Preparations for Thursday’s planned takeoff of a four-person Dragon SpaceX capsule to the International Space Station on Tuesday approved another availability analysis at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but officials are looking at marginal wind and sea conditions in the areas. remote abortion Atlantic Ocean that could force a launch delay.
With no significant technical issues in the way of launch on Thursday, NASA and SpaceX officials made an “attempt” to continue flight preparations at the conclusion of a Launch Readiness Review early Tuesday.
The takeoff of the Crew Dragon Endeavor spacecraft over a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set for 6:11:35 a.m. EDT (1011:35 GMT) on Thursday from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
It will be the first time astronauts will launch a Falcon 9 rocket powered by a first-stage flight amplifier and the first reuse of a Crew Dragon spacecraft. The mission, known as Crew-2, is the third SpaceX flight with astronauts in general.
NASA astronauts and managers are comfortable with SpaceX’s reuse plan. The company successfully flew 57 missions using recycled Falcon boosters.
Launch Readiness Review early Tuesday was the last major meeting to eliminate the Crew-2 mission for takeoff on Thursday.
“Safety was number one in all of these reviews and it should be,” said Norm Knight, deputy director of flight operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Houston. This business of human spaceflight is not forgiving. It is the vigilance of the teams that guarantees continuous safety and was certainly present in these reviews this week. ”
NASA managers have eliminated a previous technical concern associated with SpaceX’s loading of liquid oxygen fuel in the first stage of the Falcon 9 missile.
SpaceX recently discovered during a ground test in Texas that it was easily filling the oxidizer tank with a very cold liquid oxygen tank. A company official said last week that SpaceX had loaded more liquid oxygen into the rocket throughout the history of Falcon 9 flights, which includes more than 100 missions since 2010.
Steve Stich, the program manager of NASA’s commercial crew, said an analysis showed that the Falcon 9 rocket is good to go without changing SpaceX’s loading procedures.
“We concluded that the amount of liquid oxygen in the first stage was part of the navigation and control analysis and performance analysis family, within the vehicle’s loads and structural capacity,” Stitch told a news conference on Tuesday. .
Engineers have also shown that the Falcon 9 rocket can solve last-minute abortions and other situations with extra liquid oxygen on board.
“So we were going to do that amount of LOX (liquid oxygen) on the vehicle,” Stich said.
The only concern observed by officials on Tuesday was related to weather and sea conditions along the Falcon 9 missile flight corridor, northeast of Cape Canaveral. Officials monitor winds, sea conditions and lightning in areas where the Crew Dragon capsule could splash in an in-flight emergency.
The weather forecast for the Florida launch site looks good, with an 80% chance of acceptable takeoff conditions on Thursday. There is a 90% chance of good weather at the Kennedy Space Center for a backup launch opportunity at 5:49 am EDT (0949 GMT) on Friday.
The prognosis for abortion areas in the Atlantic Ocean is “a little more complicated,” Stich said. Forecast models show that some areas along the route of Falcon 9 could have strong winds at the end of this week.
“Of the two days, right now, I’d say Friday looks a little better than Thursday,” Stich said. “We will continue to watch that time.”
There is also a “moderate” risk that higher-level winds over the Florida launch site will exceed the limits of the Falcon 9 missile on Thursday morning, according to the official perspective issued by the 45th US Space Force Weather Squadron.
NASA and SpaceX officials will meet again on Wednesday to reassess the weather forecast and decide when to make a final decision on whether to continue with the pre-launch countdown early Thursday.
Assuming a timely launch on Thursday, the Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Crew Dragon Endeavor into orbit approximately 12 minutes after takeoff. An automatic series of propulsion fires will guide the capsule to a dock with the space station at 5:30 am EDT (0930 GMT) on Friday.
If the launch is delayed until Friday, the dock would slip by Saturday.
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, commander of the Crew-2 spacecraft, said he and his crew will be on the Dragon spacecraft if all goes according to plan.
“The spacecraft is a futuristic spacecraft and can do anything,” he told a news conference last month.
All four Crew-2 astronauts are veterans of previous space missions. Kimbrough and Japanese mission specialist Akihiko Hoshide each flew on both a spacecraft and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. NASA pilot Megan McArthur and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet each flew on a space shuttle and a Soyuz mission, respectively.
“The technology is very different (than the shuttle and the Soyuz),” said Kimbrough, a 53-year-old colonel and Apache helicopter pilot. “We make touch screens instead of a joystick in hand to fly … Megan and I are instructed to manually pick up at any stage of the flight, if necessary, but hopefully we’ll just be together for the ride and get to enjoy by him. ”
It will be the first visit to the space station for McArthur, 49, who was selected as an astronaut in 2000 and flew with the Atlantis space shuttle on his last service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009.
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McArthur’s husband, astronaut Bob Behnken, flew last year on the first mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavor capsule. It will occupy the same place in the renovated and modernized spaceship.
Crew-2 astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth for an explosion off the coast of Florida in late October.
Hoshide will take over as commander of the Space Station’s Expedition 65 crew next week, taking over from NASA astronaut Shannon Walker. Walker and her crewmates – Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi – are scheduled to return to Earth on April 28 with the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft, completing a mission launched in November.
Later this year, Pesquet will receive a command post of space station. He said the automation of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft makes the vehicle safer.
“For us, what this means is that we don’t have so many actions to do in a nominal situation,” said Pesquet, who was a cabin protocol instructor for Air France and recorded 196 days in orbit on his first mission. spatial. “Of course, in a situation outside the nominal, we must take action. But what it means is that you are available to handle the situation. Your situational awareness is just incredible.
“You have these huge big screens that show you, in every possible way, what’s going on,” Pesquet said. “The priority of information is already pre-analyzed by the system. The color coding is great. The way the information is presented is just fantastic. You always know what’s going on.
“Soyuz is incredibly reliable, but you had to make sense of all that information that was rare and scattered in every corner of the control panel, with digital and analog indicators,” Pesquet said. “That’s why the training was much longer. I think it’s wonderful. We will like it and I think it makes the system more reliable overall. ”
Crew-2 astronauts will support more than 200 research experiments on the space station, take space walks to maintain and modernize the 20-year-old complex, and help demonstrate new technologies for missions to the moon.
The arrival of Crew-2 astronauts will temporarily increase the size of the space station’s crew to 11 people, including three newly arrived residents who flew to the outpost of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft earlier this month. With the return of the Crew-1 astronauts on April 28, the space station’s crew will return to the long-term level of seven crew members.
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