NASA TV to Air First US Commercial Crew Port Relocation on Space Station
HOUSTON (NASA PR) — NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts aboard the International Space Station will mark another first for commercial spaceflight Monday, April 5, when the four astronauts will relocate the Crew Dragon spacecraft to prepare for the arrival of new crew members in late April and the upcoming delivery of new solar arrays this summer.
Live coverage will begin at 6 a.m. EDT on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.
NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will undock Crew Dragon Resilience from the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 6:29 a.m. and dock to the space-facing port at 7:15 a.m.
The relocation will free Harmony’s forward port for the docking of Crew Dragon Endeavour, set to carry four crew members to the station on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet are scheduled to launch to the station Thursday, April 22, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Crew-1 astronauts will depart the station and return to Earth in late April or early May, leaving the space-facing port of Harmony vacant. A Dragon cargo spacecraft carrying several tons of supplies and the first set of new solar arrays for the space station is scheduled to launch this summer, and requires the space-facing port position to enable robotic extraction of the arrays from Dragon’s trunk using Canadarm2.
This will be the first port relocation of a Crew Dragon spacecraft. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission lifted off Nov. 15, 2020, and docked to the space station Nov. 16. The mission is the first of six certified crew missions NASA and SpaceX planned as a part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
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8 responses to “NASA TV to Air First US Commercial Crew Port Relocation on Space Station”
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a short jaunt
The toxic dragon is the ugliest and most dangerous piece of junk ever to carry humans into LEO.
you are a happy soul 🙂
I was this morning 😉
I will be a “happy soul” when the pernicious influence of NewSpace finally disappears and we start expanding into the solar system. Never going to happen with these billionaire hobbyists making it all a farce. Only a state-sponsored program is going to work.
a long wait then
There is always a chance Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources becomes a major part of the Green New Deal. I believe almost anything can happen after the last 4 years of crazy. Anything except NewSpace being anything but a stumbling block.
The only “state-sponsored super-heavy-lift vehicle” that ever worked was Saturn V – assuming that the working definition of “super-heavy-lift” is 100+ tonnes to LEO per launch. N-1 didn’t work. SLS may yet work, in the sense that it manages to fly without blowing up. But, in its current Block 1 configuration, it isn’t super-heavy-lift. It’s glacial development pace, insane economics and severe production limitedness pretty much guarantee it will never be developed further before cancellation.
That leaves SpaceX’s Starship, which is under active development at several times the pace of SLS, and the paper rockets Yenisei and Long March 9. Yenisei will never be built because Russia is poor and getting poorer. Long March 9’s prospects are only marginally better as China is going to be getting poorer too and the PRC regime, itself, may well dissolve before LM9 sees a first test launch.
So the record and prospects for “state-sponsored super-heavy-lift vehicles” has been, and will continue to be, bleak.
Trolling me down the page again I see. Creep.