After more than six months in orbit, the Soyuz MS-17 mission has drawn to a close. The craft departed the International Space Station with undocking right on time at 21:34 EDT on Friday, 16 April. Launch information and schedule from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Find the next rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Bekijk het profiel van Yelei Zhang(Leslie) op LinkedIn, de grootste professionele community ter wereld. Yelei heeft 6 functies op zijn of haar profiel. Bekijk het volledige profiel op LinkedIn om de connecties van Yelei en vacatures bij vergelijkbare bedrijven te zien.
It’s been a long time since the country that once flew nine crewed missions to the moon has been able to launch even a single human being to space aboard its own rockets from its own soil. Ever since the final flight of the space shuttle in July 2011, the U.S. has been dependent on buying rides aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft—at a current $80 million a seat—if it wants to get as far as low-Earth orbit.
All of that is set to change at 3:22 PM EDT on Saturday, May 30, when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are scheduled to make their second attempt at taking off aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Both astronauts are veterans of two previous shuttle flights, and Hurley, fittingly, was one of the crew members aboard the final shuttle mission. If all goes to plan, the crew will reach orbit just 12 minutes after launch, and will dock with the station before noon the following morning. You can watch the launch above.
Saturday’s flight has been a long time in coming. It was in 2010 that NASA began its commercial crew program and in 2016 that it awarded contracts worth $2.6 billion to SpaceX and $4.2 billion to Boeing, charging both companies with the task of developing crew vehicles capable of shuttling astronauts to and from the ISS, freeing NASA up to focus on crewed missions to the moon and Mars.
Early estimates called for flights to begin as early as 2016, but the schedules slipped and slipped and slipped again, with NASA increasingly chafing at the delays. Boeing’s spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, is not expected to have its first crewed flight until sometime in early 2021, but a SpaceX success this week will lift both companies, proving the commercial crew model was a sound idea in the first place.
Behnken and Hurley will join a crew of one astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts already aboard the station. How long the new arrivals will stay is unclear. At a minimum they are expected to be aloft for at least a month; at the most, they’ll stay just shy of four months. Boeing will in part determine how long they stay. When the company is ready to fly its next uncrewed test of the Starliner, the Crew Dragon will have to leave to free up the necessary docking port. In no event is this version of the Crew Dragon certified to spend more than 110 days in space, though in the future the ship will have to be fit for 210.
Bad weather could always scrub the launch once again, as it did on Wednesday’s first attempt. So could any number of last minute technical glitches. But with the rocket poised on the pad, the country itself is poised for a new chapter in its long story of space exploration.
Is Wallops Launch On Time
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Launch Timer
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Update (March 2): SpaceX is now targeting no earlier than 5:42 a.m. Thursday, March 4, for this launch. See our full launch schedule here for further updates.
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Update (March 1): SpaceX is now targeting no earlier than 7:53 p.m. ET Tuesday, March 2, for this launch.
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Unspecified technical issues forced SpaceX to scrub a Falcon 9 rocket launch Sunday evening, setting up teams for a 24-hour turnaround at Kennedy Space Center.
With just over a minute left in the countdown, launch engineers reported an abort sequence had begun ahead of the 8:37 p.m. liftoff with 60 Starlink internet satellites. Starlink missions include instantaneous windows, meaning the rocket must launch on time or delay to another day.
The next attempt to fly from pad 39A is currently set for no earlier than 8:15 p.m. Monday. Weather for that window is expected to be roughly 70% 'go.'
The Falcon 9 selected for this mission – SpaceX's 20th for the Starlink constellation – has previously flown eight missions. After a liftoff toward the northeast, the 162-foot booster will target a landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
If successful, the flight will boost the network's size to more than 1,100 functioning satellites in low-Earth orbit. So far, SpaceX has opened up beta testing opportunities for members of the public located in higher latitudes like the Pacific Northwest, but that access is expected to expand south soon.
Starlink is currently being targeted toward people who live in remote areas without substantial ground infrastructure. It's also in use by emergency workers responding to wildfires, for example, and military branches like the Air Force.
Big countdown timer. Cost for the service, which offers speeds roughly equivalent to entry-level options on the Space Coast, runs $99 a month after $499 in equipment fees.
For the latest, visit floridatoday.com/launchschedule.
Contact Emre Kelly at [email protected] or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly. Support space journalism by subscribing at floridatoday.com/specialoffer/.
Launch Monday, March 1
Rocket: SpaceX Falcon 9
Mission: 20th batch of Starlink internet satellites
Launch Time: 8:15 p.m.
Launch Pad: 39A at Kennedy Space Center
Trajectory: Northeast
Landing: Of Course I Still Love You drone ship
Weather: 70% 'go'
Visit floridatoday.com/space at 7 p.m. Monday for live video and updates ahead of launch.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: SpaceX forced to scrub Starlink launch, setting stage for 24-hour turnaround