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SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule which will transport four astronauts to the International Space Station this weekend has reached the launch pad.
The capsule, named Resilience, and its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was deployed to Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida from Monday to Tuesday (November 9-10), NASA officials said.
The Falcon 9 is slated for launch on Saturday evening (November 14), sending four astronauts – NASA’s Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japanese Soichi Noguchi – to the orbiting lab on Crew-1, SpaceX’s first operational astronaut mission for NASA.
Live Updates: SpaceX Astronaut Crew-1 launched for NASA
However, there are some important boxes that need to be checked before this can happen. Two of those milestones will occur today (November 10), if all goes as planned – a Falcon 9 ‘static fire’, in which the rocket motors explode while the booster remains attached to the ground, and the Completion of Crew Flight Readiness Review 1. (Update for 2:50 p.m. EST November 10: The flight readiness review is complete and the launch remains scheduled for November 14.)
NASA’s Commercial Crew Program awarded SpaceX a $ 2.6 billion contract in 2014 to perform at least six manned operational missions to the space station. The six-month Crew-1 is the first of those contract flights, but it won’t be SpaceX’s very first astronaut mission. That accolade goes to Demo-2, a test flight that sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the station for two months last summer.
Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 in the hangar of Launch Complex 39A before the launch of four astronauts to the @space_station; take-off scheduled for Saturday, November 14 at 7:49 p.m. EST pic.twitter.com/dlMrPUpr4dNovember 9, 2020
Boeing also entered into a commercial crew contract with NASA in 2014, worth $ 4.2 billion. The aerospace giant will fulfill the deal using a capsule called CST-100 Starliner, which is not yet ready to fly astronauts. Starliner must first pass an unmanned test flight to the in-orbit lab, a mission the capsule first attempted in December 2019. This attempt failed after a problem trapped Starliner in an orbit too low to allow a meeting with the station.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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