SpaceX is preparing to launch a crew of four astronauts Sunday night on its first operational flight for NASA.
The Falcon 9 is scheduled for a 7:27 p.m. ET takeoff, weather permitting. Falcon 9 will carry the four Crew-1 astronauts in a Crew Dragon capsule. The flight to get to the International Space Station will take approximately 27 hours.
The Crew Dragon is the same spacecraft that took astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS in May. That test launch was the first manned launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade. Until SpaceX’s successful test flight, NASA relied on Russian rockets to send astronauts to the ISS after the agency’s shuttle program was shut down in 2011.
Sunday’s launch will take three NASA astronauts and one Japanese astronaut to the ISS, according to Space. The flight will be commanded by Air Force Col. Mike Hopkins and piloted by former Navy test pilot Victor Glover. The crew is rounded out by Johnson Space Center veteran Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. This will be Glover’s first spaceflight.
The astronauts decided to name their capsule Resilience, according to the Orlando Sentinel, a tribute to the difficulties brought by 2020, most notably the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 243,000 people in the United States.
Despite the worsening pandemic, Florida’s Brevard County, home to the launch pad and John F. Kennedy Space Center, anticipates as many as 500,000 people to come watch the launch in person.
Sunday’s launch was originally scheduled for Saturday, but the takeoff was delayed because weather from Tropical Storm Eta prevented SpaceX from positioning the drone ship that will recover Falcon 9’s reusable booster. The current forecast puts the launch at risk of being delayed a second time — a chance of scattered thunderstorms in the area could delay the launch until Wednesday. Space reports that the primary concern with the weather is not just difficulties with flying through rain, an “electric field rule” means that flying through inclement weather could produce lighting.
