SpaceX NASA Next Launch: When to Watch It

On Sunday in Florida, a SpaceX-built rocket and capsule will transport crew members to the International Space Station. The NASA mission follows a successful demonstration of the same spacecraft that launched in May and brought two astronauts back to Earth in August. Here’s what you need to know about launch.

What is SpaceX launching?

Four astronauts, three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will be seated inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, propelled into orbit around a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1 and the astronauts they called their Resilient Capsule. They are heading to the International Space Station for a six month stay.

This is the first of what NASA calls the Crew Dragon “operational” flights. In May, there was a demonstration mission, with two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on board. That launch, in a capsule called Endeavor, was the first time a manned mission took off from the United States into orbit since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles in 2011. Its return was also the first water landing of astronauts to aboard an American spacecraft. since the Apollo capsules stopped flying in the 1970s.

NASA relied on Russian Soyuz rockets to bring its astronauts to the space station. It got more and more expensive, costing over $ 90 million per seat.