SpaceX and NASA officially continue next week with the launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station, completing a critical review of flight readiness on Thursday (April 15).
The Crew-2 mission is expected to begin next Thursday (April 22), which is also Earth Day. A SpaceX Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon spacecraft will be launched from historic Route 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This will be the second flight of this particular Crew Dragon; the same capsule, named “Endeavor”, was carried by NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to and from the space station for the Demo-2 test flight last year.
Inside the crew dragon will be four crew members from Expedition 65 who will spend about six months in space: NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough, and Megan McArthur, astronaut Exploration Agency (JAXA), astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency (ESA).
Related: SpaceX’s Crew-2 Astronaut Mission to NASA: Live Updates
“The flight readiness review was very successful; we had only one exception,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s head of human spaceflight, told a news conference on Thursday. ‘It needs to be cleared up in the next few days, because it needs to be resolved before the static fire [test].
Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX (and former NASA human space chief), told the same news conference that the teams “discovered that there was a possible loading error, where we could actually load a little extra oxygen into us” [Falcon 9] tanks. “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets use liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene for propellant.
Gerstenmaier added that other Falcon 9 missions have successfully flown in the same configuration, but SpaceX only recently discovered the problem when testing the rocket on the ground in Texas. The company has detected slightly higher levels of liquid oxygen than expected, but they have not yet found the cause of this difference.
“We checked it with the NASA team today, but we did not have enough time to really study all the data and look at all the consequences of what it could mean,” he said. “We’re going to take the extra step” to review the issue and determine if it could pose a risk to the astronauts (or other future Falcon 9 launches).
If the problem with liquid oxygen is resolved as expected and everything else goes according to plan, Crew-2 will depart on April 22 at 06:11 EDT (1011 GMT) and just over 23 hours later, at 05:30 EDT (09: 30 GMT) on 23 April. A final review of the readiness for the launch is scheduled for April 20th.
A backup window is available on April 23rd. After that, Crew-2 could be launched on April 26 or April 27, Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, added at the news conference.
You can watch the Crew-2 mission live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.
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