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STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS AND USED WITH PERMIT
After 10 years, two successful test flights and a $ 6 billion investment in the American venture, NASA is set to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station this weekend, the first government-certified flight of a SpaceX spacecraft. Commercially developed Crew Dragon.
Originally scheduled for take-off on Saturday, launch has been postponed to Sunday at 7:27 PM EST due to strong winds predicted at the Kennedy Space Center and offshore weather where the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to land on a SpaceX droneship. The airline plans to reuse the booster for Crew Dragon’s next flight.
Appropriately enough, a three-man female crew called their ship “Resilience”.
“This means performing well in times of stress or overcoming adverse events,” said crew commander Mike Hopkins during a previous briefing. “I think we can all agree that 2020 has certainly been a challenging year: global pandemic, economic hardship, civil unrest, isolation.
“And despite all of this, SpaceX, NASA has kept the production line open and finished this fantastic vehicle that is preparing for its first flight to the International Space Station.”
Joining Hopkins aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule will be F / A-18 aircraft carrier pilot Victor Glover, research astronaut Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
It will be the second flight for both Hopkins and Walker, who previously flew aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the third for Noguchi, a veteran of both the Soyuz and the space shuttle. Glover, the first African American to join the crew of a long-life space station, is making his first space flight.
Hopefully, the Crew Dragon will perform an automated rendezvous with the International Space Station, gliding for a docking at the lab’s forward port around 11pm on Monday to kick off a six-month stay.
Kennedy Space Center remains closed for normal operations due to coronavirus protocols, and astronauts have been in rigorous quarantine for the past few weeks to make sure no one brought the virus to the space station.
In this context, SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted overnight that “he was tested for COVID four times today. Two tests came back negative, two positive.” He later added that he has experienced in the past few days “mild colds and coughs. and mild fever “. At this time, no symptoms. “
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post that contact tracing showed that Musk had not been in contact with anyone who had access to crew-1 astronauts and that no impact on the launch was expected.
NASA managers have not attempted to warn of possible large crowds that are expected to gather along Florida’s “Space Coast” to witness the weekend launch. But Kathy Lueders, NASA’s director of space exploration directorate, urged the public to be cautious, wear masks, and socialize remotely wherever they were.
“We expect a large turnout,” he said. “We want people to celebrate with us (but) we want people to be careful when they’re out there. We would be really sad if this were a big event. “
Aside from COVID, NASA and SpaceX managers held a launch readiness review on Friday to assess the timing and performance of the nine first stage engines of the Falcon 9 rocket during a test launch Wednesday. The engines have received a certificate of good health and the weather forecast has predicted a 60% chance of acceptable weather on Sunday at the launch site.
Mission managers will continue to assess conditions in the Atlantic Ocean along the Crew Dragon’s northeastern trajectory to ensure winds and sea states are acceptable in the event of a malfunction that could force the crew to make an emergency landing. .
Relatively calm seas are required for the recovery of the first stage of the Falcon 9. A drone ship from the company, “Just Read the Instructions”, went to sea on Thursday, headed for the landing zone several hundred miles northeast of Cape Canaveral.
“The landing time for the first leg is a big deal,” Lueders said Thursday. “It’s the stage we’re going to use for Crew-2, so it matters to us. Not that we don’t care about them (all of them), but this is an important step. “
NASA is counting on Crew-1 flight and subsequent SpaceX and Boeing missions to end the agency’s only reliance on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for travel to and from low earth orbit. NASA has spent $ 4 billion since 2006 to buy seats aboard the Soyuz spacecraft and another $ 6 billion to date working with SpaceX and Boeing to develop new commercial manned ships.
To achieve “operational” status, the agency had to “humanly evaluate” the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Falcon 9 rocket, an exhaustive process that culminated in two test flights, one unmanned and one carrying astronauts. Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken at the space station for a 64-day stay in early summer.
With two successful test flights under their belt, NASA engineers were able to certify the spacecraft after detailed telemetry analysis and flight hardware inspections. It was the first certification of its kind since the space shuttle was built in the 1970s and the first ever granted to a commercially developed spacecraft.
