The mission is SpaceX’s 6th operational human spaceflight mission for NASA because it used to be awarded a $2.6 billion contract as a part of the company’s Commercial Crew program. It additionally flew a take a look at flight of a couple of NASA astronauts in 2020 and has flown two crews of personal electorate as smartly.
Boeing could also be beneath contract from NASA to shipping astronauts to and from the station, and its contract used to be for a considerably upper quantity, $4.2 billion. But Boeing, confronted with a sequence of technical issues, has but to fly a unmarried staff. The corporate is hoping its first take a look at flight with a couple of astronauts will are available in April.
SpaceX scrubbed an previous Crew-6 release try Monday after an issue with a floor device that provides a liquid that mixes with liquid oxygen to ignite the rocket booster’s 9 engines.
In a weblog put up Wednesday, NASA stated the issue used to be due to “a clogged ground filter.” SpaceX crews changed the filter out, purged the provision strains “and verified the lines are clean and ready for launch,” NASA stated.
The Dragon spacecraft transporting the Crew-6 astronauts to the station is named “Endeavour.” It has transported 3 different crews to the space station, together with that of Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the astronauts whose take a look at flight in 2020 used to be the primary human spaceflight mission introduced from the United States for the reason that space travel used to be retired in 2011. They named the spacecraft Endeavour after the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which transported either one of them on their first journeys to space.
The flight comes days after a Russian rescue spacecraft arrived on the space station to exchange any other that had sprung a leak. Roscosmos, the Russian space company, decided it used to be no longer protected to fly the staff — NASA astronaut Frank Rubio in addition to Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin — house at the leaking craft. After a 2d pill, this one designed to fly shipment most effective, sprang a identical leak whilst docked on the station, NASA officers sought assurances that the substitute craft could be in just right running order.
The back-to-back leaks created somewhat of drama at the station as smartly. But Nicole Mann, a NASA astronaut aboard the orbiting laboratory, stated the global crews had been ready to paintings in combination to conquer the issues.
“It’s very impressive to me to see how everybody comes together to work with these off-nominal situations,” she stated right through a news briefing with journalists Wednesday from the station. “For me, this really optimizes what we’re doing as human beings to explore in space. We are uniting the world as a species, and together, when we combine our efforts, it’s remarkable what we can achieve.”