The NASA and SpaceX aim to make the first operational flight with astronauts from the Crew Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station in late October.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission, within its program for contracting private spacecraft for trips to low Earth orbit, It will be the first of regular rotation missions to the space station once NASA certification is complete, the news agency reported. DPA.
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The mission will feature Crew Dragon commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Shannon Walker, all from NASA, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission specialist Soichi Noguchi, for a scientific mission of six months aboard the orbiting laboratory after launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Crew-1 will be released at the end of October to accommodate spacecraft traffic for the upcoming Soyuz crew rotation and better meet the needs of the International Space Station.
The launch will follow the arrival of NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos aboard their Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft and the departure of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner from the station.
The Crew-1 mission is awaiting completion of data reviews and certification following NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight, which successfully launched NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the International Space Station on May 30 and returned them home safely with a splashdown off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico on August 2.
Demo-2 was the first manned flight test of a privately owned, privately operated human space system.
NASA’s certification of SpaceX’s crew transportation system allows the agency to regularly transport astronauts to the space station, ending Russia’s exclusive reliance on space station access.
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