Friday, the team of four following people to live and work on the international space station left the Kennedy Space Center of NASA in Florida, targeting the research complex in massive orbit for a planned stay of six to eight months.
Commander of the spacecraft Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, which left the Florida space coast at 11:43 a.m. (3:43 pm UTC) on Friday. Sitting towards her just inside the dragon of the SpaceX crew Effort Capsule was the veteran astronaut of NASA Mike Fincke, serving as a vehicle pilot. Flanking the commander and the pilot were two mission specialists: Kimiya Yui from Japan and Oleg Platonov from Russia.
Cardman and his crew committees set up a Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad and headed northeast on the Atlantic Ocean, queuing with the orbit of the space station to prepare the ground for automated mooring at the complex early Saturday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ilmhbwhnq
Goodbye L-1
The reusable Booster of Falcon 9 has been detached and returned to a propulsive touch to the 1 (L-1) landing area at Space Force station of Cape Canaveral, a few kilometers south of the launch site. It was the 53rd and final rocket in L-1 since SpaceX accessed the first intact recovery of a Booster Falcon 9 on December 21, 2015.
On most SpaceX missions, Falcon 9 Boosters lands on the company’s offshore drone ships hundreds of kilometers at the bottom of the launch site. For launches with enough fuel margin, the first step can return to an landing on the ground. But the spatial force, which rents the landing areas in SpaceX, wants to convert the L-Z1 site to the launch site for another rocket company.
SpaceX will move from landing to the green rocket to new landing areas to be built next to the two launch ramps of Falcon 9 at Florida Spaceport. The landing area 2, located next to the landing area 1, will also be Clétonnée and reset to the spatial force once SpaceX activates the new landing sites.
“We are working with the cape and with the people of Kennedy Space Center to understand the right time to spend this transition from the landing area 2 in the future,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, Vice-President of SpaceX for construction and the reliability of flights. “But I think we will stay with the landing area 2 at least in the short term, for a while, then look at the right time to move to other regions.”
