(Reuters) – The next launch window for NASA’s crew to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX rocket was pushed back by at least two more days, until earlier than April 22, the space agency said.
SpaceX, the private rocket company of billion-dollar entrepreneur Elon Musk, had previously planned to transport its second “operational” space station crew into orbit for NASA at the end of March. But NASA announced in January that the date had been lowered to April 20.
The schedule was further adjusted according to the available flight times to the space station, guided by an orbital mechanic, which would keep the astronauts’ need for moving sleep to a minimum, a NASA spokesman said. Dan Huot Tuesday.
The flight marks only the second orbit of a fully-fledged space station launcher launched aboard a private spacecraft – a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket powered by a Crew Dragon capsule that delivers into orbit.
The four-member SpaceX Crew-2 is made up of two NASA astronauts, astronaut Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur, along with Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and mission associate Thomas Pesquet of the Space Agency Europe.
After joining the space station, they will join the four SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts who arrived in November, with cosmonauts transported to the orbit aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft.
The newly arrived Crew-2 is set to remain in orbit for six months, and Crew-1 is expected to return to earth by early May.
McArthur is the second member of her family to ride Crew Dragon into space. Her husband, Bob Behnken, was one of two NASA astronauts on the first launch of Crew Dragon, a test flight last August marking the first human orbital mission from U.S. soil in nine years , after the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.
Reporting with Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Edited by Sam Holmes