The next launch window of a NASA crew to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX rocket has been pushed back at least two more days, until before April 22, according to the space agency.
SpaceX, the private rocket company of billionaire businessman Elon Musk, was scheduled to bring its second team of “operational” space stations into orbit for NASA in late March. But NASA announced in January that the target date had fallen by April 20th.
The schedule was adjusted again based on available flight times at the space station, powered by orbital mechanics, which would keep astronauts’ need for sleep to a minimum, NASA spokesman Dan Huot said Monday.
The flight marks just the second full-fledged space station crew rotation mission launched aboard a private spacecraft: a tilted SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule that will take it into orbit.
The four-member SpaceX Crew-2 is made up of two NASA astronauts, mission commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur, along with Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and fellow mission specialist Thomas Pesquet. of the European Space Agency.
After docking with the space station, they will team up with the four SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts that arrived in November and the cosmonauts were moved to the advanced site orbiting aboard a Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft.
The newly arrived Crew-2 will remain in orbit for six months, while the Crew-1 will have to return to earth in early May.
McArthur will become the second person in his family to lead a crewed dragon into space. Her husband, Bob Behnken, was one of two NASA astronauts on the first manned launch of Crew Dragon, a test flight last August that marked NASA’s first human orbital mission from Earth. of the United States in nine years, after the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.
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