The next launch window for a NASA crew to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX rocket spacecraft has been pushed back by at least two more days, until no earlier than April 22, the space agency said.
SpaceX, the private missile company of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, was previously scheduled to take the second team of the “operational” space station into orbit for NASA at the end of March. But NASA announced in January that the target date had dropped to April 20.
The program has been readjusted based on available flight times to the space station, driven by orbital mechanics, which would reduce the need for sleep astronauts to a minimum, NASA spokesman Dan Huot said Monday.
The flight marks only the second complete rotation mission of the space station crew launched aboard a private spacecraft – a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the tip of the Crew Dragon capsule that will carry it into orbit.
The four-member SpaceX Crew-2 crew consists of two NASA astronauts, mission commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur, along with Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency mission colleague Thomas Pesquet.
After docking with the space station, they will join the four SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts who arrived in November, and the cosmonauts were transported to the orbiting outpost aboard a Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft.
The newly arrived Crew-2 will remain in orbit for six months, while the Crew-1 will return to Earth by early May.
McArthur will become the second person in her family to ride a Dragon Crew in space. Her husband, Bob Behnken, was one of two NASA astronauts at the first equipped launch of the Crew Dragon crew, a test flight in August last year, which marked NASA’s first human orbital mission in US soil in nine years, after completion of the space shuttle program in 2011.
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