to bring Americans into orbit.
“The story made this time is that we are launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” said NASA chief Jim Bridenstine.
Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, usually attends high-profile launches in person but has tested positive for the coronavirus. It was unclear if Musk had made contact with the astronauts, but that was unlikely as the crew were routinely in quarantine for weeks before the flight.
NASA contracted SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to develop space capsules to replace the shuttle and end the United States’ dependence on Russia to bring U.S. astronauts into orbit. Boeing’s first manned test mission with its Starliner capsule is scheduled for late 2021.
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