For NASA, this marks the long-awaited start to normal team rotations on the International Space Station, with personal corporations supplying the elevators. There will be twice as many astronauts as the previous control flight this year, and your project will last six full months.
The team of three Americans and one Japanese are expected to depart on Saturday night. It will be a quick adventure to the station, an explicit six-orbit that will last less than nine hours.
Astronauts have named their capsule Dragon Resilience in the face of all the demanding situations of 2020: coronavirus and social isolation, civil unrest and a complicated election and election season. They’ve been quarantined for a week and are taking security measures: mask and social media. esttachment — long before that.
All 4 will remain in orbit until spring, when their replacements arrive aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule. The shipping edition of the capsule will also continue to make normal deliveries of food and supplies.
SpaceX’s Benji Reed said the company plans to launch seven dragons over the next 14 months: 3 for the team and 4 for charging.
“Whenever there’s a Dragon launch, there will be two Dragons in space,” said Reed, the team’s project management director.
NASA’s other rented taxi service, Boeing, is not expected to take its first team until next summer. The company expects an unmanned control flight in a few months; the former suffered so many software disorders that the Starliner capsule could not succeed at the area station.
Following the withdrawal of the fleet back and forth in 2011, NASA turned to personal corporations for deliveries from stations in the area (cargo, then equipment). American astronauts continued to hitchhike Russian rockets at ever-increasing prices. $90 million.
SpaceX nonetheless ended NASA’s nearly 10-year astronaut launch drought last May, effectively delivering a pair of control pilots to the area station from Kennedy for a two-month stay. , which resulted in some adjustments for this moment of flight.
Engineers learned of the upper erosion of the heat shield due to crackling re-entry temperatures; The company has strengthened the vulnerable segment for the next launch, said Hans Koenigsmann of SpaceX, vice president. Improvements were also made to the parachute altitude measurement formula after the falls opened a little too low under the astronaut’s first flight. More recently, the Falcon rocket was replaced by two engines due to contamination of a redass used in the treatment. Engine changes delayed in flight for two weeks
Perhaps the greatest wonder of spaceX’s first crew flight is all the complete personal boats of curious people who surrounded the capsule in the Gulf of Mexico after splashing in August. Koenigsmann promises a larger exclusion zone and more patrols for long-term returns.
The team has 3 veteran drivers and a first-time timer:
– Commander Mike Hopkins, 51, is an Air Force colonel and former station resident who grew up on a pig and farm animal farm in Missouri.
– Navy Commander Victor Glover, 44, is the pilot and rookie of the domain; he comes from the domain of Los Angeles and will be the first African-American astronaut to move to the domain station for an extended stay.
– Shannon Walker, 55, a Houston-born ingsa, has also lived at the station before; her husband, retired astronaut Andrew Thomas, helped build the outpost.
– Soichi Noguchi, 55, of the Japanese Space Agency, another former station resident, will be the first user in decades to launch 3 types of rockets; has already flown on an American and Russian Soyuz area ferry.
They will be registered by two Russians and an American who arrived at the area station last month from Kazakhstan.
Hopkins and his team will go to the launch pad of Teslas, the other company of SpaceX founder Elon Musk, in colorful spacesuits coordinated with the spacecraft. But under all this charming appearance, there are “many amazing skills,” according to Glover.
“It’s a very sublime capsule. But it has the merit of having wonderful technological advances since we last built a spaceship here in this country,” Walker said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Noguchi, who along with Walker joined the team this year, is excited to ride a dragon. In Japan, the dragon is an esteemed mythical creature, “almost a walk through paradise”.
“It’s a privilege to be informed about how to exercise the dragon, how to ride a dragon,” he says. “SpaceX has performed a task by training the dragon rider 0 in six months. “
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Department of Scientific Education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is for all content only.
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