SpaceX now has two new astronauts added to its first operational crewed Dragon mission to the International Space Station. The mission marks the beginning of a new era of spaceflight.
NASA's Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will join Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins, both also of NASA. JAXA has officially confirmed Noguchi's participation while NASA also issued a statement announcing Walker's addition to the crew.
"This mission will be the first in a series of regular, rotational flights to the station following NASA's certification of the new crewed system following completion and validation of SpaceX's test flight with astronauts, known as Demo-2," NASA said in a statement.
Walker spent a total of 163 days as a flight engineer aboard the space station for Expeditions 24 and 25 in 2010. She became a NASA employee in 1995, working on robotics and avionics hardware for the station with the program's international partners. Noguchi, meanwhile, has been to the ISS twice previously on other missions, including between 2009 and 2010 on via a Russian Soyuz launch. In 2005, he actually flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in order to help assemble part of the station.
Both NASA and SpaceX are currently preparing for Demo-1 with two NASA astronauts already named. If no changes are announced, the mission should launch sometime in May. Once that's complete, Crew-1, which should be made up of four people on board, should begin sometime in the latter half of 2020.
On the other hand, the upcoming Demo-2 launch will only take two astronauts onboard: veterans Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken. To prepare for the planned extended stay in space, both Hurley and Behnken have been continuously training for life and duty aboard the ISS at the Johnson Space Center. Note that this mission is entirely different from the first operational mission.
To further test the capability of SpaceX in terms of human spaceflight, Demo-2 will also feature splashdown landing and recovery procedures apart from launch and autonomous docking operations with the ISS.
Last year, SpaceX successfully launched an uncrewed Crew Dragon to the ISS. it also passed a series of key tests, provided by NASA, to prove that it's ready for manned missions into space.
The test marks a critical milestone in the development of Crew Dragon for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Both SpaceX and Boeing are working with NASA to launch astronauts from US soil to the International Space Station for the first time since the end of the shuttle era in 2011.
