Four NASA astronauts and one from Japan will comprise the crew of the first operational flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) set for launch on October 23. The designation for this historic flight is SpaceX Crew-1.
The launch was originally set for last September and was delayed due to "spacecraft traffic," according to NASA.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon C207 spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 rocket will blast-off from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard it will be NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
All four are members of the Expedition 64. Three other members of this group will launch to the the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft ahead of Crew-1.
Crew-1 will launch after NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov arrive at the ISS. Crew-1's liftoff will follow the departure of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner from the ISS. All three are members of Expedition 63.
Crew-1 will be the second crewed orbital flight for Crew Dragon after Demo-2 pending the certification of the spacecraft. It will be the first operational mission to the ISS for NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP).
A human spaceflight program, CCP also involves Boeing and SpaceX and is operated by NASA. It conducts rotations between the expeditions to the ISS aboard Crew Dragon and the delayed Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
NASA said the delay to October 24 due to "spacecraft traffic" will allow a crew handover aboard the ISS. The six month timeline for Crew-1 means Crew Dragon will be docked a the ISS until late April 2021. The extended duration for Expedition 64 will overlap with the SpaceX Crew-2 mission to launch in spring 2021.
The blast-off announcement for Crew-1 came two weeks after the successful completion of the historic SpaceX Demo-2 test flight. NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken splashed down off the Florida coast on August 1. Both astronauts launched to the ISS aboard the SpaceX Demo-2 spacecraft, later named Endeavour, on May 30 and docked with the ISS on the 31st.
Demo-2 was the first crewed test flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. It was also the first two-person spaceflight launched from the United States since Space Shuttle mission STS-4 in 1982.
A key Demo-2 aim was to complete the validation of crewed spaceflight operations using SpaceX hardware and to receive human-rating certification for the spacecraft.
