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We are probably a few days away from the first full crew SpaceX launch.
Elon Musk’s company has launched two people into space so far: NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, who traveled to the International Space Station on May 30 aboard a mounted Crew Dragon capsule. on a Falcon 9 rocket. This test flight, called DEMO-2, marked the very first commercial crewed launch and the first launch from US soil since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. But it was a test flight, with only two astronauts on board, lasting just 64 days with most of that time in zero-gravity spent on the International Space Station (ISS). On November 14, if all goes as planned, four astronauts will take a Crew Dragon to the ISS and stay on the space station for six months. It will mark the beginning of the era of practical commercial spaceflight.
The mission, called CREW-1, will deliver four of the seven members of Expedition 64 to the ISS: NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Expedition 64 is the term used to refer to this 64th group of people who live and work long term on the ISS.
The four began quarantining on October 31, a standard pre-launch move with added significance in the COVID-19 era, and arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., For final preparations. November 8.
Related: Here’s every spacecraft that ever carried an astronaut into orbit
(The three other members of Expedition 64, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, as well as NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins, are already on board the ISS, having arrived on October 14 in a capsule Russian Soyuz.)
Expedition 64 will last until April 18, 2021, and will increase the ISS’s usual occupancy rate from six to seven. (The Crew Dragon capsule will remain in place, docked to the ISS, all the time.) Astronauts will have work to do outside of the station: from spacewalks to igniting a suite of currently inactive scientific instruments strapped outside the station.
CREW-2’s biggest question
The Crew Dragon capsule has achieved at least one successful astronaut launch in Earth orbit. But some concerns about the equipment remain.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket – part of a fleet that has been in use for years with good results – aborted seconds before launch from Vandenberg Air Base on October 2. This is the same type of rocket that is expected to carry CREW-1’s Crew Dragon capsule into space.
The aborted rocket, like Space News reported, was supposed to launch a GPS satellite. But a red “masking lacquer” used to protect engine components had blocked a wastegate in a SpaceX Merlin engine used on the Falcon 9, making it unsafe to use.
Tests of other Merlin engines have revealed similar problems, including two intended for the CREW-1 engine and one intended for the now-delayed ocean satellite launch on November 10. SpaceX replaced these engines, as well as the GPS 3 launch engines. The GPS 3 satellite successfully launched on November 5, indicating that the replacement engines have done their job.
Yet CREW-1 will only be the second launch since the Merlin engine issue. Everything indicates that it will proceed without a hitch at 7:49 p.m. EST on Saturday, November 14 (12:49 a.m. GMT on November 15) and will reach the ISS 8.5 hours later.
If weather conditions delay the launch from November 14 to November 15, NASA said it would then take the Crew Dragon 27.5 hours to reach the ISS.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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