The historic launch, which will deliver NASA astronauts to the ISS from the United States, is fully ready and scheduled for next week, despite the coronavirus pandemic and the recent departure of the head of the manned program from the agency. This will be the first time that astronauts will be sent into space from the United States after the completion of the NASA Shuttle space shuttle program in 2011, after which the Americans were delivered to the ISS by Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA and SpaceX confirmed at a virtual press conference that they had a very successful test of launch readiness. The first assistant to the head of NASA Steve Jurczyk (Steve Jurczyk) said that the agency carefully analyzed all the systems and risks and unanimously came to the conclusion that everything is ready for launch on May 27.
“The flight readiness review is complete … As each system and subsystem was considered, at the end, we got to a ‘go.'” Administrator @JimBridenstine shares the news: We are ready to #LaunchAmerica on May 27: https://t.co/viWmO6ht4c pic.twitter.com/KRlUUzoMQH
– NASA (@NASA) May 22, 2020
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon spacecraft, delivering astronauts to the ISS, are already located in the launch complex 39A of the Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 first stage engines as part of its latest test series before launch.
Static fire of Falcon 9 complete – targeting Wednesday, May 27 at 4:33 p.m. EDT for Crew Dragon’s launch to the @Space_Station with @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug on board → https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK pic.twitter.com/bhcTq4jxAr
– SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 22, 2020
The Demo-2 mission team still needs to complete a final readiness test, which will include data from an important static burn test on May 25th. If everything goes according to plan, Crew Dragon will go into orbit on May 27 at 23:33 Moscow time with astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board. The latter, by the way, posted on Twitter several of his latest photos from the Kennedy Space Center:
Exciting couple of days here at @NASAKennedy! Crew arrival in Florida was awesome, seeing our vehicle roll to 39A was epic, and watching our @SpaceX Falcon9 1st stage fire one more time before our mission still has a smile on my face! pic.twitter.com/RzTCC11klw
– Bob Behnken (@AstroBehnken) May 22, 2020
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