The next SpaceX commercial crew mission will launch in April

WASHINGTON – The second SpaceX commercial crew operational mission to the International Space Station will now launch in mid-April, carrying astronauts from Europe, Japan and the United States.

NASA said on Jan.29 that it had set an April 20 launch date for the Crew-2 mission at the station. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur will be the commander and pilot, respectively, with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency Thomas Pesquet as mission specialists.

The four will replace the Crew-1 astronauts who flew to the station in November on the first operational Crew Dragon mission. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will return to this spacecraft in late April or early May, assuming Crew-2 launches its current program.

NASA earlier announced an early launch date for Crew-2 on March 30. However, she delayed the mission to allow the Orbital Flight Test 2 mission not equipped with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle to launch no earlier than March 25. for a mission of about a week. Starliner and Crew Dragon dock at one of the station’s two ports, one of which is occupied by the Crew-1 Crew Dragon spacecraft.

The delay to April 20 also includes a Soyuz spacecraft, Soyuz MS-18, scheduled to launch around April 10. It will bring three Russian cosmonauts to the station, the Soyuz MS-17 returning to Earth a week later with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins on board.

“Around mid-March, we’ll really start to speed up our preparations for conducting tour vehicle operations,” Kenny Todd, NASA deputy director of the ISS program, said in a Jan. 22 briefing on an upcoming round. of spacewalks. at the station.

During the briefing, he did not give a timetable for these missions. “We are still working with our Russian colleagues as well as the Commercial Crew Program to firm up the schedules for Soyuz 64S and Crew-2 flights,” he said in a Jan. 27 statement to SpaceNews, using the NASA designation for Soyuz MS -18. “Both flights are currently targeting spring 2021, but specific launch dates have yet to be finalized.”

Two of Crew 1’s astronauts, Hopkins and Glover, performed the first in a series of spacewalks on January 27, working on the exterior of the Columbus module to support the Bartolomeo external payload platform and install a new communication antenna there. A second spacewalk on February 1 will complete the installation of a new battery for the station’s electrical system.

Another pair of spacewalks are tentatively scheduled for late February or early March, Todd said at the briefing. These would take place after the arrival of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft currently slated for launch on February 20.