| Title | NASA Announces Target Date for First SpaceX Crew Dragon Flight | |
| Date | Saturday November 24 2018, @10:50AM | |
| Author | chromas | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
NASA announces target date for first SpaceX Crew Dragon flight
SpaceX is targeting Jan. 7 for launch of its first Crew Dragon commercial ferry ship on an unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station, NASA announced Wednesday, a major milestone in the agency’s drive to end its sole reliance on Russian Soyuz crew ships for carrying astronauts to orbit.
If the shakedown flight goes smoothly — and if a NASA safety probe unveiled Tuesday doesn’t turn up any show stoppers — SpaceX could be ready to launch the first piloted Crew Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket in the June timeframe, carrying veteran NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the space station.
[...] The unpiloted Crew Dragon flight coming up in January, known as Demo-1 on the SpaceX manifest, will launch from historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Liftoff is expected around 11:57 p.m. EST (GMT-5) when Earth’s rotation carries the pad into the plane of the station’s orbit.
Once released from the Falcon 9, the spacecraft is expected to carry out an autonomous rendezvous with the International Space Station, gliding in to a docking at the lab’s recently modified forward port where shuttles once berthed. After a short stay, the capsule will undock and return to Earth with an ocean splashdown.
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printed from SoylentNews, NASA Announces Target Date for First SpaceX Crew Dragon Flight on 2025-12-08 16:53:27