“I believe in 20 years we will look back on this moment as a major turning point in our exploration and use of space,” said Phil McAlister, director of commercial space flight development at NASA headquarters. “It is no exaggeration to say that with this milestone, NASA and SpaceX have changed the historical arc of human space transport.
“Not only can NASA transport our astronauts to and from the International Space Station with US systems, but now, for the first time in history, there is a commercial capability by a private sector entity to transport people into space in safe and reliable way “.
Thanks to multiple NASA contracts to deliver cargo and astronauts to the space station, “all of this is leading to great operational cadence,” said Benji Reed, SpaceX’s director of crew mission management. “And that’s great.”
“Once we get started with crew-1, we will move into a cadence where we will have to fly seven Dragon missions over the next 14 months,” he said. “There will be a series of manned missions, Crew-1, Crew-2, Crew-3 and underway. … At the same time, we will carry out four cargo flights to the station. So this is really a new era for us as a company and also for retail spaces in general. “
NASA executives have decided to continue with Crew-1 flight after work to correct a handful of issues in the wake of this summer’s Demo-2 test flight. In one case, SpaceX reinforced heat shield insulation in areas where more reentry erosion than expected was observed. In another, the company improved a system used to trigger the release of the doping stabilizing parachutes during the descent to the splashdown.
More recently, SpaceX had to fix a subtle problem with the Falcon 9’s engine that triggered the disruption of launch on Oct. 2 that grounded a US Space Force navigation satellite. The problem was traced to residual contamination in the turbopump machinery found in the GPS rocket. Similar problems were found in the crew-1 Falcon 9.
Two motors in each booster were replaced and the GPS satellite was successfully launched on November 5th. The SpaceX test fired the engines in the first stage of the crew’s Falcon 9 on Wednesday and no problems were found.
Welcoming the crew 1 astronauts aboard the station will be expedition 64 commander Sergey Ryzhikov, Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins. Rubins used the last Soyuz seat currently contracted by NASA when she and her two crewmates left the Baikonur Cosmodrome on October 14 aboard the Soyuz MS-17 / 63S spacecraft.
With the arrival of the Crew Dragon, the station crew will rise to seven, with five working and living in the US segment of the laboratory, while Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov operate systems in the Russian segment.
“It will be great to see the crew of crew 1 go through that hatch, and we will certainly welcome them aboard because with more crew members, we can spend a lot more time doing scientific research and experiments,” Rubins said before launch.
“There is a certain amount of time we have to spend just on station maintenance, and with only one or two crew members from US and international partners, it’s hard to get all the science we want to accomplish. So having all these extra crew members means we can achieve this much more scientifically. “
The station’s life support systems, including water recycling equipment and carbon dioxide removal tools, were upgraded to support a seven-member crew, and additional stores and supplies were installed.
But the US segment of the station only has four “rest stations” for the crew, and Hopkins plans to bunks with a sleeping bag in the off Crew Dragon. A new crew compartment is expected to be launched next year.
Hopefully, Hopkins, Glover, Walker, and Noguchi will spend 165 days aboard the space station, welcoming four freighters along the way. More spacewalks are planned to equip an external experimental platform on the European Space Agency’s Columbus science module and to upgrade the station’s solar power system.
And during their stay, the crew will focus on a wide variety of experiments and research projects.
The next Crew Dragon, carrying Crew 2 astronauts Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, is scheduled to launch around March 30. Three Russians – Oleg Novitsky, Pyotr Dubrov and Sergey Korsakov – will arrive aboard a Soyuz on 10 April, briefly bringing the station crew to 11.
Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins return to Earth a week later, on April 17, with a landing in the steppe of Kazakhstan. Hopkins and his crew 1 colleagues will follow suit around May 1, splashing into the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral or the Gulf of Mexico south of Pensacola, depending on the weather.
This will leave Kimbrough and his crew 2 colleagues aboard the station along with Novitsky, Dubrov and Korsakov until the next crew dragon arrives in the fall.
“We’re considering seven crew members are roughly our steady state going forward,” said Kenny Todd, NASA’s space station integration manager. “You may have periods where you will have a couple of vehicles and a larger crew during certain delivery periods. But the steady-state crew size will be seven. “
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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