SpaceX and NASA are officially “gone” to continue the launch of four astronauts at the International Space Station next week, with the completion on Thursday (April 15) of a critical examination of flight readiness.
The Crew-2 mission is scheduled to end next Thursday (April 22), which happens to be Earth Day. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and a Crew Dragon spacecraft will be launched from the historic Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the second flight of this special Dragon Crew; The same capsule, called the Endeavor, carried NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to and from the space station last year for the Demo-2 test flight.
Inside the crew’s dragon will be four members of the Expedition 65 crew, who will spend about six months in space: NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Akihiko Hoshide of the Japanese Airspace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the Agency. European Space Agency (ESA).
Related: SpaceX Crew-2 astronaut mission for NASA: live updates
“The flight readiness review was very successful; we had one exception,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s head of human spaceflight, said Thursday. “It needs to be clarified in the next few days, because it needs to be resolved before the static fire [test]”, which is currently scheduled for Saturday (April 17th), she added. (Static fires, in which rocket engines are ignited while the vehicle remains anchored to the ground, are a regular pre-flight check.)
Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of flight construction and reliability at SpaceX (and former head of NASA’s human spaceflight), said at the same news conference that the teams “discovered that there is a potential loading error that we could load little extra oxygen in ours [Falcon 9] “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 missiles use liquid oxygen and quality kerosene for fuel missiles.
Gerstenmaier added that other Falcon 9 missions have successfully flown in the same configuration, but SpaceX recently discovered the problem while testing the missile on the ground in Texas. The company detected slightly higher levels of liquid oxygen than expected, but did not yet find out the cause of this discrepancy.
“We discussed this with the NASA team today, but we didn’t have enough time to analyze all the data and all the consequences of what that might mean,” he said. “We’ll take it a step further” to review the issue and determine if it could pose a risk to astronauts (or other future Falcon 9 launches).
If the liquid oxygen problem is resolved as expected and everything else goes according to plan, crew-2 will depart at 6:11 a.m. EDT (1011 GMT) on April 22 and dock at the International Space Station just over 23 hours later. late at 5:30 AM EDT (0930 GMT) on April 23rd. A final analysis of the preparation for the launch is scheduled for April 20.
A backup release window is available on April 23rd. After that, Crew-2 could launch on either April 26 or April 27, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, told a news conference.
You can watch the Crew-2 mission live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.
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