The NASA and SpaceX they point to the end of October to carry out the first operational flight with astronauts to the International Space Station, as part of the Commercial Crew Program. As anticipated by the US space agency, the mission SpaceX Crew-1 will see three American astronauts and one Japanese astronaut launch into the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station, where they will spend six months conducting research.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1, within its program for contracting private spacecraft for travel to low Earth orbit, will be the first of the regular rotation missions to the space station once NASA certification is completed.
It will include Dragon Commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Shannon Walker – all from NASA – and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission specialist Soichi Noguchi.
As reported by the agency, Crew-1 will be launched in late October to accommodate spacecraft traffic for the upcoming Soyuz crew rotation and better meet the needs of the International Space Station.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will lift the capsule that arrived in Florida in July to prepare for launch. The mission will last approximately 6 months, so the capsule will be docked at the Station until the end of April, overlapping with the SpaceX Crew-2 mission that will launch in spring 2021.
Crew-1 will launch after NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov arrive at the space station aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft. The Crew-1 liftoff will also follow the departure of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner from the station.
Certification
The Crew-1 mission targets October 23 as it is awaiting certification following NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight, who successfully launched the astronauts Robert Behnken y Douglas Hurley
to the International Space Station on May 30 and returned them home safely on August 2 with a splashdown
off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico.
NASA’s certification of SpaceX’s crew transportation system allows the agency regularly transport astronauts to the space station, ending the exclusive reliance on Russia for access to the space station. SpaceX Demo-2 was the first manned flight test of a privately operated human space system.
–
