advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

NASA and SpaceX start what looks to be a long fruitful relationship

At the weekend NASA and SpaceX kicked off the start of what will hopefully be a long relationship, where the latter ferries astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

At 02:27AM local time, Crew-1 launched from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, as well as Soichi Noguch from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The four astronauts are currently en-route to the International Space Station with an estimated time of arrival of around 06:00AM on Tuesday morning.

The Crew Dragon capsule – which is named Resilience – will dock with the ISS autonomously as it did back in May when SpaceX was still busy with certification missions.

But this time around Crew Dragon will be sticking around for six months, which is the longest space mission launched from the United States.

“Crew Dragon also is delivering more than 500 pounds of cargo, new science hardware and experiments inside, including Food Physiology, a study of the effects of an optimized diet on crew health and, Genes in Space-7, a student-designed experiment that aims to better understand how spaceflight affects brain function, enabling scientists to keep astronauts healthy as they prepare for long-duration missions in low-Earth orbit and beyond,” NASA wrote in a press statement.

For those curious about the trip, the quartet of astronauts will be participating in a press conference from orbit at 16:55 on Thursday over on the NASA website.

If you have five hours to kill and want to watch the launch you can watch it in the video embedded below.

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement