A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is ready for NASA’s first operational commercial crew mission.
Washington:
NASA and high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX on Friday announced a 24-hour weather delay on the planned launch of four astronauts into orbit for NASA’s first full-fledged human mission using a private spaceship.
Take-off time slipped from Saturday to Sunday evening due to forecast gusty winds over the Florida coast – remnants of Tropical Storm Eta – which would have made it difficult for a return landing for the reusable booster stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, NASA officials said.
SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed “Resilience” by its crew, has been postponed for the Falcon 9 summit launch at 7:27 pm Eastern Time Sunday (0027 GMT Monday) from Kennedy Space Center at the NASA at Cape Canaveral.
The crew for the flight to the International Space Station includes three US astronauts – Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and mission commander Mike Hopkins, a US Air Force colonel who is to be sworn in into the new US Space Force an times aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The fourth crew member is Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third trip to orbit after flying the US space shuttle in 2005 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2009.
The trip to the space station – lengthened from about eight hours to just over a day by the new launch time – is considered SpaceX’s first “operational” mission for the Crew Dragon.
A so-called test flight of the vehicle to and from the space station with two crew members aboard the Dragon in August marked the first NASA astronaut space flight launched from US soil in nine years after the end of the shuttle program.
NASA officials just signed off on the final Crew Dragon design earlier this week, closing an almost 10-year development phase for SpaceX as part of the space agency’s public-private crew program.
The advent of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon represents a new era of commercially developed space vehicles – owned and operated by a private entity rather than NASA – used to transport Americans into orbit.
“The story made this time around is that we are launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday.
Mr. Musk, the billionaire titan of Silicon Valley, who is also the managing director of electric car and battery maker Tesla Inc, usually attends high profile SpaceX missions in person. But his presence for the launch was questioned Thursday after he said he had undergone a series of four coronavirus diagnostic tests, two of which came back positive and two negative.
When asked if Mr. Musk would be in the launch control room for take-off, Mr. Bridenstine said agency policy required employees to quarantine and self-isolate after taking off. tested positive for the disease, “so we expect that to happen.”
Whether Mr. Musk came in contact with the astronauts was unclear but unlikely since the crew had been in routine quarantine for weeks before the flight.
NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to develop competing space capsules to replace the shuttle program that ended in 2011 and to wean the United States from dependence on Russian rockets to send American astronauts into space. .
Boeing’s first crewed test mission with its Starliner capsule is scheduled for late next year.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
