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SpaceX’s first commercial crew flight to take off on Sunday
This trip will be SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft’s first voyage after NASA certified it for regular flights to the ISS as part of its Commercial Crew Program, following a successful initial test flight on May 31 with two astronauts
The SpaceX flight, which will take four astronauts into space for a NASA human mission, will take off from Florida on Sunday after being delayed due to bad weather.
The launch is now scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 7:27 pm Eastern Time on Sunday (around 5.57 am IST).
The Crew 1 launch is scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Centre with Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Soichi Noguchi on-board a Falcon 9 rocket.
The astronauts are scheduled to dock at the International Space Station (ISS) exactly 27 hours after the launch.
This trip will be SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft’s first voyage after NASA certified it for regular flights to the ISS as part of its Commercial Crew Program, following a successful initial test flight on May 31 with two astronauts.
Besides being the US space agency’s first commercial launch, the Crew-1 mission is also the first NASA-staffed mission licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The regulator is undertaking responsibility for public safety because the flight is to be carried out by a commercial company, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The crew has named the spacecraft ‘Resilience’. Hopkins will be the Crew Dragon Commander while Glover the pilot. Both Walker and Noguchi are mission specialists.
NASA and SpaceX will use the learnings from the August 2 test flight to make this mission better. The company has bolstered parts of the Dragon’s heat shield, strengthened some areas of the capsule so it can hold out against rougher seas, and fine-tuned so that the landing parachutes deploy at a slightly higher altitude. When the crew returns in the spring of 2021 NASA will ensure a larger flotilla of Coast Guard ships is deployed to keep recreational boaters away
The four astronauts will remain onboard the ISS and join their three teammates who are already docked there. The four will be replaced in the spring by yet another crew launched by SpaceX.
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