CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – SpaceX and NASA have delayed the next launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station by 24 hours due to adverse weather conditions along the flight path.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket were planned to launch the mission, called Crew-2, early Thursday (April 22) from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here in Florida. But today, NASA announced the one-day delay, citing bad weather conditions along the missile’s flight path. Instead, SpaceX is now targeting a launch on Friday (April 23). The launch is scheduled for 5:49 am EDT (0949 GMT).
“I’m sure you’ve heard that you’ve probably heard that we should postpone for a day,” NASA’s Bob Cabana, director of Kennedy Space Center, told reporters in a morning briefing. “We can’t launch tomorrow morning.”
“While the weather will likely look fantastic here at the launch site, we are concerned about downwind and wave heights in the event of a breakdown,” he added.
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Crew dragon is equipped with a special escape system that allows the vehicle to bring the crew to safety during take-off in an emergency. As such, the 45th Space Wing weather team must monitor not only the weather at the launch site, but also the weather along the missile’s trajectory, as well as any possible landing sites where the capsule could potentially crash in the unlikely event of a crash. accident. abort flight.
On Tuesday, launch weather officer Brian Cisek of the 45th Space Wing told Space.com the weather looks like very favorable for launch, with conditions improving to 90% favorable on Friday. Cisek said this is due to a high-pressure front entering the area and dispelling the storms that ravaged the space coast earlier in the week.
“Once this front comes through, it will be absolutely beautiful on Friday morning,” Cabana said. “So we’re going to launch then.”
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The international crew on Dragon includes NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, along with astronaut Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency and astronaut Ahkihiko Hoshide from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. They stay at the station for six months and carry one abundance of research experiments before returning home later this year.
If Friday’s launch goes as planned, the Crew-2 astronauts will be attached to the Dragon capsule early Friday morning and arrive at the International Space Station at 5:10 a.m. EDT (0910 GMT) on Saturday. The Crew-2 astronauts will join seven other crew members already onboard the space station, including the four astronauts from SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission for NASA returning to Earth on April 28.
SpaceX is one of two commercial companies with multi-million dollar contracts to fly astronauts for NASA. (The other company is Boeing, which is not yet to fly astronauts.) Crew-2 is SpaceX’s third manned flight for NASA after the launch of Crew-1 in November 2020 and a Demo-2 mission in May 2020.
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