NASA and SpaceX Schedule Crew-3 Manned Launch for Oct 23
NASA and SpaceX have announced that the Crew-3 joint autumn mission to send four astronauts to the International Space Station using a Falcon-9 rocket and Crew Dragon will start no earlier than October 23.
The decision comes as both organizations prepare for the Crew-2 mission, which is currently scheduled for April 22nd. It will transport crew members from three different space agencies to the orbital station: NASA specialists, spacecraft commander Robert Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur, astronauts from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) – Akihiko Hoshide and Thomas Pesquet, respectively.
As part of the October launch of Crew-3, four cosmonauts will also be delivered to the ISS and will remain in orbit for six months. In December last year, NASA has already selected three members of the SpaceX Crew-3 mission – NASA cosmonauts Commander Raja Chari and pilot Tom Marshburn and ESA specialist Matthias Maurer. The fourth member of the crew should be named later – possibly Russian cosmonaut Sergei Korsakov.
In connection with the planned launch of Crew-3 on October 23, the Crew-2 crew will return to Earth no earlier than October 31: within a week, responsibilities for the ISS will be transferred to its next inhabitants. The Crew-3 flight is set to be SpaceX’s third full-fledged human-crewed mission for NASA – the company launched two veteran astronauts on a two-month demonstration mission in May 2020.
As a reminder, in February of this year, SpaceX also announced plans to launch Inspiration4, “the world’s first fully civilian space mission .” This manned launch will take place in September, and the names of all four crew members were recently announced. This flight will be short-lived: space tourists will stay in orbit for three days, and the altitude will be about 540 kilometers. The mission will use the new Crew Dragon spacecraft of a special design, in which a glass dome replaces the docking lock with the ISS.
