Elon Musk is preparing for a new adventure: the launch of the first manned operational flight of the Crew Dragon shuttle, which his company SpaceX built for NASA, has been scheduled for November 14.
Initially scheduled for October 31, the launch was postponed due to a technical problem with the engines of the Falcon 9 rocket.
The shuttle will depart on the evening of November 14 from the base of Cape Canaveral, Florida, when in Italy it will be 1.49 hours on November 15, to bring 4 astronauts to the Space Station.
On board will be NASA astronauts, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Japanese Soichi Noguchi of the Jaxa space agency, for a six-month mission.
If all goes as planned, the mission, called Crew-1, will arrive at its destination at 10.15 am (Italian time) on November 15, to dock with the Space Station's Harmony module.
The crew will join the commander of the Space Station, Russian Sergey Ryzhikov, Russian flight engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, bringing the long-term crew of the orbital laboratory to seven people.
The mission follows a 64-day Crew Dragon test flight to the Space Station, launched last May with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken.
The success of the mission set the stage for the start of regular rotation flights of the crew of the Space Station with the shuttle built by SpaceX for NASA.
However, the launch of the first operational flight was postponed to allow SpaceX and NASA engineers to investigate a problem with the Falcon 9 rocket's engines. The problem occurred during an October 2 launch attempt at Cape Canaveral. a Falcon 9 rocket with a GPS satellite, which had prompted the computers controlling the countdown to interrupt the mission two seconds after departure.
Following the disruption of the GPS satellite launch, SpaceX removed the engines from the Falcon 9 rocket and took them to a test facility in McGregor, Texas for further investigation.
Last week, NASA said SpaceX will replace one of the Merlin engines from the Falcon 9 rocket for the Crew-1 mission.
