Former Crew-9 members, Starliner-1 missions unite to get to the space station-SpaceFlight now

A group of astronauts and a cosmonaut originally planned to fly on other missions finally obtain their ticket to roll. The quartet, led by NASA astronaut, Zena Cardman, will go to the international space station from a launch scheduled for Thursday afternoon.

The SpaceX CREW-11 mission will launch on board the Crew Dragon Endeavor spacecraft at the top of a Falcon 9. The takeoff of the 39A launch complex at the NASA Kennedy Space Center is scheduled for 12:09 HAE (1609 UTC).

Spaceflight will now have a live blanket starting about four hours before takeoff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axq7ronuyga

On Wednesday, the 45th Meteorological Squadron planned a 90% time of time favorable to launch. Meteorologists said there was a low probability of interference from the cumulus clouds.

“The abandoned time also seems very favorable [on Thursday] In addition, with winds and waves throughout the rise track being within the limits, “said Steve Stich, director of the NASA commercial crew program, during a preliminary briefing on Wednesday.” We are going to look at showers or thunderstorms, potential forecasts in the staging area. We will look at this very carefully.

The teams hope for a good launch on Thursday, because the weather prospects deteriorate as the week progresses in the weekend.

SpaceX will use the Falcon 9 First Stage Booster with the B1094 tail number to launch this mission. He previously stolen on Starlink 12-10 on April 29 and Axiom Mission 4 (AX-4) on June 25.

The booster experienced a liquid oxygen leak during landing on droneship, “a lack of graviras”, during the Starlink 12-10 mission, which reappeared during pre-prelimination tests on AX-4.

The test campaign before the crew-11 has not shown another leak, but Stich said after the static fire test on Tuesday (initially scheduled for Monday, but was rubbed due to a sensor problem on the Strongback), SpaceX replaced one of the engine controllers of the Five Engine Five of B1094.

“He had abnormal signatures and we therefore replaced this,” said Stich. “We checked this and it’s good for the flight.”

Just less than eight minutes after takeoff, B1094 will target a touch to the 1 (L-1) landing area at the Cape Canaveral Spatial Station. It will be the 53rd landing at L-1, if everything is going well, and according to William Gerstenmaier, Vice-President of SpaceX of construction and the reliability of flights, this is also the latest Planned SpaceX use of L-1.

The American space force requires launch providers who wish to use landing pads to make them locate in the launch complex where the rocket leaves. Gerstenmaier said they would continue to use L-2 after L-Z1 retirement.

The two landing pads are located at the Launch Complex 13, the future house of Vaya Space and the ghost space for their small orbital class rockets.

SpaceX upgrades

The crew-11 mission will be the sixth flight for the Crew Dragon Endeavour, which flew over the Mission Demo-2 in May 2020. NASA and SpaceX carried out in-depth examinations on the various subsystems of the vehicle, because it is the first to make a sixth flight.

When Dragon was certified for long -term missions as part of the commercial crew program, it was authorized up to five flights. In the end, NASA and SpaceX wish to release the spaceship for up to 15 flights.

SpaceX launched its fifth and last crew dragon vehicle, named Grace, on the AX-4 mission.

Among some of the most recent changes to Dragon are the improvements to the vehicle’s thermal shield and its parachute deployment system. The two were presented when the AX-4 of the ISS is returned.

Gerstenmaier said that the crew-11 pilot, the NASA astronaut, Mike Fincke, would also be sporty and improved the combination of theft of intra-vehicular activity (IVA). He said it had an improvement in mobility.

Meet the crew

The four members of the crew-11 mission share the unique link that they have all previously assigned to different missions before finding their way to this particular flight.

Cardman was to steal on the mission of the crew-9 as a commander, but when problems occurred on the spacecraft Boeing CST-100 Starliner in the middle of its flight test of the crew, NASA chose to found it and its compatriot NASA astronaut, Stephanie Wilson, to release two seats to be used by the CFT team.

Cardman was quickly reassigned to the crew-11, but from Thursday, we don’t know when Wilson could fly. It will be Cardman’s first trip to space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ8IEGOBHNU

His pilot, Fincke, is very familiar with SpaceFlight, because it will be his fourth trip to the international space station and his third space vessel that will take him there. As a complete circle, before flying on Dragon Endeavour, his last trip to the space was on STS-134, which presented the space shuttle orbit named Endeavour.

He too came from another mission: Starliner-1. He trained alongside the NASA astronaut and the Commander Starliner-1 Scott Tingle with the two mission specialists: the astronaut of the Canadian space agency Joshua Kutryk and the astronaut of the aerospace exploration of Japan (Jaxa) Kimiya Yui.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUPHP-VHFPW

Yui is now a specialist in the Mission CREW-11 mission. It will be his second trip at the ISS after launching a decade ago before on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

He was part of the development team of a JAXA cargo vehicle called HTV-X, which is expected to start at the space station this fall. Yui will help supervise his arrival and mooring, in the same way as the fifth HTV spacecraft arrived in 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmhpjdsgime

Roscosmos Cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, who makes his first trip to space. He trained to become a member of the rescue team on a Soyuz flight when he was withdrawn from this mission by the medical council.

Like six other people before him, his stroll aboard a dragon spacecraft comes following a seats exchange agreement between NASA and Roscosmos.

These four astronauts and cosmonauts should spend at least six months, and potentially up to eight months, aboard the ISS which leads dozens of scientific experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sponjxj0ieq