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SpaceX is preparing for another historic astronaut launch next month.
A private space flight company plans to send four astronauts to NASA’s International Space Station on November 14. announced by the agency on Monday (26 October). This mission, called Crew-1, will be the first operational flight of the DragonX astronaut taxi from SpaceX and the second mission for the Dragon crew to carry passengers on board. SpaceX Missile Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:49 PM EST (November 15, 0049 GMT).
NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins and Japanese Space Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who will spend about six months in an orbital laboratory before returning to Earth, will ride the Dragon. The first passengers on the Dragon crew were NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who spent 62 days on the International Space Station as part of the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission earlier this year.
In the photos: a historic test flight from SpaceX Demo-2 with astronauts
Crew-1, originally scheduled for launch on August 30, faced numerous delays in exiting the country. NASA moved the mission to late September, then October 23, then October 31, and finally early mid-November, citing logistical and technical issues. The target date just announced reinforces this latter timeline.
The latest delay was to give “SpaceX more time to complete hardware tests and data checks as the company evaluates the abnormal behavior of Falcon 9 first-stage gas generators observed during a recent attempt to launch a mission outside NASA. “NASA officials said in a blog post. on SpaceX stopped the launch of the GPS satellite on October 2.
SpaceX is not yet the only company working to launch astronauts into space on behalf of NASA. Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which failed to reach the International Space Station during its first test flight last year, is expected to launch a second unmanned demonstration mission in January 2021, with the first manned flight following the next summer.
If all goes according to plan, crew 1 astronauts will anchor safely at the International Space Station after a 19-hour flight. There, he joins Expedition 64 crew members with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhkov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov.
Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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