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from the One-of-these-days,-Alice...To-the-Moon!! dept.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon Shows up at Pad 39A, Nearly 8 Years after the Last Shuttle Left:
SpaceX took another step toward sticking humans atop its Falcon 9 rocket as one of the units, equipped with a crew version of the Dragon spacecraft, was erected at pad 39A at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.
The Falcon 9 went vertical at 2230 UTC last night [Thursday] to allow engineers to check all connections line up as expected. Once done, the vehicle will be rolled back to SpaceX's rocket shed nearby as the team works its way toward launch, planned for 17 January.
As promised: Proper photos of #SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 going vertical at Kennedy Space Center just before 1730 ET / 2230 UTC.
More + story: https://t.co/hTWaLZwiIX pic.twitter.com/0OKyykhMyx— Emre Kelly (@EmreKelly) January 3, 2019
That launch date is, of course, highly likely to slip, and SpaceX will probably point a finger at the US government shutdown. The NASA resources needed to get the thing off the ground are most likely sat at home, twiddling thumbs, instead of signing off on mission reviews.
[...] The next flight for SpaceX's Crew Dragon will also be uncrewed, and will demonstrate the system's abort capability should something go south during ascent.
If all goes well, SpaceX's Demo-2 flight test will launch in June with actual humans onboard.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:35AM
I care more about the April-or-later Starship tests. But ferrying astronauts to the ISS would be a great revenue stream, and it's one that is only guaranteed to last for the next 9 years.
Beyond that, we should see some actual Falcon Heavy launches soon, with paying customers and full use of Block 5 components.
Also, it should be noted that NASA has approved [bgr.com] of Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser spaceplane, although it's unclear whether it would ever carry astronauts. There has been some discussion about using it for a Hubble servicing mission, which would be fantastic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]