SpaceX, NASA target overnight launch of Crew-7 to space station
SpaceX is set to send up the next quartet of astronauts to the International Space Station from an overnight launch from Kennedy Space Center.
A Falcon 9 rocket topped with the Crew Dragon Endurance on the Crew-7 mission is targeting liftoff at 3:49 a.m. liftoff from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A with backup opportunities on Saturday and Sunday.
“We know the importance of flying crew and the trust the crew puts in us,” said SpaceX’s William Gerstenmaier during this week’s flight readiness review. “We put every effort into crewed missions. We don’t treat them like other missions. They’re special for us and we make sure we’re really ready to go and the hardware is really ready to go.”
SpaceX performed a successful hot fire of the Falcon 9 on Tuesday and all signs are pointing toward hitting the target launch time. The Space Launch Delta 45 weather squadron predicts an 85% chance for good conditions for early Friday and 90% chance if delayed 24 or 48 hours.
NASA will begin live commentary at 11:45 p.m. on NASA.gov and its social media channels while SpaceX will also provide launch coverage beginning about an hour before launch.
The first-stage booster for the mission is flying for the first time and will attempt a recovery landing at nearby Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which will bring with it the double sonic boom that will be heard along the Space Coast and other parts of Central Florida.
Astronauts bound for space station on SpaceX Crew-7 arrive at KSC
Along for the ride are NASA astronaut and mission commander Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA astronaut and pilot Andreas Mogensen, mission specialist JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and mission specialist Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov. They arrived to KSC on Sunday to prep for this week’s flight, which is the seventh rotational mission for SpaceX under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
“This Crew-7 will perform just under 300 experiments while they’re docked for six months with 81 new investigations onboard,” said NASA International Space Station program manager Joel Montalbano.
It’s the first time the program has flown with astronauts from four different agencies. The Crew Dragon Endurance, which is flying for the third time, is set to arrive to the ISS at 2:02 a.m. Saturday parking next to its sister capsule Crew Dragon Endeavour.
That’s the ride home for Crew-6, who have been orbiting the Earth on the ISS since their arrival in March. The station’s population will increase to 11 until the Crew-6 departure, expected in about five days for a splashdown landing off the coast of Florida.
“That’s enough time for a good handover between the two crews and such that the Crew-7 guys are ready to rock ‘n’ roll,” Montalbano said.
For now Crew-7 will become part of the ISS Expedition 69 expected to stay on board for about 190 days. Mogensen will then take command of the station in September after the arrival of another three new crew members who will fly up on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to relieve three crew members including NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who have been aboard the ISS for nearly a year.
“The space station is as busy as ever as we approach our 23rd year of continuous human presence with our international partners,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.
When Crew-7 arrives, there will be four NASA astronauts, three Roscosmos cosmonauts, one European Space Agency astronaut, one Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) astronaut and one United Arab Emirates astronaut on board.
The ISS has had a continuous crew since November 2000 with NASA relying on the Space Shuttle Program until its retirement in 2011. It then was solely serviced by Russian Soyuz launches until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon program sent up the first two astronauts from KSC in May 2020 on the Demo-2 mission.
SpaceX and Boeing won the contract to take over U.S.-based launches to the ISS, but Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has faced a series of delays, and is now targeting no earlier than March 2024 for its first crewed flight to the ISS.
NASA had originally planned for SpaceX and Boeing to share taxi service duties to the station with each flying just one rotational mission each per year, but with Boeing’s delays, SpaceX continues to be the workhorse. Crew Dragon has also flown private missions including two Axiom Space flights to the ISS and an orbital mission called Inspiration4 with billionaire Jared Isaacman.
The Crew-7 astronauts will make it 42 humans Crew Dragon has sent to space across 11 missions in just over three years with Crew-8, another Axiom Space flight and another Isaacman-led orbital flight called Polaris Dawn coming up.
It’s the 43rd launch from the Space Coast so far this year with all but two coming from SpaceX. It’s the third crewed launch this year as well.
“I think it’s easy to think that this is easy,” Gerstenmaier said. “This business is not easy. From the outside, it may look like we’re flying a lot of flights and they’re all trouble free. They’re not all trouble free. They are not easy. Every time we fly, we learn something.”
