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Four astronauts, who will travel to the International Space Station from Florida on Saturday, say they expect science and other activities to expand on the orbiting platform.
Their arrival on the space station would bring the number of astronauts living there to seven for the first time in years. Saturday’s launch will be the first time four astronauts will fly in a space capsule and the first routine launch as part of NASA’s new commercial space program.
Astronaut Mike Hopkins, commander of the spacecraft, said he has already seen a full schedule for the first week of the crew’s six-month mission to space.
“It will be exciting to see how much work we can do while we’re there,” Hopkins said Monday at the Kennedy Space Center, where the launch will take place. “There isn’t much gray area [the schedule], so I think they’ll keep us pretty busy.
The new crew will join astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.
The space station only has six beds, so Hopkins plans to sleep in the crew’s Dragon capsule called Resilience. During the era of space shuttles, commanders traditionally slept in the spaceship’s cockpit, he said.
The launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the capsule – also built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX – is scheduled for Saturday, 19:49 EST to begin the Crew-1 mission, but the impact of tropical storm Eta on Florida could delay. this launch time, the astronauts said.
Hopkins, 51, will fly with pilot Victor Glover, 44, and mission specialists Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi, both 55. Noguchi is a Japanese astronaut.
Glover is flying into space for the first time. He has refused to speculate on the kind of world he will return to in view of the impending change of leadership in Washington, DC
“Unlike the election, you know this is in the past or at least back in time, while this mission is still ahead of me, so let’s fly there and then we’ll talk,” Glover said.
He said the crew appreciated the preparations.
“We’re having a lot of fun because … we’re going through a lot of our final preparations, a lot of our final briefings, a lot of our final revisions,” Hopkins said. “I think… it also helps calm the nerves a little.
If the crew takes off on time, they have a relatively short flight to the space station of around 8.5 hours. If there is a ground delay, it could extend to 24 hours or more.
Since the flight will be the first time four people will fly in a kite pod, they will spend some of their time preparing and unpacking goods and personal items, Walker said.
The crew will test some procedures, even if the short flight doesn’t require them, so future crews will know what to expect, he said.
“It’s the choreography of how you handle all your stuff, like when you have to take off your spacesuit and put on your normal clothes,” Walker said. “It can be difficult to fit everything into your rooms …”
Walker flew to the space station in a Russian Soyuz capsule in 2010. He said Dragon’s crew seating area seems more spacious than the Soyuz, but the Russian spacecraft can carry a lot of cargo along with people.
SpaceX has said in the past that Dragon could be configured to carry seven astronauts, but Walker said it seemed to her that seven people wouldn’t leave much room to move.
“There would have been room for them, but not for the cargo,” he said.
The previous manned SpaceX capsule, which returned to Earth on August 2, was a test flight that took two astronauts to the space station and docked with the station in orbit for two months.
In addition to this mission, since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, astronauts have only been launched into space aboard the Russian Soyuz capsule, which carries two or three people from Kazakhstan.
Hopkins said he did not believe astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley – former Dragon mission crew members – would participate in the upcoming launch due to the pandemic restrictions at the space center.
But he said the two astronauts had given advice on events and sounds the crew should expect during takeoff and landing.
“And I’d like to say it’s my favorite [advice]was thinking about how to pack food, so we rearranged our food to make sure it was easily accessible.
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