The Crew-2 mission will leave no earlier than April 22, the second manned operational for the SpaceX Crew Dragon: it will bring four astronauts, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of NASA (commander and pilot respectively), Thomas to the International Space Station (ISS) Pesquet of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japanese counterpart Jaxa, both mission specialists.
All four veterans will be the first to fly a reused Dragon and Falcon-9 rocket, which will depart from NASA's Kennedy Space Center launch pad 39A in Florida.
The Dragon Endeavor spacecraft will be the same used in May 2020 by astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to reach the ISS with the Demo-2 mission: the capsule, in addition to having been verified in every component, has also been improved to become safer in the launch and return to Earth phase.
The booster of the Falcon-9 rocket, on the other hand, is the one recovered after the launch of the Crew-1 mission last November.
After docking with the Space Station, the crew of the Crew-2 mission will join that of Expedition 65 already in orbit, for a total of 11 astronauts.
Between the end of April and the beginning of May, the members of the Crew-1 mission will return to Earth, namely Commander Mike Hopkins, the pilot Victor Glover and the mission specialists Soichi Noguchi and Shannon Walker, after a stay in orbit of five months and a half.
