A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft named "Resilience" will blast-off Sunday (Florida time) carrying three American and one Japanese astronaut in the first manned space launch from the United States since 2011.
The historic launch of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission will transport the four astronauts of Expedition 64 to the International Space Station (ISS) after an 8-1/2 hour flight. SpaceX Crew-1 will be the first crewed operational flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins (Crew Dragon Commander), Victor Glover (Pilot) and Shannon Walker (Mission Specialist 2) along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi (Mission Specialist 1).
The Expedition 64 crew will travel to the ISS aboard a Falcon 9 blasting-off from the Kennedy Space Center's launching pad LC-39A.
"It's going to be exciting to be able to see how much work we can get done while we're there," said Hopkins.
Crew-1 will be the first operational mission to the ISS for NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
"It's exciting, especially with Crew-1 being the first time we've ever put four people on a space capsule ever, as humans, like that's pretty cool," said Anthony Vareha, the lead NASA flight director for the mission.
"It's also the longest mission of a crewed US capsule ever."
The members of Crew-1 will participate in a six-month science mission aboard the ISS. Some of the experiments Crew-1 astronauts include testing key parts for future spacesuits.
These new spacesuits are called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU). This spacesuit will use water evaporation to dissipate heat from an astronaut's body to maintain a safe temperature during spacewalks.
A key element of the xEMU is the Spacesuit Water Membrane Evaporator, which will be tested on spacewalks during the Crew-1 mission via the Spacesuit Evaporation Rejection Flight Experiment. The investigation will conduct 25 simulated eight-hour spacewalks to see how well the garment and technology work in space.
An interesting experiment will be one involving genes proposed by two students from Troy High School in Troy, Michigan. It will study how brain function changes during spaceflight. Its aim will be to better help astronauts do their work on long-duration missions on the ISS, the Moon, and other deep-space destinations.
The flight of Resilience to the ISS follows the success of the Demo-2 mission. Crew-1 will be the second crewed orbital flight for Crew Dragon after Demo-2. It will be the first operational mission to the ISS for NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP).
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.
