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CAP CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – Four astronauts flew to the Kennedy Space Center for SpaceX’s second crew launch on Sunday next weekend.
For NASA, this marks the long-awaited start of regular crew rotations to the International Space Station, with private companies providing the elevators. There will be twice as many astronauts as the test flight earlier this year, and their mission will last a full six months.
The crew of three Americans and a Japanese should leave on Saturday evening. It will be a quick trip to the space station, a six-orbital express that will last less than nine hours.
The astronauts named their capsule Dragon Resilience in the face of all the challenges of 2020: coronavirus and social isolation, civil unrest and a particularly difficult electoral and electoral season. They have been in quarantine for a week and are taking security measures – masks and social distancing – long before that.
The four will remain in orbit until spring, when their replacements arrive aboard another SpaceX Dragon capsule. The cargo version of the capsule will also continue to make regular deliveries of food and supplies.
SpaceX’s Benji Reed said the company plans to launch seven Dragons over the next 14 months: three for crew and four for cargo.
“Every time there is a Dragon launch, there will be two Dragons in space,” said Reed, director of crew mission management.
NASA’s other hired taxi service, Boeing, is not expected to fly its first crew until next summer. The company is planning a second unmanned test flight in a few months; the former suffered so many software problems that the Starliner capsule failed to reach the space station.
NASA turned to private companies for space station deliveries – cargo, then crew – after the shuttle fleet withdrew in 2011. US astronauts continued to hitchhike on Russian rockets at prices of higher and higher. The last Soyuz ticket cost NASA $ 90 million.
SpaceX finally ended NASA’s nearly ten-year launch drought for astronauts last May, successfully delivering a pair of test pilots to the space station from Kennedy for a two-month stay. The return capsule was scrutinized by SpaceX after its splashdown, resulting in some changes for this second flight.
Engineers found excessive heat shield erosion from scorching reentry temperatures; The company has reinforced the vulnerable section for the upcoming launch, said Hans Koenigsmann of SpaceX, vice president. Improvements were also made to the parachute altitude measurement system, after the falls opened a little too low during the astronauts’ first flight. More recently, the Falcon rocket had two engines replaced due to the contamination of a red lacquer used in the treatment. Engine swaps delayed the flight by two weeks.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the SpaceX crew’s first flight was all the private boats full of gawkers that circled the capsule in the Gulf of Mexico following the August splash. Koenigsmann promises a larger exclusion zone and more patrols for future returns.
The second crew has three veteran pilots and a first timekeeper:
–Commandant Mike Hopkins, 51, is an Air Force colonel and former space station resident who grew up on a pig and beef farm in Missouri.
– Marine Cmdr. Victor Glover, 44, is the pilot and the only space recruit; he is from the Los Angeles area and will be the first African-American astronaut to settle in the space station for an extended stay.
– Shannon Walker, 55, a physicist born and raised in Houston, also previously lived on the space station; her husband, retired astronaut Andrew Thomas, helped build the outpost.
– Soichi Noguchi, 55 of the Japanese Space Agency, another former resident of the station, will become the first person in decades to launch on three types of rockets; he once flew on an American and Russian space shuttle Soyuz.
They will join two Russians and an American who arrived at the space station last month from Kazakhstan.
Hopkins and his crew will travel to the launch pad at Teslas – the other company of SpaceX founder Elon Musk – in color-coordinated space suits with the spacecraft. But underneath all of that good looks, there are “a lot of amazing abilities,” according to Glover.
“It’s a very elegant capsule. But it has the advantage of having great technological advancements since the last time we built spaceships here in this country, ”Walker said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Noguchi, who along with Walker joined the crew this year, is particularly excited to ride a Dragon. In Japan, the dragon is an esteemed mythical creature – “almost a walk in paradise”.
“It’s really a privilege to learn to train the dragon, to ride a dragon,” he said. “SpaceX did a really good job of teaching zero to the Dragon Rider in six months.”
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The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science receives support from the Department of Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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