SpaceX crew launch set for Nov. 14 – Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now

After a two-week delay to evaluate a concern with Falcon 9 rocket engines, NASA and SpaceX have set Nov.

14 as the target launch date for the first operational Crew Dragon flight to the International Space Station, kicking off a half-year expedition in orbit for three U.S.

NASA commander Mike Hopkins, spacecraft pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi — of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — will ride the Crew Dragon spaceship to the space station.

Hopkins and his crewmates will join space station commander Sergey Ryzhikov, Russian flight engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins on the international research outpost, raising the lab’s long-duration crew to seven people for the first time.

It follows a 64-day Crew Dragon test flight to the space station that launched in May with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken.

The successful test flight set the stage for the start of regular SpaceX crew rotation flights to the space station under contract to NASA.

After the GPS launch abort SpaceX removed engines from the Falcon 9 rocket and took them to a test facility in McGregor, Texas, for further investigation.

Last week, NASA said SpaceX will replace one of the Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 rocket for the Crew-1 mission, along with an engine on a different Falcon 9 rocket set to boost the NASA-European Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich oceanography satellite into orbit Nov.

10 scheduled launch of NASA’s Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, following a thorough review of launch vehicle performance,” NASA said in a statement Monday.

4 launch opportunity for the Falcon 9 rocket with the military’s GPS 3 SV04 mission hinges on an on-time liftoff of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from nearby pad 41 at Cape Canaveral at 5:58 p.m3

If the Atlas 5 launch is delayed a day, the Falcon 9 flight with the GPS satellite is expected to be pushed back 24 hours until Nov.

They include the launch of another classified for the NRO on a Falcon 9 rocket, and a Falcon 9 flight with another batch of Starlink internet satellites.