NASA and SpaceX will launch four crewmembers to the International Space Station (ISS) at just after midday ET on Thursday.
Blasting off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, along with Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov, will be traveling inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft.
Endeavour will set a new record, too, breaking its own one for the most missions flown by a Crew Dragon capsule. Endeavour’s sixth flight on Thursday comes just over five years after its first flight for the historic Demo-2 mission that took two NASA astronauts to the space station in the Dragon’s first-ever crewed flight. After thorough checks and maintenance, Endeavour has flown one a year since then, carrying Crew-2, Ax-1, Crew-6, and Crew-8 to orbit.
Acknowledging this week’s record flight, Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, recently described the launch as “a really important mission for us … we worked very hard with SpaceX to complete all the reuse activities for this vehicle.” Stich said that SpaceX’s Dragon capsule had originally been certified for only five flights but that the necessary work had been done to prepare Endeavour for another mission, adding, “and we’re really ready to go.”
SpaceX has four other Crew Dragon capsules in operation. Resilience, Endurance, and Freedom have each flown four times, while Grace, SpaceX’s newest and final Crew Dragon, has only flown once to date.
NASA is hoping eventually to transition to SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft for crewed flights, a vehicle designed for missions to the moon and beyond. But the Starship is still very much in the test phase and so it could be some time before it becomes operational.
NASA could also deploy the Boeing-made Starliner for flights to near-Earth orbit, but issues with the capsule during a test flight in 2024 has jeopardized the plan.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.