SpaceX Crew Dragon launch has been delayed for 24 hours due to bad weather

NASA and high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX space company announced on Friday a 24-hour weather delay for their planned launch of four astronauts into orbit for NASA’s first full-fledged human mission using a spacecraft of private property.

Take-off time slipped from Saturday to Sunday evening due to forecasts of wind gusts over Florida – remnants of tropical storm Eta – that would make a return landing difficult for the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable booster stage, they said. NASA officials.

SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed “Resilience” by its crew, has been rescheduled for launch on Falcon 9 at 7:27 pm Eastern time Sunday (0027 GMT Monday) 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 US Air Force colonel who is to be sworn in the fledgling US space force once aboard the orbiting laboratory.

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 so-called test vehicle flight to and from the space station with two crew members aboard the Dragon in August marked the first NASA astronaut spaceflight 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,” NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said Friday at a press conference at Kennedy Space Center.

Musk, the Silicon Valley billionaire titan, who is also CEO of electric car maker and battery maker Tesla, usually attends high-profile SpaceX missions in person. But its presence for the launch was questioned on Thursday after it said it had carried out a series of four diagnostic tests for the coronavirus, two of which were positive and two negative.

Asked if Musk was in the launch control room for take-off, Bridenstine said the agency’s policy required employees to quarantine and self-isolate after testing positive for the disease, “so we expect that to happen.”

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 competing space capsules to replace the shuttle program that ended in 2011 and wean the United States from dependence on Russian rockets to send US astronauts into space.

Boeing’s first manned test mission with its Starliner capsule is scheduled for late next year.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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