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NASA and the private company SpaceX Preparations continue for the next manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS), whose protagonists, three Americans and one Japanese, are already in Cape Canaveral, for takeoff this Saturday if tropical storm Eta permits. Cosmic rays to X-ray volcanoes)
NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with Soichi Noguchi of JAXA, the space agency of Japan, arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Sunday to join the preparations and testing of the Crew-1 capsule, which will be launched into space by a reusable Falcon 9 rocket.
“We are ready,” said in a meeting with the press and curious Hopkins, commander of the mission, after thanking their families, NASA, the Department of Defense and SpaceX, the company of Elon Musk, also owner of Tesla.
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“Make no mistake: every flight is a test flight when it comes to space travel. But it is also true that we must be able to go to the International Space Station regularly,” said the NASA administrator. Jim
Bridenstine, welcoming astronauts to Kennedy station on Sunday.
After the flight has been postponed for two weeks (the start date was October 31), takeoff is scheduled for 19:49 (00.49 GMT) from the historic platform 39A, provided that persistent tropical storm Eta does not prevent it. .
The Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule, from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center.
After leaving doom and doom in Central America and hitting the island of Cuba and the Florida Keys, Eta will strengthen in the Gulf of Mexico waters during the week to land on Florida’s northwest coast Saturday morning and maintain a trajectory in which Cape Canaveral appears as an area of interest.
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Weather permitting, the Crew-1 mission will continue the historic Demo-2 test voyage that took off on May 30 and that took astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS.
After two months they returned to earth in the same capsule, which fell in the Gulf of Mexico in a controlled and problem-free manner on 2 August.
On this occasion the mission will double the number of crew members and will spend six months in the ISS, where they will arrive after about eight and a half hours of travel and where they will join the astronaut of the NASA Kate Rubins and her Russian colleagues Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Serchkov.
Team members are scheduled to test the capsule’s engines on Tuesday. Last month, a problem was discovered in the Falcon 9 rocket engines during a flight not related to NASA’s schedule.
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Hans Koenigsmann, Vice President for Construction and Flight Reliability of SpaceX, In a press conference he explained that on that flight a GPS system automatically stopped its operation in the last seconds of the countdown, because “two engines tried to start earlier”.
Further investigation revealed that a substance, a kind of “paint” very common in the aerospace industry, as specialists say, was blocking an exhaust valve.
Crew-1 will be the first of at least six missions SpaceX rHe will lead the ISS with a $ 2.6 billion contract with NASA signed in 2014.
EFE
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