Thomas Pesquet, ESA, Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough of NASA, and Akihiko Hoshide of JAXA, tried their SpaceX flight suits.
NASA
NASA and SpaceX prepare for the second operational flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Four astronauts will ride in the dragon on Thursday, April 22, on the runway on top of the Falcon 9 booster. It’s going to be an early morning flight and here’s how you can follow it live.
There will be known hardware that can help the new crew get off this rock. “The Falcon 9 that will be used to launch this mission uses the same booster as NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1, which is the first time an aircraft-proven booster has been used for a launch crew,” NASA said in a statement .
NASA TV will stream the launch, which will take place at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The event is scheduled for Thursday, April 22 at 3:11 PT. It will take about a day to reach the station.
NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough will join Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. All four were already in space, which asked Pesquet to tweet in March, “I do not mean to show, but this crew has perhaps the most collaborative experience in the history of spaceflight!”
We have received our brand new crew portraits, so it’s time to launch # Crew2. I don’t mean to brag, but this crew has perhaps the most shared experience in space history! More importantly, they are the best teammates ever 👇 pic.twitter.com/rXMnEhS7Pv
– Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro) 31 March 2021
SpaceX and NASA are entering the business-as-usual phase of their Commercial Crew Program partnership. The early test flights went well and the Crew-1 mission in 2020 went smoothly. Crew-2 is the second crew rotation flight for Crew Dragon and the first with two international astronauts on board.
NASA is looking into the fall for the launch of a Crew-3 mission, which could take off as early as October 23rd. Crew-2 will not want to return long after that.
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