They are ready to fly, with a capsule and a rocket already used, the four veterans of the second mission of the Crew Dragon, the SpaceX shuttle that asserts itself as the new "space taxi" of the United States after the Shuttle.
Also on board is the first European astronaut to fly on a shuttle built by a private company.
In Cape Canaveral everything is ready for the launch of the Crew Dragon 2, scheduled at 11.49 Italian time from the historic platform 39 of the Kennedy Space Center, the same from which the Saturn V rocket started at the time of the Apollo program and from which also departed many Space Shuttles.
On the ANSA Scienza e Tecnica channel the live broadcast with NASA TV, from the hours before the launch until the arrival of the astronauts on board the International Space Station
The news of the Crew 2 mission A
lot of news about this mission. It is the first time that astronauts will fly on a shuttle already used, the one with which the first crew of the Crew Dragon debuted in the Demo 2 mission, consisting of Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken. The first stage of the Falcon 9 that will take them into orbit is the one used in the first mission of the Crew Dragon.
It is also the first time that an astronaut from the European Space Agency (ESA) flies with a commercial vehicle. The crew, made up of four veterans, is in fact the Frenchman Thomas Pesquet. Aerospace engineer and airline pilot, Persquet joined the ESA astronaut corps in 2009 and flew for the first time in 2016 on a Russian Soyuz shuttle. Now he is ready to return for the second time to the International Space Station, where for six months he will work on his new mission, Alpha.
Commander Robert Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, both of NASA, and Akihiko Hoshide, of the Japanese space agency Jaxa, who will become the commander of the Expedition 65 crew of the Space Station, are preparing to board the Crew Dragon.
However, the news is not lacking for any of them: for all it is the first flight on the Crew Dragon and the suits they will wear are also unpublished, white and gray, with a style that evokes that of science fiction. Pesquet chose a photo with the new helmet for his Twitter profile. The vehicle with which the four will have to reach the launch pad is also new: the white Tesla of the SpaceX instead of the silver minibus.
