As we throttle ahead into the final months of 2020, NASA and Space X are moving forward with final preparations for one of the most important milestone mission's of the last decade.
On Tuesday, November 3rd, NASA & the NASA Commercial Crew Program released a series of press statements and took to social media to update the public on the upcoming series of events leading up to Launch Day. First and foremost, it was confirmed that the 4-person Crew (
Shannon Walker, Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, & Soichi Noguchi ) have entered there formal quarantine at home and at Johnson Space Center as of October 31st. The Crew has been isolated for the two weeks prior to launch in able to assure the health and safety of each other and the Expedition 64 Crew currently in Orbit on the International Space Station. An especially important procedure, given the current era of COVID-19. The duration and structure of the current Crew-1 quarantine closely resembles that of the quarantine that Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley underwent prior to the launch of DM-2 earlier in May of this year.
The Crew-1 Astronauts will remain in isolated quarantine until November 8th, when teams at NASA plan to transport the crew from Johnson Space Center in Texas, to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Once the crew have safely arrived in Florida, they will join launch teams from NASA and Space X in making final preparation's for the mission, in the days leading up to Lift-off. This is set to include a static fire of the Falcon 9 Launch Vehicle on November 9th, and a full scale 'dry' dress-rehearsal of launch day with the Astronauts and ground teams.
As was previously announced by the Commercial Crew Program on October 26th, and heavily reviewed in an October 28th Press-Teleconference, Space X & NASA are targeting Saturday, November 14th, at 7:49pm EST for the Lift-off of Crew-1 from LC-39A in Florida. This launch schedule follows the delay of the original October schedule, which slipped due to a Engine-abort issue on a previous Falcon 9 mission which attempted to launch in early October. The issue ultimately led to the decision to replace two Merlin-1D Engines on the Falcon 9 1st Stage Booster which will fly the Crew-1 Dragon Spacecraft, named 'Resilience".
Crew-1, flown by Commander Mike Hopkins, Pilot Victor Glover, NASA Astronaut Shannon Walker, and JAXA Astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will be the first Operational Crew Rotation mission flown to the International Space Station since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2009; and the second crew mission flown by private Aerospace company, Space X, following the success of the DM-2 Test Flight flown earlier in 2020.
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