Astronauts rehearse for launch day as mission managers watch the weather – Spaceflight Now

The four astronauts preparing to go into orbit with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” climbed aboard their spacecraft Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in a training run for a launch to the International Space Station scheduled for Saturday night.

Meanwhile, NASA and SpaceX officials have been tracking downstream weather and sea conditions that could cause problems for the recovery of the reusable first stage thruster from the Falcon 9 rocket or the Crew Dragon itself in emergency in flight.

NASA Commander Mike Hopkins, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Shannon Walker and Japanese Astronaut Soichi Noguchi donned their black and white flight suits Thursday and climbed inside Tesla SUVs from their quarters in crew at the Falcon 9 oceanfront launch complex.

They boarded an elevator to the launch tower, passed through the crew’s access arm, and entered their Crew Dragon spacecraft above the 215-foot-tall Falcon 9 launcher (63 meters). . Hours later, the astronauts exited the capsule and returned to the crew quarters inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout building in Kennedy.

Engineers continued to assess data from a Falcon 9 rocket test firing on Wednesday ahead of a launch readiness review on Friday, in which SpaceX and NASA officials will decide whether to make an attempted launch Saturday at 7:49 p.m. EST (0049 GMT Sunday).

Kathy Lueders, associate administrator of the NASA Exploration and Human Exploitation Mission Directorate, said Thursday there were no significant technical issues being discussed leading to the readiness review. at launch.

“We’re obviously looking at the weather,” Lueders said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “The weather is a big problem, the weather for several regions.”

Tropical Storm Eta moved across the northern Florida peninsula on Thursday and is expected to move northeast into the Atlantic Ocean. By Saturday, the remnants of the cyclone are expected to be east of the Canadian Maritime provinces.

The Falcon 9 rocket will head northeast off Florida’s space coast to align with the space station’s orbital path.

Mission managers will track winds, wave conditions, lightning and precipitation at more than 50 locations in the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of the United States, east of Canada and just east. west of Ireland. The Crew Dragon capsule could abort and splash in these areas if the launch failed, and rescue teams would be dispatched to retrieve the astronauts.

A weather forecast released Thursday for the Falcon 9 launch opportunity on Saturday evening shows a 70% chance of favorable conditions for takeoff from Florida spaceport. The main weather concern is cumulus clouds, according to the 45th Weather Squadron of the US Space Force.

The forecast does not take into account the wind and wave conditions along the Crew Dragon spacecraft’s ascent corridor across the Atlantic, nor the upper wind criteria for the Falcon 9’s climb into the atmosphere.

Lueders said SpaceX and NASA officials are also monitoring the process of the football-sized drone that will be used to land the Falcon 9’s first-stage thruster.

“The drone we need for the first landing stage is coming out today,” Lueders told Spaceflight Now. “And with the way the seas are, and the way Eta is, we’re watching how fast this drone can get through… So we’ll also be talking about that tomorrow in our launch readiness review, where exactly is it? Can it be organized in time for us to launch it on Saturday? “

Saturday night’s launch will kick off the Crew-1 mission, the first “operational” astronaut flight on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Hopkins and his teammates will spend six months living and working on the International Space Station, before returning the Crew Dragon to Earth for a parachute-assisted sea dive.

Crew Dragon’s next launch, tentatively targeted for March 30, 2021, with a new space station crew of four, will use the same reusable Falcon 9 booster flying with the Crew-1 mission.

“Obviously the weather on the landing for the first leg is a big deal,” Lueders said. “This is the stage we’ll be using for Crew-2, so we care. Not that we never care, but it’s a big step.

Lueders said NASA has a spare rocket available for the Crew-2 launch in case SpaceX is unable to land the Falcon 9 booster on the Crew-1 mission. If there is an issue with the recovery of the Crew-1 rocket, NASA plans to launch the Crew-2 mission with the Falcon 9 booster which is expected to launch the Sentinel-6 oceanographic satellite Michael Freilich later this month in California, Lueders said.

“We have a backup in case anything happens at that particular stage, but we did all of our inspections on that stage,” Lueders said. “We did all the work. We understand the material. So we would really like to use it because it makes Crew-2’s job easier.

“One of the things we are looking at is using the Sentinel-6 booster, because it’s a booster that we also looked at,” Lueders said. “There will have been a theft on it. But… there are a few more out there. The good thing about SpaceX is that there is a range of hardware that we can use. “

SpaceX’s “Just Read the Instructions” drone left Port Canaveral on Thursday, heading for a position a few hundred miles northeast of Cape Canaveral.

“The second place where we worry about the weather … is the launch weather,” Lueders said Thursday. “Then we have to watch the weather up to the abandonment runway, so we’ll look at all of these when we take our launch readiness exam tomorrow, and then see if we go for the first day, following a way to target a launch on Saturday night or if we go to Sunday. “

A backup launch opportunity is available at 7:27 PM EST Sunday (12:27 AM GMT Monday).

Once launched, the Crew Dragon will pilot an automated rendezvous profile to connect to the space station, where Hopkins and his teammates will join three other crew members currently living and working on the space station.

NASA officials officially certified SpaceX to pilot astronauts during a two-day flight readiness review Monday and Tuesday, capping a ten-year effort to design, develop and test the Crew Dragon spacecraft , the Falcon 9 rocket at human rate and validate the SpaceX ground systems.

The test program culminated in the test flight of a Crew Dragon capsule earlier this year with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board.

SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday afternoon on platform 39A, a day later than originally planned. SpaceX lowered the rocket to pad 39A to replace components of the second stage purge system.

Lueders said NASA and SpaceX pushed back the launch readiness exam a day after the Falcon 9 test firing was delayed.

“So with this shift from Tuesday to Wednesday we decided to move the LRR to Friday to make sure the team still had a few days to go through the data and make sure we are ready to go,” Lueders said. ‘said.

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