The astronauts head to the launch site for the second flight of the SpaceX crew

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida – Four astronauts headed to Kennedy Space Center on Sunday for the second SpaceX crew launch, coming next weekend.

For NASA, it marks the long-awaited start of regular crew rotations at the International Space Station, with private companies providing the elevators. The number of astronauts will double compared to the test flight earlier this year and their mission will last six full months.

The crew of three Americans and one Japanese will depart on Saturday evening. It will be a quick trip to the space station, a six-orbit express lasting less than nine hours.

The astronauts called their dragon capsule Resilience given all the challenges of 2020: coronavirus and social isolation, civil unrest and a particularly difficult election and campaign season. They were in quarantine for a week and took safety precautions – masks and social distancing – much earlier.

The four will remain in orbit until spring, when their replacements arrive aboard another SpaceX Dragon capsule. The cargo version of the capsule will also continue to make regular deliveries of food and supplies.

SpaceX’s Benji Reed said the company plans to launch seven Dragons over the next 14 months: three for the crew and four for the cargo.

“Whenever there is a Dragon launch, there will be two dragons in space,” said Reed, director of crew mission management.

The other taxi service hired by NASA, meanwhile, Boeing, is not expected to fly its first crew until next summer. The company plans a second unmanned test flight in a couple of months; the former suffered so many software problems that the Starliner capsule was unable to reach the space station.

NASA turned to private companies for space station deliveries – freight, then crew – after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. US astronauts continued to hitchhike Russian rockets at increasingly high prices. The latest Soyuz ticket cost NASA $ 90 million.

SpaceX finally ended NASA’s nearly decade-long launch drought for astronauts last May, successfully delivering a couple of test pilots to the space station from Kennedy for a two-month stay. The return capsule was examined by SpaceX after its abandonment, resulting in some modifications for this second flight.

Engineers discovered excessive heat shield erosion due to burning re-entry temperatures; the company has backed the vulnerable section for the upcoming launch, said Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of SpaceX. Improvements were also made to the altitude measurement system for the parachutes, after the slides opened a bit too low during the astronaut’s first flight. More recently, the Falcon rocket had two engines replaced due to contamination from a red lacquer used in processing. The engine change delayed the flight by two weeks.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the SpaceX crew’s first flight was all the private boats full of onlookers that surrounded the capsule in the Gulf of Mexico after the crash in August. Koenigsmann promises a larger exclusion zone and more patrols for future returns.

The second crew has three veteran aviators and a first timer:

– Commander Mike Hopkins, 51, is an Air Force colonel and former space station resident who grew up on a pig and cattle farm in Missouri.

– Navy Cmdr. Victor Glover, 44, is the pilot and lone space rookie; he comes from the Los Angeles area and will be the first African American astronaut to move to the space station for a long stay.

– Shannon Walker, 55, a physicist born and raised in Houston, has previously lived on the space station; her husband, retired astronaut Andrew Thomas, helped build the outpost.

– Soichi Noguchi, 55 of the Japanese Space Agency, another former resident of the station, will become the first person in decades to launch on three types of spaceships; he has already flown on a US space shuttle and a Russian Soyuz.

They will join two Russians and an American who arrived at the space station last month from Kazakhstan.

Hopkins and his crew will reach the launch pad in Teslas – the other company of SpaceX founder Elon Musk – in color-coordinated spacesuits with the spacecraft. But underneath all the good looks there is “a lot of amazing capabilities,” according to Glover.

“It is a very elegant capsule. But it has the advantage of making great strides in technology since we last built spacecraft here in this country, ”Walker said in a recent interview with the Associated Press.

Noguchi, who along with Walker joined the crew just this year, is particularly excited about riding a dragon. In Japan, the dragon is an esteemed mythical creature – “almost a race to heaven”.

“It is a real privilege to learn how to actually train the dragon, how to ride a dragon,” he said. “SpaceX did a great job teaching the Dragon Rider from scratch in six months.”

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