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Miami – NASA and the SpaceX company hope to send the first manned operational mission to the International Space Station (ISS) from US soil on Sunday from Cape Canaveral (Florida), after bad weather caused by tropical storm Eta forced to postpone it by almost 24 hours.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon capsule will take off, if the weather does not prevent it, one day later than expected, that is, at 7:30 pm local time with four astronauts on board.
Once separated from the rocket, which is reusable, the capsule, dubbed Resilience for this mission, will arrive at the ISS around 11pm on Monday.
The mission was postponed for a day, it was scheduled for Saturday, due to the bad weather generated by the tropical storm Eta, which on Thursday crossed all of northern Florida and continued its journey in the waters of the Atlantic after leaving this been heavy floods.
According to those responsible for the mission, the weather conditions have offered no guarantees that the platform that should receive the Falcon 9 rocket will reach its position in the Atlantic Ocean.
Part of the rocket is expected to be reused in the next manned mission to the NASA / SpaceX space station in March.
In turn, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, noted that the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that will be used in the Crew-1 mission flight will be reused for the “Crew-2 mission coming spring.”
On board the capsule are an astronaut from the US space agency, Shannon Walker, and two male colleagues, Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover, as well as the Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who will be received on the ISS by Kate Rubins of NASA and the Russians Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.
The four astronauts have been at the Kennedy Space Center for days and on Thursday boarded the spacecraft for a series of tests before launch.
This is the first of at least six missions SpaceX will carry out on the ISS under a $ 2.6 billion contract signed with NASA in 2014, which includes manned and other cargo flights.
It is the first time in 45 years that American astronauts have returned to Earth with a parachute over the sea.
ELON MUSK IS POSITIVE AND EVEN NEGATIVE TO COVID-19
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk wrote on his Twitter account on Friday that he had four tests for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in the same location and with the same nurse and two were negative and two positive.
When asked about the possible transmission of the disease to astronauts and mission members, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said that day that he was unaware that Musk had contact with the mission astronauts, but that SpaceX should have been tracking contacts.
Hours later, Reed and other NASA executives ensured that both SpaceX and NASA weren’t interested in contact tracking and that the four astronauts also maintained a rigorous two-week quarantine as a precaution.
“I can assure everyone that we are fine with the launch of Crew-1 and all the personnel involved,” Reed said.
In the event that the mission could not take off as planned on Sunday from Kennedy Space Center’s historic platform 39A, the next scheduled date would be Wednesday, November 18.
The X-37B is a mysterious military experiment of the US Air Force of which the Pentagon has limited itself to emphasizing that it is “an experimental test program to demonstrate the feasibility of a reliable and reusable unmanned space platform of the Air Force “.
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Bridenstine said on Friday that the ultimate goal of missions like Crew-1 is “to have more resources to do things for which there is no commercial market yet, such as going to the Moon and Mars under the Artemis program.”
“When we have more astronauts, a full replacement on the International Space Station, the amount of research that will be produced will be transformative,” he added.
The Crew-1 mission was preceded by the historic Demo-2 test trip, which began on May 30th.
On that mission, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley traveled to the ISS and after two months returned to earth in the same capsule, which fell into the Gulf of Mexico in a controlled and regular manner on August 2.
The six-month Crew-1 mission was originally scheduled to begin on October 23, but was postponed to October 31 and then undated until NASA announced in late September that it would be November 14. On Friday he announced he was postponed to 15.
The penultimate postponement was due to a problem in the engines of the Falcon 9 rocket discovered during a flight not related to NASA’s program.
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