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NASA and high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX space company announced a 24-hour weather delay for their planned launch of four astronauts into orbit for NASA’s first full-fledged human mission using a proprietary spacecraft private.
Take-off time slipped from Saturday to Sunday evening due to forecasts of wind gusts over Florida – remnants of tropical storm Eta – that would have made it difficult for the Falcon 9 rocket to return to the reusable booster stage. NASA officials said.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule has been rescheduled for launch on top of Falcon 9 at 7:27 PM EST Sunday (11.27 AM AEDT 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 this week, concluding a nearly 10-year development phase for SpaceX as part of the space agency’s public-private crew program.
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