Delay of the launch by NASA-SpaceX of the next crew of the International Space Station

The next launch window for a NASA crew to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX spacecraft has been pushed back by at least two days, no earlier than April 22, the space agency said.

SpaceX, the private rocket company of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, was previously scheduled to put its second “operational” space station team into orbit for NASA at the end of March. But NASA announced in January that the target date had moved to April 20.

The schedule was again adjusted based on available flight times to the space station driven by orbital mechanics, which would minimize astronauts’ need for sleep, NASA spokesman Dan said on Monday. Huot.

The flight marks just the second full-fledged space station crew rotation mission launched aboard a private spacecraft – a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule it will carry into orbit.

The four-member SpaceX Crew-2 consists of two NASA astronauts, mission commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur, as well as Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and fellow mission specialist Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency.

After docking at the space station, they will join the four SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts who arrived in November and the cosmonauts transported to the orbiting outpost aboard a Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft.

The newly arrived Crew-2 is scheduled to stay in orbit for six months, while Crew-1 is scheduled to return to earth in early May.

McArthur will become the second person in his family to ride a Crew Dragon in space. Her husband, Bob Behnken, was one of two NASA astronauts on Crew Dragon’s very first launch, a test flight last August marking NASA’s first human orbital mission from American soil in nine years, after the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.